New Lives

by Ingo Schulze

  I assigned to Herr Kaspareck the role of the Herald of Evil. He hadn’t greeted me, he had stumbled over the stretched-out legs of an inductee who had fallen asleep, and Kaspareck’s well-placed blow to the calves had almost pitched the fellow from his chair.

  Every observation here would be of use, material for improving on my first draft.

  A patrol unit, whose white patent-leather belts and straps reminded me of the harness on circus horses—a comparison that came to mind by way of Animal Farm—dragged a drunk past, a man in despair, sobbing his wife’s name. Or was he calling for his mother? Like dogs returning a stick, they dropped him between two chairs. He lay there whimpering. Two members of the patrol lifted him up by the shoulders, about even with their hips—were they trying to see his face?—tugged him a little more to the right and then, counting inaudibly to three, dumped him again. Their aim was good. His front teeth were knocked out on the edge of a chair. They immediately pulled him up from the floor and inspected their work. One of them shouted that they’d evidently netted a little Dracula. The other four grinned. The silence in the Mitropa Hall was impenetrable. In the same way that by stretching out their legs after Kaspareck’s attack, the inductees had made him stalk his way through the room like a stork through underbrush, so now their silence closed in around these traitors and came close to suffocating them.

  These kind of scenes formed in my mind all on their own, as if I had finally found the beanpole on which my fantasy could entwine itself and grow. But as I’m sure you know: our inventions are never brutal and nasty enough, exaggeration makes its home in reality, and somewhere—of that much I was and still am certain—this or some similar scene had occurred.

  As you can see, I felt from the start that I’d come to the right place. Here was the perfect dose of callousness and inevitability that had been lacking until then.

  Watched over like convicts, we climbed the stairs to the train platform, and I listened closely to the orders, which needed to be decoded according to tone, pitch, and intensity.

  Our cars were shunted several times back and forth across the Marien Bridge. The Canaletto panorama with the Hofkirche and the Brühlsche Terrace171 was the last thing I wanted to see at that point.

  Naturally I would have preferred an escort of uniformed men, plus a phalanx of plainclothes men barricading me as I climbed aboard a train for West Berlin—where, surrounded by photographers and cameramen, I would then begin my new life. But that triumph presumed that here and now I had to fall in, buzz cut and all. Before I could display my treasures, I would have to enter the underworld and have a look around.

  When we finally pulled out and passed through Radebeul—my mother and father had wandered those vineyards together, and later Vera and I, and once Geronimo and I, had strolled there too—I was for a few moments the dissident writer who was being exiled by his government, who would never be allowed to return to his hometown, who would be consoled by a speech given in his honor by Heinrich Böll172 or Willy Brandt. I gazed from the window and formulated the first sentences of my acceptance speech, an indictment that would leave no comrade unaware of what a huge mistake it had been to banish me.

  Now began a veritably endless circuitous trip. A farm boy from Upper Lusatia treated our compartment to home-butchered sausage, because he was afraid—thanks to some remark by a noncom—that he would soon be relieved of his provisions. He himself ate liverwurst, neat. He became a hero when he pulled underwear out of his bag and peeled it away to reveal a bottle of high-proof whiskey.

  My new comrades made fun of the Brandenburg landscape, which had always been my Arcadia, called it a sand and pine desert. In late afternoon we arrived—sober and a little more familiar with one another—in Oranienburg, which lies to the north of what was then West Berlin.

  On the way from the train station to our barracks I was annoyed that no one turned around to watch us pass.

  As if on command, a hundred feet suddenly kicked at piles of leaves by the side of the road, scuffled around in them, sent leaves spiraling and drifting ahead, scooped them against the heels of the man in front, over the shoes of the man beside, scattered them in all directions. No command, no barked order told us to stop. The rebellion didn’t end until there were no more piles of leaves. The yowls of those with six and more months already behind them were silly by comparison. They flung windows open and roared the number of days they still had left, as if in this country service in the army could ever come to an end, as if they didn’t know that at any moment they could always be stuck in a uniform again and imprisoned in a barrack. With a boom the gate slammed shut behind us…

  At the rear of the base, between a frame structure and the House of Culture, you could see the building that marked what had once been the entrance to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

  I later wrote a long passage about how we stood there with our bags in the drizzle while we watched one company after another march into the mess hall for supper, about how we were vaccinated, made to fill out questionnaires and to wait until we were soaked to the skin. It was almost nine o’clock, an hour before lights out, before I was sent along with some others to a building that abutted the camp watchtower.

  Although we had to stand for another hour in the entry as if at a pillory, the sparkling clean red floors and freshly painted walls had a calming effect on me. I wanted to get out of my wet clothes and, yes, I was looking forward to a dry uniform! The room assigned me came equipped with just two bunk beds—but looked comfortable. Pasted on the top bunk on the right was a slip of paper with the typewritten words: Private Türmer.

  My only fear was that I wouldn’t be able to make a mental note of everything I saw, heard, and smelled. I couldn’t let any of it be lost.

  At the sound of the wake-up whistle the next morning I jumped out of bed as if about to leave on an expedition. Morning gymnastics and breakfast were canceled for us late arrivals. Instead they threw at our feet a piece of canvas that could be buttoned up into a sack. With it in hand we shuffled through supply rooms. A steel helmet, a new and an old pair of boots, three uniforms (standard, dress, field), protective gear, gas mask, gym shoes, tracksuit—I accepted it all like a miner being outfitted. I was going down into the pit to uncover hidden treasures.

  At the midday meal, as I was hungrily wolfing down my Königsberger meatballs, a big stocky fellow farther down the long table stood up and shouted that the only reason he could stomach this slop was that this was the first food he’d been fed here. Tomorrow he was going to dump this slop over the head of the sergeant at the end of the table.

  I pressed my last bit of potato into the gravy—and was thrilled. My first character had just revealed himself to me, a combination of Thersites and Ajax.173 I wasn’t going to let him out of my sight.

  That afternoon as we were packing up our own stuff, I inserted among the damp clothes a greeting to my mother and an envelope addressed to Geronimo. Inside it were three pages of jotted notes, with a 1 at the top, then a slash, followed by a page number. I asked him to collect and save these rough sketches. I started on 2 immediately afterward.

  My mother still talks today about the moment when she opened the package and found my clothes inside—“as if you had died.”

  Enough for today. As always warmest greetings from

  Your Enrico T.

  Friday, April 20, ’90

  Verotchka,174

  So that we don’t waste our telephone time: Roland was here. He’s on a lecture tour of the East. The Party of Democratic Socialism is allowing him to appear only in small towns. But what he loves to talk about most is you, as if you had left for the West because of him.

  If I understood Roland correctly, he’s soon going to have to look around for a new job. Not even universities have any use for his theories now. He of course put it differently: just when for the very first time we’re going to need to give serious thought to socialism/communism, they’re going to terminate his position. I asked him who he meant by we. Th
e oppressed and disenfranchised, people dying of hunger and thirst, people who’ve been driven from their homes, who’ve been raped and have no roof over their heads, he replied without a hint of irony.

  Then he laid into the New Forum for having acted so irresponsibly, for being so naive and childish, as if they had never heard of capitalism. And now we can sit back and watch it all get smashed, everything that distinguished it “over against capitalism.”

  It’s pointless to argue with him, I knew that beforehand. He has a knack for constantly maneuvering you into corners where you start justifying yourself all on your own. For him I was somebody from the New Forum, which, whether it intended to or not, had sold out the GDR to capitalists.

  He wasn’t interested in our paper. At least there used to be nothing in our newspapers, he said; nowadays they’re just full of nonsense. In the very next sentence he claimed I wouldn’t publish anything about his lecture—“presumably for reasons of space.” When I asked him why he would accuse me of that, he mocked me, saying he could see my article already before him. I was speechless. And Roland’s reaction: he’d always admired reactionaries, the way they fall silent the moment something doesn’t suit them, they trust in the way things are, in the power of factuality, so why argue? I asked him whether he now regarded me as a reactionary. He laughed—I’d always been one! Unlike the people from the Party of Democratic Socialism, he has no guilty feelings and sees himself as totally above it all. That’s what annoyed me most.

  He would probably only be satisfied if I printed his lecture in full, starting on the front page—anything else is censorship. But how do you write about someone who uses the concept of democracy, bourgeois democracy, so cleverly that even a child would have to believe it’s something suspicious, yes, despicable.

  Roland claimed that his final triumphant volte—in which he praised Schalck-Golodkowski as the last internationalist, who was keeping Communist publishing houses and Party headquarters alive in the West, and concluded by calling November 9th the victory of counterrevolution—was an embarrassment to the cadres of the old Socialist Unity Party. They were afraid his lecture would become known to a wider public.

  The Soviet Union, the socialist states, he went on, had been the only power in the world that had kept capitalism in check. We, in the East, had been the guarantors that capitalism in the West had worn a human face. But that was all over now. I would see. I would remember what he’d said when the state and its citizens were nothing, and the economy and consumerism were everything, when we’d all have to pay for kindergartens and universities, yes, probably have to pay to die.

  Roland doesn’t shy away from any exaggeration. Actually what he’d like is to return to the situation in which it was impossible to know anything about capitalism.

  Ilona’s husband, a former comrade, returned from Bayreuth floating on cloud nine because he’d been able quickly and without any fuss to find trousers that fit him, so that Ilona won’t once again have to shorten the cuffs. The comforting reassurance that his body is evidently not abnormal made a convert out of him. You can regard that as ridiculous, and I didn’t risk telling Roland about it either, but I understand Ilona’s husband. I believe he’s found happiness, a happiness that Roland can only scorn as a sign of bedazzlement and corruptibility.

  Isn’t it a crime to say: You’re not allowed to see the Mediterranean—or only when you’re old and gray and can’t work anymore? Ah, enough of all this! I’m sounding like Michaela, who’s forever getting high on the fantasy of running into her former teachers and professors and confronting them. As if she hadn’t learned in the theater by now just how pointless that is—pointless, because you can’t demand shame and contrition.

  But of course I also admire Roland. If only for his vitality, the way he loves to talk, to argue, for his extravagance (and by that I don’t mean just his belts, the swing in his hips, and that silk scarf). He’s a brilliant logician, unafraid of consequences. Yes, I admire him for his courage, but it’s a pernicious logic, not to say lethal.

  I told him about how Mamus was arrested and what happened in Dresden last fall. Even while I spoke I was annoyed with myself for using her arrest as an argument, because it suddenly made me sound so self-serving. At least he didn’t try to invent justifications for it or go so far as to cast it in doubt. He expressed his disgust, but then couldn’t refrain from suggesting that I ask you about Shatila and Badra,175 and then asked me about what happened in Greece or Spain, in Argentina and Uruguay.176 And there they were again: Victor Jara’s hacked-off hands.177

  Why doesn’t he want to live in a world that is halfway decent, why must it always be struggle, suffering, dying? You, my dear Heinrich—I hear you say—you yourself should know the answer to that better than anyone. Because for people like Roland it’s not about living in a pleasant world, but about remaining productive. And for that they accept the rest as part of the bargain: revolution, chaos, death. That’s why Roland has to view November 9th as a work of counterrevolution. How could he go on writing otherwise? Well, let them all put their Budyonny caps178 back on. You’d think there could be no end to the desperation of people like Roland, because history has hurled them back a hundred years, because their whole proletarian hoopla, all those millions of victims that they bore like an indictment on their banners, will now become as meaningless as those other millions of victims who were slain in the name of their own false gods. But that’s not the case. His eyes shine more brightly than ever. Are they fools? Maniacs? No matter what happens in the world—they hold on tight to their divine mission. I’m sorry, I’m repeating myself. Roland and his comrades are simply tiresome. In fact it gives me great satisfaction to see their tap turned off just like that and to watch them have to start looking for work like everyone else. We send greetings to the comrades of the German Communist Party for the last time! But let’s not waste so much anger, so much energy and emotion on them. They interpret everything that has to do with them—even if you spit at their feet—as a badge of their importance. Roland is completely right to view me as a reactionary. Isn’t it marvelous to hold tight to factuality, to fall silent, to smile?

  How much does he actually know about us?

  Love, Your H.

  PS: Strangely enough, he got along famously with your friend Barrista. Barrista calls Lenin and Luxemburg terrorists, for Roland they’re revolutionaries. But in terms of their “analysis” Roland and Barrista were in agreement and blamed all the evils of the world on German reactionaries, who always first create for themselves whatever it is they then take up arms against.

  With Roland, however, I’m not certain if he wouldn’t line us all up and shoot us if he were told to do it in the name of the revolution. There’s probably no danger of that in Barrista’s case.

  PS II: I had a dream about Mamus. She’s at a spa for her health and I’m supposed to renovate the apartment. Nothing’s been done in preparation; she didn’t even take the pictures down. I look everywhere for brushes, buckets, paint. To no avail. But in the cellar I find Neudel’s painting equipment, which he had given me to wash out the last time around, but now the paint in the can is hard as stone, there’s a round brush stuck in it for good. When I try to push the wall unit toward the middle of the room, the Georgian vase falls off. But Mamus snatches it with one hand, as if she were doing the beer-coaster trick. She wants to know what I think I’m doing. At that moment I realize I’ve made a mistake. The woman who told me to do the renovation wasn’t Mamus at all. Just look around, Mamus says, pointing with a very grand gesture at the walls. They are in fact white, freshly painted white. And outside—she points to the window—there’s a blanket of snow. It glistens so dazzlingly that the building across the street is invisible. Mamus tells me to stand in front of the mirror so that I can finally see what I look like now.

  Saturday, April 21, ’90

  Dear Nicoletta,

  I sometimes think I’m way too fainthearted. But then I think of how you cautioned the taxi driver t
o drive less recklessly. I took pleasure in your every gesture. Sometimes I clap my hand to my brow as if I might still find your hand there, when you were checking to see if I was feverish. And I see your other hand hastily buttoning up your coat. And that’s supposed to have been six weeks ago now?

  Within the first few days in the army it was clear: Hell looks different. I was glad to know that, but also disappointed. There were lots of whistles and shouts ordering us around, we were cursed and ridiculed, but it was all just a big show. Besides, as part of the pack your hide gets tougher. Of course, it wasn’t pleasant to run in protective gear and a gas mask or do push-ups in a puddle. All the same I put on weight at first, because as trainees to drive an armored personnel carrier (APC) we had almost nothing but political instruction at the start. Except for the room corporals, who were our driving instructors, we were all newcomers, which helped keep stunts by those who had already served six months or more to a minimum. Even when you had room duty, there was still time to read and write.

  We were sworn in at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial, where, so we were instructed, antifascists of some eighteen countries had been murdered. During the ceremony we faced the obelisk with eighteen red triangles at its tip—created, it would seem, to help us count off our eighteen-month stint.

  I tried to capture as much of daily life as possible. Military jargon, every terminus technicus, fascinated me. I was the only one who kept his brochures on “Being a Soldier,” which appeared monthly, each time in a new color. I often took down conversations in shorthand—dialogue was my weak point.

  In early December we had six days of home leave, the so-called rest and recreation we were supposed to get every six months. Vera and I borrowed a?

  Skoda and toured almost every castle, fortress, and church between Meissen and Görlitz, then sat for hours smoking and drinking gin and tonic (if it could be had) in cafés filled with older women.