Political speculative fiction—that is what it would have been if, a year ago, you had produced a novel in which a C.D.U. Ministerpräsident of the D.D.R. with a French name had flown to Moscow to talk to Gorbachev about the possibility of NATO membership for a united Germany. Imagine the Honecker of a year ago, with a copy of today’s newspaper in his hand, flicking on the television to see de Maizière descending the stairs of an aeroplane in Moscow. What kind of reality is it that is real, and yet absurd? I live in a city, I take the bus, I go to the Reichstag. The Brandenburger Tor has been stripped of its horses and chariot and is in scaffolding, a building emasculated. The surrounding square is wide and open; they are demolishing the Wall by night. People walk across the space, East German soldiers in boots, a child, windswept figures with the Charité in the background. I go to the other side, am permitted to walk straight through, and in a wooden hut I exchange West Marks for East Marks: three to one. You can change money illegally as well; wherever you look, there are grubby moneychangers with bundles of banknotes in their hands. You get a lot more money that way, but there is something unpleasant about it; the situation is bad enough as it is. You are ten minutes away from your own house, the weather here is the same, you can hear the same language around you, but suddenly the money in your pockets has miraculously multiplied, because not only is one of yours worth three of theirs, but soup costs 1.50, goulash 3.95, a pils is 1.20, and you can divide all of those amounts by three again and, feeling a little peculiar, head back outside and go to the bookshop, where you can buy a beautiful bilingual edition of poems by René Char for six Ostmark = two Westmark. It is not right, but that is how it is. You only have to pay in D-Marks (Westgeld) at the big hotels, and when you buy petrol you sometimes (but not often) have to show proof that you changed your money officially. There is a huge amount of fiddling, speculation, calculation going on. Everything tastes, smells, reeks of money. It beats and buzzes in the conversations, and drifts off into the realm of fear, insecurity: what is going to happen soon, after the second of July, and what will that mean for individual citizens?
A journey through the D.D.R. I drive down a road I have driven along so often, on the way to the Netherlands, but now I am allowed to leave it, to head off into the countryside. Magdeburg, Halberstadt, a cathedral, another one, monasteries, dead aristocrats lying on top of their tombs, a world that was kept on ice, but which is now being defrosted. That can’t really be the case, can it? So why does it feel that way? A war, bombardments, restoration, and these churches stood here all that time. The English wife of one of the Ottonians lay here for centuries, hidden beneath an enigmatic smile that suggests she can hear something a long way off in the distance, but what? The sculptor designed her epitaph as a rebus, weaving together the letters of her titles and virtues, but still I can decipher her name. I read her, just as I can read the language of the pillars, of the images carved in the wood of the choir stalls, a language that told the same story everywhere, so that these churches somehow gave a semblance of unity to eternally divided Europe. This land was closed off, and it seemed as though these churches no longer existed, but to me it feels like they went elsewhere for all that time and have only just returned, as though they have reclaimed their place amidst these peculiar piles of socialist architecture: migratory birds returning to nestle among the dilapidated cardboard blocks; paradoxical forms, foreign bodies that belong here.
Magdeburg Cathedral, May 1990
I look at the medieval faces, the Holbein figures on the tall, upright tombstones, the sooty, corroded angels, the black cliff faces of the high buildings. Then I follow a group of children whose teacher is giving them a guided tour and I listen to his soft, melodious sentences as he tells stories about that former empire. It feels as though it is not only the stories, which are so old, that are being given back to the children, but also the German language that these stories are told in, a German that such children have not possessed for quite some time. It was simply not available. Another variant of language was in use, one in which other words had taken root and divergent forms of history had concealed themselves, absent without ever truly disappearing. Maybe that is what we are experiencing here: beneath all of the material copulation and gluttony that is taking place on the surface, a submerged, deferred Germany is giving itself back to itself, and no one knows quite what to do with it. But whatever occurs, it will happen in language, and that will not be the language that is used for “ordering socks from Taiwan” (Peter Sloterdijk), nor will it be the language of the Neues Deutschland editorials of two years ago, nor that shared, earlier variant that was valid from ’33 to ’45 and which was used for so many lies that a lot of words will never recover their former strength. Where words are missing, speech falters and fails, and forms of reticence, obfuscation, silence develop. Sprechen, versprechen: to speak, to promise. This German connection between speaking and promising does not exist in Dutch. We certainly know all about verspreken, but the Dutch word means only to say the wrong thing, to make a slip of the tongue, to put one’s foot in one’s mouth. The Germans are capable of doing that too, of course, but when we Dutch people verspreken, we never promise anything. That sense of “to promise” is what the philosopher Sloterdijk is talking about when he says that being German means having to reflect more carefully than any other nation about what you can promise yourself and the world.1
As I continue to traipse after the schoolchildren (they have now reached St Maurice, and the teacher says, “Have you seen this? The black saint?”), my thoughts stray somewhere I cannot follow: is a language, as well as being everything that is written or said in it, also everything that can be written or said in it? And if that is the case, what does it mean? Are some languages less capable of expressing evil than others? Are some languages better suited to lies? And, if so, how long does it take for a language to recover from its lies? Or, if the language itself is innocent and therefore just a victim, or just another victim, along with the people it has been used for lying to, how can we help her (language has to be feminine) to heal? And who should be the healer?
The children are laughing about something. Their high-pitched peals ring up to the vaulted ceiling and, shocked at the sound, they start shushing themselves, and yet, because they are here and I am here and their laughter is now part of my thoughts, it seems as though they are saying, “You need a healer? We can do that.” At the same time, it occurs to me (as you suddenly find yourself able to express something that you have actually known for a long time) how peculiar it is that we are born into a language, as though, for the arbitrary span of our lives, we are immersed in a river. But the river never remains the same, and you play a part in changing that water yourself. After you, the river is never the same. For me, that river is Ruusbroec, Hadewijch, the words spoken by the judge against Oldenbarnevelt, Vondel, as well as more modern figures like Max Blokzijl, and beneath and behind all those written, articulated words, the endless murmuring of generation after gener-ation, the mass of words and sentences constantly accumulating around us. For the schoolchildren now stroking the devils and animals of the choir stalls, it is the words that Luther translated from the Greek on the Wartburg, but also the Germanic echoes of the Nibelungenlied, the surging waves of Hölderlin and the forgotten words that Handke gave back when he described the landscapes of his youth in Die Wiederholung; it is the cries of the Thirty Years War, but also Himmler’s protocols and Goebbels’ roars, or Gottfried Benn’s response to Klaus Mann and his later remorse, which he captured in words. It is a living, never-ending intermingling of spoken and written words, the conversation that a nation has with itself: language, who may perhaps even be able to purify herself once the pressure of the systems that abuse her is removed, just as lungs can cleanse themselves when you give up smoking, even after many years.
I am on my way to the Harz. Friends in Berlin laughed suspiciously when I listed my destinations: the Hexentanzplatz, the Rosstrappe, the Brocken, the Barbarossahöhle, the Wartburg, the Germany of those lonely pilgrimages in search of the Holy Grail, the dragon’s blood, the witches’ screeches, the legends, the nostalgic memory. Why is it that the witches from Macbeth and the ancient twilight of the Druids and Celtic heroes do not elicit the same ironic shiver as Richard Wagner’s “Wallala weiala weia” or the shrieking females in Goethe’s Faust? The answer can only be that this world died a gentle death with the anemic English Pre-Raphaelite movement, while here it has made a comeback and has merged with symbols of death and destruction. After all, Kniebolo (the childish code name that Jünger came up with for Hitler, as though it might somehow render him harmless, like some sort of Pinocchio) also relished the Nie-wieder-Erwachens wahnlos hold bewusster Wunsch; language as the anaesthetic of thought, an escape from the rational world.
I am rewarded, as though the set designer is looking kindly upon me. I have not even reached Thale, the location of the Hexentanzplatz—the witches’ dance floor—when the white mist starts swirling around my car. I see a sign for a Schwebebahn, a suspension railway, and although the idea of taking a floating train seems like a suitably magical approach, I would prefer to walk the last part: a little fear never does any harm. What I think is mist turns out to be clouds; sometimes they are there, sometimes they disappear. The trees are dripping. There is not a soul in sight. But commerce has already had its wicked way with the legend: when I finally reach the top, I find a parking area for coaches, a restaurant with an amusing painting of a witch above the entrance, a Bratwurst stand, all of it empty, deserted. I walk around this tainted legend and then, at the far end of the site, I find it, the actual site of the Walpurgisnacht ball. I climb the slippery rocks and stop at a rusty railing that would have caused a few landing problems for the witches. Some of the genius of this place still remains; the abyss before me is deep, with ragged fir trees growing against bare rock faces, shreds of mist, mystery. Now that all of that commercial nonsense is behind me, it really is quite beautiful.
There is a whistling of wind in the trees, but otherwise the silence is dense, dense enough to make you imagine all kinds of things, but before I can picture anything that might make me shiver, memory intervenes once again: an actor wearing a peculiar green pyjama-like outfit, dancing on a small stage. It was a few months ago and I had read that someone was performing a one-man version of Faust somewhere in East Berlin, both parts, in a tiny theater that was aptly called “Unter dem Dach,” Under the Roof. Both parts of Faust, I thought, how was that even possible? It would take ten hours, and yet I was intrigued. There were twenty of us and, as usual, I must have been the oldest person there. The others were serious young people who wanted to wrap themselves up in Goethe for an evening. The actor was in his forties and was dressed in the aforementioned garment, which was clearly handmade and gave him the freedom of movement he required. As he was playing several roles, he had rather a lot of leaping around to do. And, of course, the winds had to blow, the choruses had to be spoken, the witches had to screech evilly, and so he had cunningly hidden a cassette recorder behind a curtain, but he had to keep going over to switch it on (after all, the machine could hardly come to him) and he concealed this repeated movement with a fascinating variety of dance steps. It was terrible and wonderful, all at the same time. He had mastered his lines and kept up his performance for hours, but sometimes he tried to shout along with himself on the cassette recorder and that did not work: a failed twinning of natural and mechanical voices. By the interval, I had had my fill and wanted to leave the attic, but some fiendish spirit had locked the cloakroom. However, it turned out fine, because the man in the green pyjamas, with all of his histrionic posturing, managed yet again to draw me into his Faustian world of darkness, the search for light, the lewdness and the lust for knowledge; he was his own devil and his own doctor, his own Gretchen and his own witches. All by himself, he had enchanted me and now, here in this gloomy place in the forest, I thought of him again, a man who had surrendered himself to Goethe and wound his lines around me and sent me home, bewitched, after the earnest youngsters and I had called him back three times for one more round of thunderous applause. I walked slowly back past the Knödelbüffet and the Selbstbedienungsgaststätte. Witches, dumplings, Goethe: without irony, it is no longer possible to endure the world. It is not the writer who is postmodern, but the world.
From deep in the valley, I had seen a hotel and that was where I wanted to go now. The clouds turned into ordinary rain and then the road began to climb again, and finally I ended up at the same height, but on the other side of the gorge. In the cloud of mist surrounding the hotel, I could make out two Western cars and two Trabants, so I knew there must still be vacancies. The young man at the reception desk decided that I should pay in West Marks; an accent costs money here. The room had a balcony that must have looked out over the valley, but the door was locked. A shabby orange rag hung at the window, there was no shower or toilet in the room, and any complaints were to be made to the collective. The reading lamp did not work—call the collective! The communal shower was grimy, and there were splotches of paint all over the rest of the bathroom, not important in themselves, but because of what they signified. Tap, mirror, curtain, hallway all expressed the same sentiment: to hell with you, we are long gone, and we were never really here even when we were present.
Rosstrappe, this is where Brunhilde once fled from Bodo the knight, her horse taking an almighty leap and flying across the gorge; you can still see the mark left by its hoof. I can even go and stand inside it. So I clamber up to it along a muddy path, and on the way I meet another hotel guest, who says that it’s “mystisch” up there. His glasses are gleaming in the rain. I think he might be a little mystical himself, but when I am standing in the spot where Bodo plunged into the abyss, the weight of German Romanticism descends, and the unspoiled landscape down there calls something, languishing or pining, as a white-masked bird I have never seen before comes and sits on the inaccessible rock in front of me, singing its heart out without expecting anything in return, and some inconceivable mountaineer has planted a cross up there atop a dragon’s tooth, the mist wrapping around it like a cloak. I see a path zigzagging down to a river that I can hear but not see. Chinese hills, Japanese trees, the German landscape as an oriental wash drawing. As I descend, the birds grow louder, throwing themselves into the depths and hovering there, writing letters in the air and perching on more distant rocks to continue delivering their orations. I try to understand what they are saying, but one sounds like a Chinese person discussing tasty food, while another seems to be translating Hildegard of Bingen into the language of the birds, so I am never going to work it out. As evening falls, I climb back up again, to a hotel and dining room with ficus and ferns and burghers tucking into boar meat, mountain air, contentment.
Before I go to bed, I take a quick look outside, but there is nothing to see. I am living in a cloud, Niflheim, the abode of mist, the camouflage clothing of Germanic mythology or, as Gottfried Benn puts it, “Always and eternally, ribbons of mist and veils of fog and a need for the bearskins of the ‘glorious old Germans,’ as they are called in the radio broadcasts [of the Nazi era]. From a place such as this, Taine would surely have postulated a geophysical explanation for the fact that our nation, deep in its very essence, has a strange relationship to clarity and form, or, one might say, to honesty.” As a counterbalance, I try to read some of Heine’s Harzreise, but I have just reached the point where the poet sits down at the foot of the Brocken with a shepherd, “ein freundlich blonder junger Mensch” for a “Déjeuner dînatoire” consisting of bread and cheese, while the little sheep snatch up the crumbs and the sweet calves leap around them, with their big, happy eyes. Such shepherds no longer exist and, besides, sleep is creeping up on me, but I put my Walkman on for a while and fortunately, or perhaps un-fortunately, find a D.D.R. station with the voice of an older man who is arguing, trying to persuade “ein junger Freund.” There is no doubt about it—these men are writers. You can recognize the type immediately. The man he is addressing is not present; the voice remains alone, an intelligent, lonely sound, disillusioned, mournful. The younger man has apparently written something about Anna Seghers’ betrayal of Walter Janka. He has expressed suspicions and mentioned the names of Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym, and the voice wonders whether the young man really knows enough about all those things, if he knows about Seghers’ conversations with Ulbricht, if he knows about the pain and the moral conflicts. So, once again, this is about the rift between belief and conscience, and the man to whom the voice belongs knows what he is talking about because he too was imprisoned under the regime for several years (“so many years of my life were stolen from me”), and condemned by people who had themselves been in prison for many years of their lives, under a different regime, and now this young friend had attacked Seghers, but had gone on to argue, of all things, that the work of “anti-Semites such as Céline and Pound, Gottfried Benn with his fantasies of eugenics, of a warmonger like Ernst Jünger, who still has on his desk the perforated helmet of an English soldier he shot dead in the First World War” should finally be published in the D.D.R.
What is going to happen, I wonder in the fog of my drowsiness, to those who are faithful to the old doctrine, who have suffered so much through their practice of that doctrine and been pilloried as heretics and yet still have not lost their faith? Last week I read a lovely little book by Stefan Hermlin, Abendlicht, in which he writes about his youth and his father, his wealthy Jewish background (what the French refer to as the “haute juiverie,” a term that makes you wonder if they are talking about some extremely rare sort of bird)—liberal, musical and, above all, German, people with horses and paintings (later, in a museum in Oslo, he sees the Munchs and Redons that used to hang on the walls at home).
One day, as a schoolboy, in the summer of 1931, he stops on his way home to watch a couple of unemployed men who have no money to buy a newspaper and so are reading one in a shop window instead. He listens to their conversation and keeps returning to the same spot, until finally one of the workers speaks to him and, gently mocking his appearance (a dutiful schoolboy from a well-to-do family), suggests that he should join the Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands. The man hands him a piece of paper with pale letters that are hard to decipher: it is a badly printed membership form for that organization, the Communist Youth Association, which he duly signs. The sentence that follows might have been spoken by Saint Paul on the road to Damascus: “The street started spinning around me, slowly and steadily.” That one moment defines Hermlin’s life. He flees to Switzerland in the Nazi era, while his father stays behind and dies in Sachsenhausen. After the war, he chooses the D.D.R. and he remains a Communist, like the man whose voice I can hear without knowing who he is. I am in that hopeless moment of near-sleep, when everything is very faraway, but also very large; the voice is inside my head now and it feels as though the split personality of these people, with their high ideals and the Stalinist mould that has eaten away at them so viciously, is attempting to take up residence in my brain, to seep through the two tiny sponges of my Walkman, as they deliver increasing doses of their soporific drug. When it is finally over, I hear the name: Günther Rücker. Later, back in Berlin, I make enquiries: he is a filmmaker in his late sixties, who has made some wonderful things, and who wrote a very fine debut novel in 1984, Herr von Oe. I still have no idea who the young friend was.
Morning, more mist. I hear the sound of birds flying past; they must be operating on automatic pilot. The morning newspaper is singing about two to one, one to one, the state arts subsidy is no more, and at breakfast some gentlemen from the East and the West are busy either tearing apart a sand-mining company or setting one up. The men from the West are dressed in leather, the men from the East are in Nikita Khrushchev suits—something else that will soon disappear. I go down the same mountain path as yesterday, but this time I reach the river and cross the Devil’s Bridge (what better name for a bridge in this place?). Down at that level, the fog has dispersed. I lean out over the swirling water and watch as a white-throated dipper disappears into the rounded form of its nest, which is glued to the rock face, and then reappears and flies off, low over the water, a small propeller without a body. The path rises and falls, the leaves of the chestnut trees are curled or unfurled, depending on how high or low I am. The walk to the next village is twelve kilometers, but I do not meet a soul. Somewhere, someone has carved Goethe into his own granite; there is no avoiding him: Der Geist aus dem wir handeln ist das höchste. Zum 200sten Geburtstag, Kulturbund Thale.2 It is midday by the time I arrive in Treseburg, muddy and soaked through. After lunch, I ask if there is a bus that goes back to Thale, but I am informed that it does not leave until late in the afternoon, and a taxi costs forty-three Marks, which works out to fifteen. When I say I’ll take a taxi, the boss says he will drive me himself. On the way, he gives me a lesson in socialism for company owners: the penalties for making more money, the harassment from state officials, the countless forms you have to fill in just to paint a windowsill, the fines for putting in extra effort, all the things that are supposed to be in the past now, “but, honestly, I’ll have to see it for myself first, because the same people are still in the same jobs.” I keep hearing this refrain in the days that follow, no matter who I speak to: owners or staff, teachers or students, waiters or customers waiting in the long queue for the restaurant. The feeling of resentment is huge. People do not know where they stand, if their company is going to close down, if their child will be able to study, if their qualifications are still valid in the West, what Grandma’s savings are worth, if they will be able to keep their job, if the Party-appointed leader of the government enterprise will still be its owner tomorrow. Politicians from East and West are rowing against this tide of uncertainty, with faces and statements full of confidence; they are talking about three years, five years of hardship at the most, and about the golden future that will follow. But four thousand people a week are still leaving for the other Germany.
May 5, 1990