Fear of Mirrors

by Tariq Ali

  Döblin was not simply the author of Berlin, Alexanderplatz. He wrote two other epic novels. When you have some time you should try and read A People Betrayed: November 1918: A German Revolution and its sequel Karl and Rosa: A German Tragedy. I’m not alone in this opinion. Your very own Gunter Grass, the lyric poet of German Social Democracy, is in full agreement with me on the Döblin question. He has acknowledged his own debt to Döblin, putting him on an even higher pedestal than Mann, Brecht and Kafka. I’m not sure that Grass likes the two novels I want you to read. I’ve not read anything by him on them, but don’t let that bother you.

  Like Brecht, Döblin found refuge in Los Angeles during the bad years. He worked under contract to MGM, waiting impatiently for the end of the Third Reich. Brecht returned to the East, Döblin to the West. Much of this you’ll find in Schichsalreise, his memoirs, which affected me greatly thirty years ago.

  Read him, Karl. Read him. It will make a refreshing change from those interminable Bundesbank reports which are clogging your brain. Of course, you have to study them in order to feed the jelly-fish who employ you, but give yourself a break.

  Gertrude and her lover, David Stein, were making plans to run away together. They were thinking lofty thoughts. Your generation does not understand this, but for most of this century there have been millions who thought lofty thoughts. In those times large numbers of people were prepared to sacrifice their own future for a better world.

  David and Gertrude were obsessed by the fate of their comrades in Berlin. They knew that the survivors of the Berlin massacre were traumatized. People from other cities were needed to help rebuild the Berlin organization. People like them.

  Even as they were mapping their future, a revolution erupted in Munich. The very thought is unthinkable today. Bavaria? Which Bavaria? The land of beer cellars where Hitler’s audiences became intoxicated on hatred and which later became a fascist stronghold or, in our own post-war times, the fiefdom controlled by Franz Joseph Strauss? I’m talking of another, older Bavaria.

  In November 1918, Kurt Eisner, leader of the Independent Social Democrats, proclaimed a Bavarian Republic and was elected its prime minister. Three months later Eisner was executed by Count Arco. Even the moderates, men like David Stein’s father, wanted revenge. They pleaded with the SPD leaders to do something, but were told to leave the decisions in tried and trusted hands.

  ‘Tried and tested in murder!’ old Stein had shouted in anger as he walked out of his party offices in Munich. The workers were, without doubt, in an angry mood, but did they want a revolution? Eugen Leviné did not think so. He had been despatched to Munich by the Comintern* to help prepare and organize the revolution.

  Munich was full of dreamers and utopians. Gertrude and David were certainly not alone. There were several thousand others and they wanted to seize power immediately. Poor Leviné! He knew the attempt was doomed. Gertrude was half in love with him. She used to talk of how he would sit up the whole night trying to deflate their dream-filled heads. Leviné warned them that they were still isolated. He wanted the uprising postponed, but Gertrude and her friends outnumbered him.

  When news reached Munich in March 1919 of the uprising in Budapest and Bela Kun’s proclamation of a Hungarian Soviet Republic, David told Gertrude that this was their first real chance to make history, to avenge the deaths in Berlin, to move the revolution forward. And so it happened. To the great horror of the middle classes and the Catholic peasants, the Bavarian Soviet Republic came into existence.

  Moscow was overjoyed. Lenin and Trotsky were hard-headed men, but they were also desperate. They knew the price of isolation. Lenin firmly believed that without a revolution in Germany, the infant Soviet Republic could not last for long. He was right, wasn’t he, Karl? I mean, the historical space occupied by seventy-five years is next to zero. It’s nothing. So Lenin and Trotsky sent Munich their solidarity in the shape of hundreds of telegrams. They were hoping that Vienna, too, would fall and had already instructed the Red Marshal, Tukachevsky – the Tuka whom my father loved so deeply – to investigate the military possibilities of a corridor from the Soviet Union to Bavaria. Their man in Munich suffered from no such illusions. Levine bade farewell to his wife and new-born child and prepared to sacrifice himself for a cause that had no hope of success.

  The Junkers could have taken Munich painlessly, but that might not have been a sufficient deterrent to the rest of the country. Blood had to be shed. It’s the same today. Serbs and Croats could capture a village peacefully and spare their civilian opponents, but they rarely do so. Bloodlust. The animal instinct that still echoes in human biology.

  General von Oven crushed the Bavarian Republic with exemplary brutality. Citizens were pulled out of their beds, then shot, knifed, raped and beaten to death. Gertrude fled to her parents in Schwaben. David was given refuge by his professor. Levine went into hiding. He thought of his wife and child and then all he could think of was flight, but he was betrayed, captured, tried and executed. His trial was a big show. Gertrude, dressed as a bourgeois Fräulein, attended the court every day. Till her dying day, your grandmother never forgot Leviné’s final speech to the court. She used to recite it to me when I was still a child, growing up in what they once called the Soviet Union.

  We communists are dead men on leave. Of this I am fully aware. I do not know whether you will extend my leave or whether I shall have to join Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. I await your verdict in any case with composure and inner serenity. I have simply done my duty towards the International, and the World Revolution …

  The words continued to haunt her long after the system to which she’d sold her soul had degenerated beyond recognition. They tell us now that it was always so, but I don’t believe them, Karl, and nor should you. There was a nobility of purpose. It may have been utopian, but for a majority of the foot-soldiers it was never malignant. Otherwise it is impossible to understand the motives of those men and women who sacrificed their lives in those early years. People for whom the map of the world had no meaning if Utopia was not inscribed on each continent. These are the people whose lives I’m trying to reconstruct for you.

  They executed Leviné early one morning. Two soldiers in the firing party had to have alcohol poured down their throats before they could pull the trigger. That same afternoon Gertie told her parents that she had become a Communist. She was never to forget the look of horror, mingled with fear, that transformed their faces. Her father left the room and a few minutes later she heard him being violently sick. Her mother simply sat down on a chair in the hall and wept.

  A young officer, Otto Müller, who had been slightly wounded during the street battles, was bivouacked in their house. He came up behind her as she was staring out of the window at the old cedar and the swing and whispered in her ear.

  ‘I heard everything. I greatly admire your decision. I wish I had been on Leviné’s side. He refused to plead for mercy. His face was proud and held high just before they shot him.’

  The initial shock gave way to amazement. If men like him, men on the winning side, could say things like that to her at such a time, then all was not lost. Strange, the trivial incidents that leave such an impact. Your grandmother was sure that the young officer’s encouragement made up her mind for her. Many years later she met Müller in Berlin, where he was practising as a doctor. He was in a hurry. It was 1933 and he was helping to get his best friend’s furniture to Denmark. The name of his childhood familiar was Bertolt Brecht.

  When Gertie’s father recovered he spoke to her in a hard but trembling voice. ‘You are no longer my daughter.’

  Her mother did not speak. Gertie went to her room and wept. ‘Mutti, Mutti,’ she sobbed. ‘Why did you not speak? Why?’

  Then she packed a few clothes, a framed photograph of Heinrich and herself, her books, and a tiny green shawl that had once belonged to her grandmother. Her brother was away on a school trip. She sat down at her desk and wrote him a farewell note: My dearest Heiny, I
have to leave now, but I will miss you terribly. Don’t forget me. I will write and give you my address in Berlin. Many kisses and a big hug from your loving Gertie.

  She walked out of the house and down the drive. As she reached the bend after which the house became invisible she was desperate to turn round one last time, but she was proud and resisted the lure. Heiny later wrote and told her that their mother’s tear-stained face had been pressed to the first-floor window, watching Gertie leaving her family house. She had told him so when he returned from his trip. I’m sure that none of them really believed in the finality of the breach, but then none of them knew what lay ahead.

  Some years after the war, when she had returned to Berlin, Gertie wanted to return to Munich and see the house again. That was before the Wall was built. Travel between the two zones was easy. She took me with her. I was eleven at the time. I remember well our trip to Schwaben. The house was still there, just like it used to be. Gertie held me close and began to cry. She, a Communist, had fought the Nazis and survived. Her father, a staunch German nationalist, a man of the Right, perished in the camps with Heiny, her mother and the rest of the family. Gertrude and I were the sole survivors. We had been staring at the house from the driveway. Gertie was too frightened to go in. Slowly we turned round and as we began to walk out we noticed an old man on crutches who had stopped and was observing us from outside the gate.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked Gertie.

  She tightened her hand on mine. ‘I used to live here a long time ago.’

  The old man came close and stared right into Mutti’s eyes. ‘Fräulein Gertrude?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Haven’t you recognized me? Frank. The gardener. I used to give you and little Heinrich rides on my back.’ The old man’s eyes filled with tears. Gertrude hugged him. When finally she moved away she was going to ask him what had happened, but he read the question in her eyes even before she spoke and shook his head.

  ‘I was conscripted in ’36. They were still here. The Doctor had many influential patients. Nazis who respected him, wouldn’t change doctors for anything. When I returned in 1942 – I was one of the first casualties on the Russian front – they had all disappeared.’

  We nodded. ‘And the house, Frank?’

  ‘You remember the young doctor who sometimes assisted your father. He joined the Nazi Party. This was his reward. He moved in with his family. Took the practice, the house, the furniture. Everything. A few years ago he got scared and sold the property. It’s empty now. They’re going to knock it down and build apartments. The garden will disappear completely. He’s still in Munich. One of our distinguished citizens. He’s set up a medical publishing house.’

  We had lunch with Frank in a cafe. Gertie wanted to give him some money, but realized that she had none herself.

  I thought of that visit, Karl, when, about two years ago, the inquisitors arrived from Bonn. I remember the date, because it was Helge’s birthday. The sixth of April. These three men had come to investigate me and to decide whether I was a fit person to teach at the university. They were not in the least interested in the fact that I was opposed to the old regime, that I had shielded dissidents, distributed pamphlets, marched on the streets, helped bring down the Wall. They actually laughed when I showed them the manifesto I had helped to draft for the Forum for German Democracy.

  ‘Marxist gibberish,’ was the verdict of the man with red hair.

  ‘You may have brought them out on the streets, but they voted for Chancellor Kohl!’ his colleague informed me in a polite voice.

  I never discussed this event with you before now Karl, because I was frightened. I thought you might agree with them. I was wrong. Forgive me. I wanted to shout at these hypocrites. Remind them of Schwaben. Ask when I could have Gertrude’s house back. Ask why the Nazi who had stolen my grandparents’ house was still thriving while they were making us all redundant. Instead I remained calm. I explained the volatility of the situation. Reminded them of how Turks and Vietnamese were being burnt alive in their homes while the citizens of the new Germany stood by and the Chancellor washed his hands.

  ‘Why,’ I asked them at one point, ‘do you despise us Easterners so much? For us, not even a Treaty of Passau!’

  They looked at me with blank impressions, none of them wanting to admit that they had no idea when or what the Treaty of Passau was. It was my only triumph that day. I explained that through the Treaty of 1552, the Lutherans had accepted a surly and grudging co-existence with the Catholic Church.

  They questioned me for three hours, but it took them fifteen minutes to reach a verdict. They called me in to the investigation room, where, in the old days, I had often faced the hostility of our own ideological commissars.

  ‘Professor Meyer, please sit down. After careful consideration, the Commission has decided that you are not fit to teach the course on Comparitive Literature at Humboldt University. We are aware of your gift for languages, your knowledge of English, Russian and Chinese. We are confident that you will carry on your translation work, which is of a high quality. But teaching. Now that, in our new conditions, is something different …’

  I wrote you a brief letter telling you that I’d been sacked. I wanted to tell you how I was haunted by fear, tormented by insecurity, desperate for your mother to return. I walked around the city aimlessly for several hours. There was dust everywhere. Scaffolding on every main street. Hitler and Speer had wanted to rebaptize Berlin. Germania was their favoured name. Berlin will be a capital city once again.

  At least it will bring you back here, Karl, away from the Ollenauerstrasse and quiet, old Bonn. That will be nice. I get the feeling that the architects are reverting to the nineteenth century, trying to forget that this century even happened. If they succeed, they will destroy Berlin.

  I thought of our two cities in one. For too long, the Western half had been a forbidden zone. Did you know that sex shops have taken the place of churches and chapels? They cater for every taste. In Wedding, where Gertrude and David lived when they ran away from Munich, and which was a Communist working-class stronghold, the new entrepreneurs are trading in exotica. Rare tropical birds, powder from the horn of a rhinoceros, dried pigs’ ears and a lot else.

  Berlin is a shamelessly consumerist city. Art consists of the chassis of an old Cadillac fixed to slabs of concrete and wooden benches with carved breasts and penises.

  To my own amazement, Karl, I began to miss the drab, dingy, prudish Berlin where both you and I grew up.

  _______________

  *The Communist (Third) International (Comintern) was launched with great fanfare in Moscow in 1919. Its aim was a World Revolution of which it was the General Staff. It laid down a set of twenty-one conditions for membership, the principal function of which was to split the existing Socialist Parties of the Second International and form new Communist parties. For the first four years, the heroic period of the Comintern, this aim was pursued vigorously. Later, the Comintern became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. It was dissolved unilaterally by Stalin in 1943 to convince Churchill and Roosevelt that he was a reliable ally.

  Three

  KARL MEYER stood at the window of his second-floor apartment on the Fritz-Tillman-Strasse in Bonn. He sometimes regretted his escape to this strange city. At first he had wanted to forget everything about Berlin. The Wall. The Fall. His parents. Gerhard. A beautiful teacher named Marianne. Grandma Gertrude. Everything. He loved them all, but when he looked back and remembered his father’s petulance and blindness to reality or his mother’s insistence on a monotone reading of the rich complexities of European politics, his anger returned. His parents were always delirious in their irrationality. The protective wall they had built around themselves and their friends had fallen at the same time as that other Wall. Now they complained bitterly of the miseries and lunacies of the new order. Karl held them responsible for their own failure.

  Now, close to the centres of power in this dying capital, he was afr
aid of being forgotten by them. His mother was happy in New York, but Karl was often anxious about the state of his father’s mind and health. He put on his dark-blue suit, found a matching bow-tie, and inspected himself in the mirror. He saw a very self-contained, slender, square-jawed young man. He nodded in approval, locked his flat and descended via the lift to street level. The cafe where he breakfasted was in the same block. As he sipped his espresso, Karl quickly flicked through that morning’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Much speculation as to whether Kohl would last the course as Chancellor this time; reports of a dissident Muslim-Serb alliance in Bosnia; another crisis for the British Conservatives.

  Karl was indifferent to the Balkans. Britain, in his eyes, was a laboratory experiment that had gone badly wrong, and the guinea pigs were on the verge of an electoral revolt. Perhaps, under a new government, it might be of some interest to Germany. Perhaps.

  The fact was that Karl was interested only in the minutae of German politics. He knew, of course, that the United States, Japan and China were the major planetary players, but even this knowledge did not excite any real interest in the last two countries. Karl was a new German. He wanted Germany to play its part in the world. He did not believe that the crimes of the Third Reich annulled Germany’s traditional position in the centre of Europe.

  A few weeks ago, Karl, on the instructions of his leader, had spent a whole afternoon in concentrated talks with two pivotal Free Democrat members of parliament, one of whom had defied his party’s instructions and failed to vote for the Christian Democrats’ choice of Chancellor.

  Karl’s mission was as straightforward as his demeanour. He wanted Kohl dethroned, and the SPD leader crowned Chancellor in his place. His hosts plied him with questions about the future. How many posts in the Cabinet? What were SPD intentions on Europe? Could the young man assure them that Scharping was more than a creature of the apparatus?