Fear of Mirrors

by Tariq Ali

The Hungarians had responded to the Congress by a celebratory insurrection. They wanted a free and democratic Hungary. Their greatest Marxist philosopher, Gyorgi Lukács supported them and became a minister in the new government, but Khruschev, nervous lest the disease should spread, sent in Russian tanks. Lukács sought asylum in the Yugoslav Embassy. The rebellion was crushed.

  Despite the brutalities in Budapest, hope was still alive. People east of the Elbe were yearning for a thaw. They were desperate to cease being human toys of some grand design, tired of being bit-players in a gigantic fantasy, which was now beginning to overwhelm its creators.

  It had been an exciting year, but I wanted to spend New Year’s Eve with your mother. I loved her so much that nothing else mattered and it was not often we had the apartment on our own. It seemed a pity to fill it with friends at this time.

  She laughed when I said all this to her, a throaty, infectious chuckle. We were lying in bed, late in the afternoon, overcome by post-coital torpor. It was always more relaxed when Gertrude was out of the country. I buried my head in her breasts, revelling in her body scents.

  ‘You’re lovely. Fragrant. Like a plucked lily.’

  Helge would not be distracted.

  ‘We can spend New Year’s Day together. All on our own. In bed. But we must have a New Year’s Eve party. All the signs are auspicious.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Suddenly we aren’t frozen with fear.’

  ‘Tell that to the Hungarians!’

  ‘Vlady! No excuses. Yes or no?’ She was now sitting on me, her hands moving towards my neck as if to strangle me. I surrendered. Helge laughed. We embraced and made love to seal the agreement.

  ‘Vlady…’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘You promised you would let me read it one day. Why not now?’

  ‘Because it’s clumsy, it’s unfinished and you won’t like it.’

  ‘So what?’

  I sighed, got out of the bed and went to the desk. My hands explored the disorder till they uncovered a handwritten sheet of paper. I handed it to Helge and went in search of my clothes.

  She put the piece of paper on her chest as she watched me dress. Then she jumped out of bed, found her thick blue trousers and her knitted black jumper and dressed herself. There are times, Karl, when I miss her more than she could imagine. She read my poem twice.

  FOR B. B.

  Long sleepless nights with inspiration gone

  Tabula rasa.

  Then random images rush past

  Bland thoughts float by.

  Most nights are like that

  Then, once a month …

  No, I exaggerate

  Twice every six …

  A spark.

  Pen skates on paper,

  Soon a page is full,

  A year’s work done.

  Was it the same for him?

  Or did his words roar onto the page like Niagara?

  Next week I will visit his grave once again,

  Salute old Hegel’s resting place as I pass

  And on the cold new marble slab

  Scatter red roses and pledge to fumigate our country.

  18 Berlin, 12 August 1956

  Before she could tell me what she thought of my little offering there was a knock on the door. Helge picked up her watch from the bedside table. Six o’clock. It had to be Gerhard, punctual to the point of irritation. None of the others would be there for at least another half an hour.

  She took the poem next door and greeted Gerhard.

  ‘What did you think?’ I heard him asking her.

  ‘Not bad. I’m not too sure of the last three lines, but it works…’

  ‘May I read it, Vlady?’

  She handed Gerhard the poem. He scanned it briefly and shook his head.

  ‘Burn it, Vlady. No good. Too sentimental for a start. Brecht hated sentimentality.’

  So did Gerhard. I just grinned, took the piece of paper from his hand, crumpled it in my fist, placed it in the ashtray and set it alight. Helge screamed at me.

  ‘No, Vlady! You fool.’

  Her cry was in vain. Only I knew that the poem was in my head and a better version would emerge one day. It didn’t, as you can see, but I remembered. Your mother will confirm that what you’ve read is what I wrote all those years ago.

  ‘Gerhard was right and you were wrong, my Helge,’ I told her. ‘We will only succeed in our tasks if we are ruthlessly objective. Self-aware and self-critical, unlike the men who rule over us.’

  Gerhard nodded as he self-consciously lit his pipe. He was nineteen, a year older than Helge and me. The pipe was only a few weeks old.

  ‘But, comrades,’ Helge expostulated, ‘both of you rush to the opposite extremes. For you, criticism has to be completely destructive, like air entering a sealed tomb.’

  ‘Well spoken,’ said Gerhard, without a smile. ‘That is it exactly. We want to extinguish everything in this Stalinist tomb.’

  ‘Everything?’ Helge inquired plaintively. ‘Everything? Including the foundations of the DDR?’

  ‘Especially them,’ mocked Gerhard.

  Our discussion was interrupted by loud knocks on the front door, strange noises, and the sound of laughter. I was always fearful of the neighbours, zealots of the regime, so I rose hurriedly and opened the door. At first there was silence. Then Eric, Heide, Helen, Alexander and Richard, dressed in discarded army greatcoats, came to attention. They ignored me completely, looked above my head and goose-stepped neatly into the apartment. Safely inside, they discarded their coats and fell on the floor. Everyone laughed.

  The room was large and solemn. The grey light coming through the windows had almost disappeared. On a table there were copies of the Italian Communist Party weekly, Rinascita, piled next to a small bust of Lenin. Next to it stood an old Russian samovar, now bubbling with tea.

  Once the liquid had been poured into glass mugs and served, Gerhard called us all to order.

  A collective earnestness gripped the meeting. I’m sure you know the feeling, Karl. In your case it probably happens when your leader addresses all of you on some solemn occasion. With us, it was the result of a belief that we were going to change the DDR and the world.

  We were all members of the youth wing of the ruling party. We were aware that this small gathering was illegal; that, if discovered, we could all be expelled from the league and the university, sent into internal exile or to work in a factory. Everyone present was conscious that our futures could be ruined, our lives destroyed. Everyone knew the risks, but despite it all we were prepared to throw ourselves in the whirlpool of history.

  We wished to reform and remake DDR communism, a communism that was hostile to our tastes, our hopes, our aspirations, and replace it with a humane socialism.

  The crushing of the Hungarian revolt by Soviet tanks had only strengthened the feeling that the system could not carry on in the same old way for much longer. And yet the people had not completely lost their sense of fear, nor were they totally confident that they were on the right track. They were sure of only one thing. They could not remain silent and passive in the face of crimes that were being committed in their name. It was no longer sufficient to cover their ears and drone on, as children do, in order to keep out the lies of the regime.

  ‘Comrades,’ Gerhard’s voice was trembling slightly, ‘we are still few in number, but have no doubt, we will grow. All our lives, we have been held on a leash. Vlady was lucky. Unlike the rest of us he was not born in Nazi Germany. We are living in a sad century. The events in Moscow and Budapest make silence impossible. We have to make our voices heard, establish contact with like-minded comrades elsewhere in the DDR and work for the day when the DDR is truly democratic. The bureaucrats who blight our souls have erected a pyramid of lies and hypocrisy. If we do not shatter their world, other forces, more sinister, will arise …’

  Talk of this sort carried on for nearly four hours, punctuated by a short break for beer, bread, cheese and ham.
Each of us speaking bitternesses, combining personal knowledge of tragedy with the collective experience of the world.

  Hardly anyone spoke with excessive passion that night. There was no thunder or lightning. We stirred each other calmly, without haste, giving ourselves time for reflection and speculation. This was not because we lacked emotions. It was a conscious rejection of the demagogy that had characterized the Nazi period, in which all of them had grown up. Nazism was a way of life they knew at first hand. Unending rants on the radio, forced attendance at carefully orchestrated Nazi rallies, the Horst Wessel song at school and the worship of blind hate against the enemies of the Reich within and outside Germany.

  How do I write all this without boring you, Karl? Remember my Israeli friend, Joe Lotz? The thing he dreaded the most was his parents recalling the Polish town they left in 1936. No Jews there now. Joe didn’t want to know. But you still live in Germany, Karl, and that’s why I think you do want to know – or is it just that I want you to know?

  After midnight we ran out of words. It was time for decisions. Should we set up a clandestine organization? Did we have the material and moral resources to circulate an underground newspaper? Or perhaps it would be wiser to confine ourselves to preparing and publishing a manifesto, a call to arms to a frightened and bewildered generation?

  It was Helen Kushner who concentrated our minds on the world outside your grandmother’s apartment.

  ‘Walter Janka was arrested today!’

  Shock registered on every face. Janka was one of the most respected publishers in the DDR. In his youth he had been in a Nazi prison. His brother Albert, a Communist member of the old Reichstag, had been beaten to death by the Nazis. Released from prison by accident, Walter had fled to Prague and made his way to Spain, where he fought with the Thaelmann brigade. After that defeat he had fled to Mexico with Anna Seghers; there he had founded a Communist paper. His past was well known. He was one of the DDR’s élite intellectuals. He had resisted Ulbricht’s attempts to make him conform to the current orthodoxy, and his publishing house was an oasis for critical minds. The thought of Janka in a DDR prison outraged all of us.

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked in a choked voice.

  ‘My mother was with Anna Seghers this afternoon. Walter was Anna’s publisher. Someone rang to warn her.’

  ‘Why Janka?’ mused Gerhard in a puzzled tone. ‘It would be hard to find a more loyal Communist in Berlin.’

  ‘Because he published Lukács,’ Helen replied. ‘And because Lukács did not simply support the Budapest uprising with words – he became a minister in Nagy’s government. It follows that Comrade Lukács is a traitor and an apostate. Ulbrichtian logic condemns his publisher.’

  ‘And the poet who could have turned this twisted logic on its head is dead. Why is Brecht dead and Ulbricht alive? Lukács spoke at his funeral. Why don’t they dig up Brecht’s body and put it on trial?’

  The thought cheered us up. Gerhard lay down on the floor. Richard and Alexander and I all stood up and posed as secret policemen.

  VLADY: Comrade Brecht, we have orders to take you to prison.

  GERHARD: I’m dead.

  RICHARD: That’s what they all say. Pick him up, boys.

  [Gerhard’s body is lifted and thrown on the sofa.]

  VLADY: Now look here, Brecht. You know you’re dead, we know you’re dead, but the state has ordered your arrest.

  GERHARD: It’s a bit late, don’t you think?

  VLADY: It’s never too late here.

  GERHARD: Why has my body been arrested?

  RICHARD: Ask your wife.

  HELGE: They say that Lukács spoke at your funeral, Berty, and Lukács, as we all know, is a traitor.

  GERHARD: I know that he wrote a book called The Destruction of Reason, in which he demonstrated how irrationalist modes of thought abetted the rise of fascism and reaction. Ulbricht did not comprehend the argument, but –

  ‘Enough clowning. Please. Enough now.’

  Something in Helen’s voice made them all stop. They looked at her.

  ‘I told you about Janka’s arrest so that you would understand what we are up against. Instead you start play-acting. Don’t you realize the risks we run?’

  ‘Nobody is here under false pretences. We’ve been talking for weeks. Something has to be done. If you’ve changed your mind, Helen, we understand. You can go.’

  ‘Don’t be a dumbhead, Gerhard,’ retorted Helen. ‘I want to discuss what we should do. Since none of you have come up with a concrete proposal could I suggest that we draft a brief manifesto? Something that can be read and understood by anyone. I propose that Vlady prepares a draft and we meet next week to discuss and approve. Agreed?’

  Everyone nodded.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Helen. ‘Now we can all go home.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Helge. ‘Next week is New Year’s Eve. Some of us have persuaded Vlady to throw a party. Why don’t we meet that morning to discuss the manifesto and then all of you can stay and help to organize the evening. Agreed?’

  ‘Yes,’ they muttered unenthusiastically.

  For a long time that night, hours after my fellow-conspirators had left, I sat at my desk, face cupped in my hands, and stared at the blank sheet of paper in my typewriter. Helge was fast asleep next door.

  ‘We have begun a long and dangerous undertaking,’ I said to myself. ‘If the local bosses don’t crush us, Moscow will, and then …?’ Slowly my fingers began to move and a title took shape on the blank sheet:

  MANIFESTO FOR THE BIRTH OF A REAL DDR

  A decade of totalitarian rule and iron discipline has robbed our people of their capacity for self-expression and self-organization. Coming as this does on top of what German fascism did to our nation, the results can only be tragic. This nation is longing to manage itself, to master its own destiny, free from both the stranglehold of bureaucratic rule and the dead hand of consumer capitalism, which rules in the Western part of our country.

  At the end of the war, the citizens of the DDR entertained high hopes of freedom, equality and international brotherhood, but these, right from the beginning, clashed with the bureaucratic aims of Moscow and the men it sent to run this state.

  The workers then discovered that their so-called socialist conquests were a sham. In 1953 we clamoured for reforms: a multiparty system, trade-union rights, freedom of the press, but DDR ‘socialism’ could not grant its citizens the rights that all West German citizens enjoyed as a matter of course, and rights which Rosa Luxemburg had argued were vital for the health of any system calling itself socialist. The workers uprising was crushed. People became cowed and sullen. Apathy reigned supreme.

  It was this failure that made the rantings of our propagandists so much hot air…

  By the time I had finished the first draft of the manifesto it was almost three in the morning. The freezing cold outside had penetrated the apartment. While I was working I had been unaware of how cold my body had become. Now I shivered as I undressed and crept into bed. Helge was in a deep sleep, breathing evenly. The heat radiated by her body was irresistible.

  She’s my lover, my comrade and my friend, I thought. She’s loyal and she’s passionate. I can rely on her. I tell her about things I’ve not confessed to anyone else. Perhaps my mother understands this instinctively and, for that reason, does not like her. Stupid Gertrude.

  I embraced her. Still asleep, she turned and hugged me. Within minutes her warmth had spread to me. Before I could think back on the events of that day, I, too, was fast asleep.

  A week later, on the morning of New Year’s Eve, the meeting approved the Manifesto, finalized arrangements for having it mimeographed, and compiled a list of likely sympathizers in all the major cities to whom it should be sent, though, naturally, not in the post. For months we had discussed endlessly. At times, our own chatter had seemed to us to resemble a meaningless din. Workers, democracy, freedom, bureaucracy, dictatorship, intelligentsia. Words. Now we had decided to make u
se of them in order to do something, to move forward, to act, to confront history, to uncover the clear blue sky underneath the leaden clouds.

  People had started arriving early and by ten the apartment was already overflowing. Young bodies were sprawled everywhere. Youthful spirits, helped by Gertrude’s supply of Russian vodka, were robust and carefree. In the sitting room, a cultivated satirist was standing on a table and mimicking Ulbricht. His audience was laughing uncontrollably without a trace of nervousness. A self-satisfied smile on my face, I was whispering to Gerhard.

  ‘Last year they would not have dared. It’s the spirit of the Twentieth Party Congress!’

  Gerhard, smoking a pipe and trying hard to strike an elegant posture, nodded in agreement.

  ‘The auguries are good as far as our little endeavour is concerned.’

  In the kitchen where guests were helping themselves to mulled Moldavian wine, a woman in her late forties was in full flow.

  ‘You think I place my art too high. I disagree. My only function is to take my readers into confidence by relating my dreams to them. Not yours or those of the DDR or of the goat who rules over us. Collectivist art has no aesthetic value. Literature has an intrinsic value independent of everything else. Everything else.’

  Her white-haired companion, a decade or so older, laughed at her. ‘Wrong again, my dear. What you say applies to masterpieces. Exceptions. As for the rest, art is a product, like much else, of the human mind, destined for hurried consumption. It is a perishable commodity. Socialist-realist rubbish is neither better nor worse than capitalist rubbish. When I realized that the public for which I wrote had ceased to exist, I stopped writing.’

  ‘You were full of shit then and you’re full of shit now,’ retorted his friend.

  They were interrupted by shouts from the next room alerting all the guests that midnight was two minutes away. As the bells on the radio rang in the New Year, everyone burst into song. Then Gerhard called for silence.

  ‘Comrades, let us drink to the memory of Bertolt Brecht.’

  ‘Bertolt Brecht!’

  ‘To freedom!’ suggested someone else.

  ‘To freedom!’ the apartment echoed.