As soon as he had earned his first deutsche mark by tutoring a dense high school student in Charlottenburg, he became an enthusiastic consumer. Not of luxury goods, because these were beyond his means—and besides, he didn’t particularly covet them. Small, inexpensive things did the trick. Buying things, that’s what it was all about, entering into the sacred circulatory system of commerce that went beyond the satisfaction of basic needs and thus became an end in itself, essentially a kind of art for art’s sake. But his countrymen didn’t understand this art at all, he repeated to himself over that Christmas holiday in Budapest. It quite simply spoiled his pleasure to see that those he had once left behind could now also be consumers. Part of the pleasure associated with every purchase had been the knowledge that he was one of the favored ones, one of the chosen, distinct from the brothers and sisters he had left behind the Iron Curtain, but not like all those consumers in the West who had no experience of the shortage economy, who had never needed to escape. In short, he had allotted himself this special status and now he saw it threatened. This new experience of equality—now even his walrus-mustached, Zwack Unicum–drinking dolt of a brother-in-law could afford a trip to Paris—poisoned his desire to shop once and for all, with the result that almost all his purchases still date from the late ’80s; he still wears the large glasses with square metal frames he had bought because the elderly Hayek wore that model, he still drives his 1985 Ford Bronco he bought used the day after he arrived in Palo Alto, and if Barbara didn’t intervene every once in a while and drag him to Nordstrom, he would still be wearing sports jackets with shoulder pads and rolled-up sleeves.
The collapse of communism was a disaster that touched every part of his life. Not only did he lose his desire to shop, but his aura as dissident refugee lost its power overnight, and professionally it was a complete catastrophe because a foreseeable end to the Cold War drained his discipline of all the erotic attraction from one day to the next and left it, at least in his students’ eyes, of historical interest at most. His first year as a hotshot among the defense intellectuals at Stanford University and the most recent new Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace had just ended and he was, in his early thirties, already at risk of becoming the custodian of his field of research. After only a few semesters he had to stop offering his catchily titled course Victory Is Possible: Controlled Escalation from First to Last Strikes and to give a lecture course called the History of Nuclear Strategy to a much smaller number of students.
The main reason for his irritation and heightened tension, however, was his fear of the Hungarian intellectuals who could take advantage of their newfound freedom of movement and show up in Stanford as visiting scholars at any moment. What if one of them had been a member of the chess team and, at the sight of Ivan, remembered the championship in Berlin and the departure of the blue Ikarus bus at daybreak? Ivan spent the first half of the ’90s in a state of constant worry that one of them would appear and destroy his legend. Even today he would still occasionally sit bolt upright in the middle of the night, bathed in cold sweat, woken by a dream in which a pale young man whom Ivan, heart beating wildly, immediately recognizes as János Rákosi, the captain of the Hungarian university chess team from 1980 to 1984, stands up in the middle of his lecture and points an accusing finger at him, Professor Ivan Pánczél, fellow of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, teaching the history of nuclear deterrence on the authority of his reputation as Hungarian dissident, political refugee, and chess master; then the young man declares in a shrill voice that still rings in Ivan’s ears from their complaints about sweat stains under the sleeves of the ivory-colored polyester jerseys, that this man here, passing himself off as Professor Ivan Pánczél, an expert on nuclear strategy, is nothing but an impostor, none other than the shirt-washer István Pánczél, who had been forgotten in a dreary hotel room in Berlin like a dirty, unmatched sock under the bedspread.
Ivan’s fear of being exposed was completely unfounded since all involved had quickly suppressed any memory of the shirt-washer Pánczél after having agreed on a lie at the Czechoslovakian highway rest stop, a lie they promptly adopted as gospel truth, albeit always haunted by a stale aftertaste, so they were, therefore, all too happy to forget the whole business, all, that is, but the intelligence officer who, having accompanied the student national chess team as their minder on the trip to Berlin, was held responsible for the shirt-washer Pánczél’s escape to the West and, as a result, was sent into the wilderness, that is, transferred to the puszta as a disciplinary measure, where he contracted before long a case of meningitis from a spoiled can of goulash out of the stocks of the National People’s Army, an illness that he barely survived and that left him so utterly feebleminded he couldn’t even remember his mother, much less the shirt-washer Pánczél.
* * *
Ivan led the way. He forged a path through the crowd like a wedge and parted the bellowing masses like a combat swimmer. The irritability and strain he had exported from California to Budapest, then brought with him from there to Berlin, did not dissipate under the effect of the Tokay they’d just downed or of his reunion with Kraft, and meanwhile he could no longer remember why, the day before, when reading an article in the Magyar Nemzet about the preparations for the upcoming New Year’s festivities in Berlin—the first since the fall of the Wall, which the residents of East and West Berlin were preparing to celebrate together—he had the sudden conviction that he had to be there, upon which he packed his things, shoved a couple bottles of wine and a Hungarian salami in a plastic bag, hurriedly kissed his mother on the forehead, and boarded the night train to Berlin as if the state security services were on his tail. And now that he was here, he at least didn’t want to miss the David Hasselhoff concert being held next to the Wall.
The noise was frightening. There was singing and shouting. Fireworks shot out of the crowd into the smoke-filled sky and illuminated the quadriga atop the Brandenburg Gate, on which young men were climbing, brandishing bottles, and dancing, drunk with joy, on the edge of the void. The GDR flag had been lowered, the hammer, compass, and garland torn out, and then raised up the flagpole again, with the powerfully symbolic hole, next to the European flag. Ivan, with Kraft cursing and following in his wake, fought his way westward up to the Wall, on which thousands of people were perched, squeezed tightly together above the swaying reunited German Volk. Ivan blazed a roughshod trail across the former death strip, strewn with garbage and broken bottles. Once at the foot of the Wall, they let themselves be pulled up by their hands. There they stood, sweating despite the icy frigidity of the New Year’s Eve night and looking triumphantly out over the heads of the jubilant crowd. Kraft pulled one of the bottles of Tokay out of his leather satchel and pulled the cork he had already loosened at home out with his teeth. The syrupy wine ran down their throats, sweet and viscous. Every square centimeter of the Wall seemed to be occupied by revelers, but newcomers kept boarding the concrete slabs with the assistance of those standing above them. Kraft and Ivan were constantly being prompted to grab the hands stretched out to them and pull people up. The two of them stood side by side, clinging to each other and to complete strangers. In a din of shouting, a child, a boy about six years old, was held up to them. The boy raised his thin arms, Kraft grabbed his wrists, pulled him energetically up to eye level, and stared into the boy’s face: he saw his own gray eyes with honey-colored flecks in the irises, his own curly hair, a mouth that was still childish but already bore a trace of the same skeptical expression on his own narrow lips. Alarmed, Kraft held the child at arm’s length and looked pleadingly for help at Ivan, who stood face-to-face with a woman he had just hoisted up. With her broad face and maternal hips, she stood before Ivan, looking into the weeping eye she had once angrily flailed with a gerbera. Ruth Lambsdorff looked from one to the other in panic, tore her child, who was quite obviously Kraft’s too, from his arms, held the boy protectively to her buxom chest, and stepped back in alarm from the
Hungarian dissident and chess whizz; in doing so she lost her footing and would certainly have fallen backward off the Wall with her son in her arms, if Ivan, of all people, who recognized her at that very instant as the socialist battle-ax whom he had to thank for his loss of vision, had not instinctively reached for her and prevented her fall, while Kraft stood next to him, gaping and idle.
For a moment, time seemed to stand still as if that decade would never end; blood pounded in the ears of all three, the child looked uncomprehendingly from one to the other. A power from the past penetrated this triangle and sought to push their bodies apart, but there was no escape. They were forced to stand next to one another, squeezed tightly together, the boy crushed between them, and then cheering surged up behind these frozen figures, as if hundreds of thousands of people wanted to celebrate their reunion, a synthesizer began to play, and a singer’s voice, amplified a thousandfold, drowned out the crowd. One June morning, some twenty years earlier, he’d been born a rich man’s son; he’d had everything that money could buy, but as for freedom, he’d had none, he sang in English—which was fortunate, because what the singer was crooning about wasn’t exactly the problem the celebrating citizens of the GDR had suffered. Then a thumping beat set in and David Hasselhoff, standing in a crane basket and urging the crowd to clap in rhythm, was lifted over the masses of people. Countless electric lightbulbs flashed on his leather jacket, and his scarf, knit in a pattern of piano keys, glowed against the night’s darkness as thousands of voices joined in the refrain’s call for the freedom that had been sought for so long.
I’ve been looking for freedom
Still the search goes on
The little boy threw up his arms, clapped his small hands to the beat, and joined the chorus with his childish falsetto.
This seemed to release the three adults from their torpor. In a gesture of deliverance, they raised their hands to the heavens and sang freedom’s praises with the American TV star, but only to themselves, avoiding each other’s eyes and staring into the sky blazing with fireworks.
chapter eleven
Theodicy successful, God dead.
—ODO MARQUARD
Jolted awake, Kraft finds himself staring into the gaping beak of a purple finch. He had dreamed he was all alone on a beach in Ceuta facing an enormous machine emitting a laser beam that was sintering an object out of the sand with rapid strokes right in front of the gleaming tips of his shoes, and the object, rising on some invisible mechanism, soon towered above him, revealing layer upon layer of glass, until he found himself looking up at a transparent habitat. The sea surged, waves washed around Kraft’s fine shoes. He found refuge on the crystalline island that was floating out to the open sea. Kraft remained completely calm, there was no reason to panic, he knew Gibraltar wasn’t far away, and he had everything he needed: a glass bed, a glass toilet, a glass cupboard filled with shimmering glass jars of glass preserves. Suffocating, gurgling cries for help were carried toward him on the wind. Countless ragged figures in wrestling singlets that gleamed like sealskin swam toward his island, stretching their black arms out to his island, clutching at its edges with fingers wrinkled from the salt water, swinging their pinkish soles over the railing. With mute tenacity, Kraft defended his realm, twisted their fingers backward, stepped on cracking phalanges, running from port to starboard and back again, striking, pushing, and kicking, but there were too many of them. Then Herb handed him an oar and Kraft beat at the heads that popped up over the rail in a frenzied dance, one head, one face, one blow, there, another one, wham, bang, and then he slipped, staggered, tumbled, toppled backward over the railing, his fingers slipping on the glass, the water closing over his head—at which point he sat bolt upright and stared into the gaping beak of that purple finch.
He thrashes his legs wildly to free them from the sweat-soaked sheets, heedlessly sets his bare feet on the carpet, and grips the cool bed frame with one hand. Good Lord, Kraft thinks, why on earth was I beating those miserable heads? Why would I do such a thing? That’s not who I am at all. And the oar, I barely get my hands on it again, at least on one of the two, before losing it again. He rubs his eyes, his nose, snorts and brushes away the hair stuck to his forehead. That damn Erkner disrupted me completely with his blather.
Erkner had dragged them to a bar, high up in a glass tower somewhere in the Financial District. Kraft sat by the window and looked down into the street canyons through which fireflies left glowing traces, and then he looked up along the facades to the top of the Transamerica Pyramid, which jutted into the evening sky like a pharaonic tomb. Somewhere down below, in those hills, Johanna sat, spoon in hand, in a small wooden house, perhaps in the glow of a kitchen light she had just turned on. Kraft was hungry. To his own astonishment, he already regretted his mac and cheese, which had been whisked away, barely touched, from under his nose. And an obsequious waitress had just removed the bowl of mixed nuts from the table on Erkner’s request that she take it away. In its place, a bottle of locally distilled rye whiskey was brought, from which Erkner poured generous portions before perching on the edge of his petrol-blue mid-century chair, his back very straight, his tumbler balanced on the palm of his hand, holding forth. In an effort to adopt an interested posture, Kraft had imitated him but he soon sank under the weight of his interlocutor’s unfailingly contradictory pronouncements and retreated to the safety of the chair cushions. He felt as shattered as he had months before, when he opened the PDF attachment in Ivan’s e-mail and looked at the boyish face with cold eyes that was now directly in front of him, so close he could have touched the flat nose with his fingertips if he’d only had the strength to stretch out his arm.
Erkner seemed to be possessed by an urgent need to deliver an exhaustive explanation of his worldview in articulate sentences of flawless clarity that sounded alternately like slogans and professions of faith, statements he launched with great emphasis but without any visible emotion over the kidney-shaped table that stood between them.
He feels closer to Catholicism with its theological complexity and intellectual rigor, Erkner had said, than to the arbitrariness of Protestantism. He is a devout Christian, he declared, his gaze fixed just past Kraft’s left ear. Christianity is true. And because there was no division in Erkner’s intellectual makeup between his convictions, which Kraft felt belonged primarily to the private sphere, and his guiding principles as an entrepreneur, in the same way as the most diverse subjects merged into each other seamlessly and organically in Erkner’s disquisitions and obscured the precarious structure of his arguments, Kraft was overcome by a diffuse malaise that he initially attributed to strong drink on a stomach empty of anything that could absorb it. But then Erkner explained after just a few sentences—a few sentences with which, nonetheless, he appeared to have covered enormous ground without Kraft noticing how he had advanced his argument—that he had always loathed the authorities because they reined in the originality of thought with the bridle of the past and actual present and so impeded rapid progress toward prospective futures and curbed reflection on the present future, and in so doing also limited the range of possibilities for the future to come. One’s approach to the world, he continued, should be as independent as possible from existing interpretations and those imposed by the authorities, in order to avoid well-trodden paths, which is absolutely essential for all thought and action in the technology sector, since only the new will guarantee a better future for humankind. Intellectual independence is the sole guarantor for freedom. It took Kraft a long time to ascribe his malaise to the utter irreconcilability of the particular elements in Erkner’s discourse. It was as if he were being served a liverwurst milkshake, but one prepared so skillfully and delivered with such assurance that the evident incompatibility of the ingredients only became noticeable when they lost their artful form in his stomach and began to rebel against each other. How the devil, he wondered, can a profession of Catholic faith be reconciled with a rejection of all authority? Before Kraft could formulate an
objection, he was subjected to a new sleight of hand, whitewashed with the utterly inconceivable—immortality—presented with the same matter-of-factness with which one would treat a technical problem that could soon be resolved with a spot of financing and ingenuity. Human mortality was a problem of great, perhaps even utmost, urgency and that was why he was investing a not inconsiderable sum in overcoming it by funding a biogerontologist’s institute. Defeating death is entirely within the realm of the possible; death is, after all, nothing but a disease not substantially different from the flu or stomach cancer; probably not in his lifetime, but you have to think of the future. One thing he doesn’t understand, mind you, is how so many people willingly capitulate to death. Our society is convinced that death is unpredictable and unavoidable.
Kraft didn’t see how Erkner’s desire for immortality could coexist with his profession of Christian faith whether in a Protestant or a Catholic context. However, to his surprise and deep discouragement, he lacked confidence in his counterarguments, obvious as they were. It was inconceivable, he thought, that such a successful man would put millions into a project that wasn’t thoroughly thought out. Erkner, in the meantime, had left death far behind and embarked on what was obviously his favorite subject, the future, or the futures, to be more precise, since there seemed to be a wide array of forms possible, of which only one was desirable. Luckily that one could be completely planned out. He was even able to draw a small diagram of it on his cocktail napkin with practiced strokes of his Montblanc fountain pen and he impressed Kraft by effortlessly writing the script upside down so that it was legible for the person sitting across from him. The planet, he explained with the aid of his sketch, has been in a state of crisis for some time because mankind has lost its faith in a quantifiable world, a quantifiable future. In the golden years of the 1950s and the decades that followed, mankind had been guided by a concrete optimism that had its source in the United States and the technological and scientific progress being made here, that is, the belief that the future would be better than the present if we did what was necessary and worked hard at it. There was general agreement on what that better future should look like. But today mankind is in the grip of a universal pessimism. An abstract pessimism is making minds dull, especially in Europe. People are convinced the future will necessarily be bleak and don’t have the slightest idea what to do about it. All that’s left for Europeans is to wait for the inevitable decline and enjoy life without bothering to act; and that’s precisely the reason for Europeans’ leisure mentality. In America, by contrast, a phase of abstract optimism began in the early ’80s and is most clearly visible in the growth of the financial sector, the sole purpose of which is to amass money, without, however, any idea of how to create a better future.
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