Berlin Cantata

by Jeffrey Lewis

  “Because you’re my sister,” she said.

  “But you can have more than one, you know.”

  “I don’t want more than one.”

  There. So no one can accuse me of poisoning anyone’s mind. I didn’t poison Karen’s mind. This was her opinion from the start. I was perfectly suitable. Those were my exact words. “That’s not right, to hate your sister.”

  It did no good. Even after the sister gave us everything, Karen still didn’t wish to see her anymore. People say she’s an imbecile, Karen, but certain things she can certainly see.

  Nor will I tell you my exact plans for the place. If I sell it, I sell it, it’s none of your goddamn business. If I want to go to Phuket, that’s none of your business either. Are you going to accuse me of taking a vacation? I’ll take any vacation I want to. No one can tell me I don’t deserve a vacation. That’s the problem. Everybody has an opinion. Everybody butts into other people’s business. No one knows what really went on. No one knows how I’ve spent my life.

  Karen is a sweet girl. She just wants to be left alone with her television. She thinks one day the idiot on the television, Hunter, his name is Hunter and he is also from California, is going to find her and marry her. Then her life will be complete.

  People have many ideas why all this happened. I am referring to the so-called “gift.” One is that this woman had so much money she didn’t know what else to do with it, it all meant nothing to her, it was like crumbs off her plate. Another is that people are always saying how we must be guilty about the Jews but I don’t even know a Jew and this was the opposite exactly, the Jew felt guilty for coming in here and disturbing our lives the way she did. Another is that she was as big an imbecile as Karen. Another is that she was deeply touched and all of that, she loved her sister, all of that, she was so happy to find a sister, all of that. This last explanation I don’t believe one bit. Who was she trying to kid?

  HOLLY ANHOLT

  Demonstration

  SHE SAT ON A ROCK with her sign on the muddy ground near her feet. A few people had flashlights but mostly it was dark. We were somewhere in the countryside, not far from the city, having arrived in motley cars strewn around like lumps of coal, darker than the night. Beyond us were the barracks of the asylum-seekers. We caught glimpses of their lives, men in underwear, women with wash, the stark, tinny light of a television. Curtains blew through open windows. It was a quiet moment on the new front that had opened, between the asylum-seekers and those who didn’t want them in the country.

  I suppose you would say we were there to keep the peace. Schoolteachers and lawyers and students and solid citizens, responding to Anja Mann’s call: “We have to say to them: no. Now. Before it starts to flame up big. In particular, to show these Eastern police that there’s a price also if they ignore the problem.” Though I wasn’t there for such noble reasons. I was there because this was my lawyer’s other life, which I’d managed to know about only as rumor, and I was curious, and felt a little bit obliged, like somebody who’s been to somebody’s house for dinner several times and has never asked to see the beautiful garden. Nor did I think Simona was there to be altruistic either. It was more a reflex with Simona. Tell her about a demonstration and she would come.

  But on this cold night there was something more. Simona was lying in wait. She was like a beggar in the shadows. From her rock she watched Anja march here and there, checking lists, bucking up spirits, giving orders, courting the waning interest of the TV people – whatever might be done in the dead spots by the captain of an undertaking such as ours. In the darkness we could make out little, but Anja was so upright, with her top-knot of hair and prominent nose, as if some mad Prussian geneticist in search of civic courage had attempted a cross between a samurai and Charles de Gaulle, that the faintest shadow of her was unmistakable. When Anja disappeared altogether, Simona resembled a bored, disconsolate child, her chin resting in her hand or her foot making idle circles in the muddy dirt.

  And then Anja would reappear, like a looming ocean liner out of an old movie’s fog, and Simona would follow her with her eyes. Beseeching glances, knowing glances, helpless glances; a full repertory of pleading, to all of which Anja was immune. Though it was possible, as well, that she hadn’t even noticed Simona sitting on that rock, or seen her name on the sign-in sheet. But I didn’t believe it; Anja was too organized for that, too in control. She was one of those for whom survival must have meant scanning the horizon.

  A conversation that never took place:

  Forgive me, my queen, but I only wrote notes until 1983, I only wrote notes for two years and a half, I only pointed out your Zionist tendencies twice.

  Forget it, my lowly subject, whose nose properly touches the ground, my slave, unworthy and pathetic, whom I wouldn’t forgive in ten thousand lives, who is only telling me this now because it will come out anyway, who would still keep it secret if she could, who only got that place in the Writers Union house to write a fatuous, self-serving autobiography by ratting me out.

  It never took place because Anja wouldn’t allow it to. At last Simona got up from her rock and went over to where Anja was talking with others in a circle. She loitered at the periphery until there was room for her to elbow in, then stood in silent hope that her relentlessness would soon pay off. Others drifted away. “Anja…” Perhaps she got that far. I couldn’t hear but I could see Anja turn away from the circle. Was it at the exact moment Simona spoke or caught her glance? Simona followed her and touched Anja’s sleeve, a shadow puppet’s gesture. Anja pulled her arm away.

  Simona came back to her rock and her sign. Sometime before she had told me she was leaving Berlin for Jerusalem. Now wasn’t that nice news, I had thought, but didn’t say, afraid that if I showed any support for the idea, she might reconsider. She was gripping the handle of her sign with both hands now, as if it were her last friend, she and her sign taking on the world. But the cardboard part of it still dragged in the mud. “Asyls in! Nazis out!” Perhaps it was my mother’s pity that I kept feeling for Simona; if you ask, you shall be forgiven, the world according to Doe. And why not, what was wrong with that, wasn’t that the only way the world would ever work?

  And Anja Mann, heroic leader of the old GDR dissidents, now left without much of a portfolio, rooting around for the next evil thing? What was wrong with her, that she couldn’t forgive two years in jail, slanders, family suffering, psychiatric tortures, loss of health? I felt like a fool that night. I was confused and I hated to be confused. Simona had a few tears, as well. I hated her tears. It was some moments after she produced them that I went after Anja, not ostentatiously, but in Simona’s plain sight, as if I were sick of hiding some stupid thing. We spoke for a minute or so. She thanked me for coming. When I arrived back in the shadows, Simona asked me, “So you know her?”

  “Anja?”

  “You know her quite well.”

  “She’s been my lawyer. With the claims.”

  “I should have guessed,” Simona said. The words, of course, of a woman who’s just discovered the identity of her husband’s lover.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  But I offered no further explanation, nor did she ask for one.

  A stalemate of little lies.

  Later the skinheads came. From the back of the shelter we heard a window break and then shouting. We jumped up, grabbing our signs as though they were weapons. Our signs, our brave defense against the rock-throwers. We raced around to the back of the barracks and tried to form a line. It was all fairly chaotic and exciting and never seemed particularly dangerous. Inside the barracks men in t-shirts ran from window to window. Whoever had flashlights shone them into the woods, trying to catch glimpses of the attackers. There couldn’t have been many. I caught glimpses of two or three, advancing or retreating, as shadowy as guerrillas. A couple more windows broke. The skins disappeared into the woods. Later I would learn that two of the boys from David’s car workshop were among the attackers, but I saw none of their fac
es that night. Anja’s demonstration made the evening news.

  FRANZ ROSEN

  List

  Beerman, Felix, 1887–1915

  Beerman, Siegfried, 1894–1916

  Beerman, Walter, 1890–1915

  Mayer, Isador, 1891–1918

  Rosen, Hugo, 1886–1914

  Rosen, Julius, 1881–1918

  Rosen, Louis, 1888–1914

  Rosen, Max, 1891–1915

  Schlösser, Artur, 1897–1915

  Schlösser, Ernst, 1882–1916

  Silber, Willy, 1895–1916

  So there it is, the list that I never thought I would make. The list, even, that I may have called barbaric. But I suppose it was always in my mind. More recently I have stayed up late with record books and family albums, fretting, deducing, counting. You may imagine that it was a sleepless devotion, conceived in shame and doubt. Of the 12,000 or so Jewish men who died fighting for Germany in the Great War, it seems that these eleven were my blood relations. What pride, what sadness, too. Sadness even that I should do such a thing, make such a list, a man with my history, a man over seventy years old. They say, about such matters as the Shoah, that we must never forget. But there are others things that must never be forgotten as well.

  ANJA MANN

  Justice

  IT WOULD BE UNETHICAL for me to speak about the cases of any of my clients. In particular I wish to emphasize that my comments below in no way derive from the claim of Miss Holly Anholt. But if you only read the newspapers, you would hear of claims where the capitalist lottery is on full display, where distant relations receive windfalls of tens of millions, where institutions such as even state art museums acquiesce to flimsy claims, ostensibly because they fear adverse public relations if they fight, but more likely because they understand that an expensive private sale of the claimed painting would boost the value of their remaining holdings of the same artist beyond measure. A new class of greedy and sanctimonious lawyers, particularly in America, has been nourished as well, and this can never be a good thing.

  Thus a certain ambivalence has crept into my feelings about the claims process taken as a whole. On the one hand stands the obvious justice supporting the vast majority of persons who have filed claims. They once owned property, the property was taken from them by coercive means without fair compensation, and now that the totalitarian regimes which supported such unjust takings are gone, why shouldn’t they have their property back? Many such persons are less interested in the material gain to be had from their filing than in making some small gesture – small as against the murders and exiles that accompanied the loss of mere property – towards the reestablishment of justice. Here I speak not only of justice in the present tense, but justice that recognizes an historical past, that seeks continuity with it. Moreover, provided proofs are forthcoming and legitimacy is established, our laws provide for such claims. It cannot be said juridically that there is anything unjust in pursuing rights that are nothing more than what the law provides for.

  On the other hand, there is the less refined justice supporting those who might be dispossessed or whose lives might otherwise be disrupted by the claims process. Their numbers in truth may be relatively small. But their crime, in such cases as exist, is of course typically no more than bad luck. They relied, just as the earlier dispossessed ones did, on discredited arrangements, on a supplanted regime.

  Nor is it possible, as a general rule, for one to judge regarding the relative emotional and economic interests of both types of parties, the earlier dispossessed and the now-perhaps-to-be dispossessed.

  Moreover it is a simple fact of history that property has regularly changed hands as the result of theft, warfare, and lies. Radical regime changes have everywhere been accompanied by changes in property ownership. “Just compensation”, historically speaking, is hardly a reliable thing. Thus trying to sort things out back to the Nazi time is rather like spitting into a sea wind. While we’re at it, why not go back to the Thirty Years War? Then everyone would be uncertain of everything. Actually, I rather like this idea. It might be the final revenge of Karl Marx.

  Finally, while properly speaking we ought pay it no mind whatever, nonetheless it is so that these property claims in the hands of the right demagogue have the potential to stir unwholesome sentiments in the citizenry, even as today we face already a rising tide of other social problems engendered by reunification. Some days I feel like I only have two hands.

  Perhaps as a GDR schoolgirl, I read a definition of Greek tragedy which suggests that at its core is an irreconcilable clash between two competing social goods. In this regard, there may yet be a dollop of tragedy woven into the fabric of some of these property claims. One part tragedy, one part monkey business, one part justice.

  I am not unmindful of the irony involved in a lawyer such as myself schooled in the Eastern ideology now making her living in defense of private property. Nonetheless, I am grateful for the honest work the claims process has provided me.

  NILS SCHREIBER AND DAVID FÜRST

  Comanches

  Nils:

  My favorite place in the city isn’t there anymore. The Potsdamer Platz isn’t what it used to be. It used to be a Cold War frontier. It used to be a weedy, bombed-out wasteland where kids lived in the back of trucks getting stoned all day waiting for the millennium and there was one ramshackle Turkish café out-of-doors with broken chairs to sit on and a construction crane from which for a few marks you could bungee-jump. I don’t know what happened to that crane. It may have been used to build one of the corporate towers that stand there now. The kids were waiting for the millennium because according to the logic of their lives something miraculous was supposed to happen then.

  My son Erich was one of those kids. He lived there from when he was seventeen. He was dark and mopey like his mother and he had soft eyes and, yes, I was proud enough of him, being out there, taking his chances. Every time I saw him I thought what a big, goofy question mark he was. Once again the world could be anything. His stoned mysticism gave way to stoned politics, and he became a Comanche, one of the anarchist groups that fought the police in Kreuzberg every weekend and half the time won. I got him his first job on the old Potsdamer Platz, eighty marks to jump off the crane and write it up for the paper. The angle being, as Erich put it, Mr. Average Degenerate Citizen Goes For It. He got the jump paid for too. It was another one of those half-breathless moments when it looked like the paper was about to go belly up and I thought if I didn’t get him a chance soon, I’d never be able to give him one at all. But the paper is still around and Erich survived the jump and his article was pretty good, he got the rush and the fall and every bounce, though he never wrote another one. Of course he doesn’t live on the Potsdamer Platz anymore.

  David:

  My dear friend Nils neglected to mention that there was also an old MiG fighter that lay among the trucks, ruined, scavenged, and graffitied by the kids. Personally that MiG was my favorite part, because you could climb in the cockpit and because of the mess the kids made of it. The Ozymandias of the no man’s land, the Cold War’s freakiest emblem.

  My dear friend Nils also neglected to mention that it was his son Erich’s Comanches who firebombed my car workshop. How did I know this? It wasn’t so hard. They left a note that said, “We the Comanche faction of Autonome gives fair warning. By the destruction of the so-imagined ironic skin car project, we announce: fascists, beware, next time we set fire to your bodies, and you can burn in a hell on earth!” It was the end of the shop.

  I never reported them to the police. What would have been the point? I was sick of the shop by then, and so were my charges, and we were sick of each other. Her Stuffiness Anja Mann had come to me to complain that two of my boys had been involved in an attack on an asylum-seekers’ barracks. I preferred to deny this, because it was blatantly against all the rules I’d set up, but once again, as in the matter of the fire-bombing, the proof was not utterly dismissible: she had a dark but clear photograph o
f Johann and Hermann running off, even wearing the shirts with our shop’s name on it. Wear the shirt to a pogrom, you shits! Some people never learn. I would include myself in this last statement.

  So the Comanches did us a favor. The world works as it should. After a lively physical combat, in which one of them broke my nose and I managed to inflict a bit of damage myself, I duly wrote up the story of my boys and the final failure of my efforts to reform them in a more capitalistic mode, just as they predicted I would. As they would be quick to point out, only one of us got paid. I am not sorry that it was me. I was broke.

  Self-disgust took its usual back seat.

  Nils:

  It was also where I met Holly for the last time, sitting on the least-broken folding chairs we could find, sipping our coffee, the crane hovering over us, under a long gray sky. She wasn’t ready to leave Berlin yet, but she was getting closer. Thinking about jobs, thinking about places. No longer the real estate queen of Velden, no longer the plucky adventurer. Not that she was ever exactly either of those, but surely she feared that she was.

  We talked about Franz Rosen, as we so often did, as if he were the secret cypher that linked us. I told her about my rage, how I’d been in a rage towards him for weeks after I interviewed him. She wanted to know why. Holly, my love, the eternal straight man. Because I felt seduced by him (I said), made a fool of, and the rage came when I realized I kind of liked it.

  Then she took a small brown envelope out of her jacket pocket and pushed it my way. Inside was a pin with a sky blue background, a few Cyrillic letters, and an antique fighter plane manned by a tiny man in goggles. It was an old Soviet aviator’s pin, she said, an airman first class pin, that she had bargained off a hustler near Checkpoint Charlie, near my office. She was quite proud of it and I loved her for being quite proud of it. Genuine, no counterfeit, yeah sure, she said. But she thought I might like the blue sky background. I did. It was like the sky in Oksana’s paintings.