It was in May, and it was in Los Angeles. The president of Loyola Marymount University, the Reverend Thomas P. O’Malley of the Society of Jesus, had invited me to the ceremonial unveiling of a section of the Berlin Wall, a gift to the university from the city of Berlin. Various people were going to speak, including the consul general of Germany, Hans-Alard von Rohr. It was a sunny day, the heat from the nearby desert tempered by the ocean. I felt a little strange as I drove there along the endless freeways. Merely the word “freeway,” with all its associations, made the thought of the Wall and the memories it evokes seem grotesque. The two cities are part of my own personal history: I have lived in both Berlin and Los Angeles, and it says something about the mysterious make-up of our brains that two such incompatible concepts can coexist within the limited space of our skulls, although perhaps not without an element of hostility.
It was a peculiar ceremony. How could it not be? The rector magnificus was a cheerful, round Irishman, who looked as though he enjoyed a drop or two, and who had not, as is customary nowadays, disguised himself as a civilian, and so he still looked as priests did in my youth, which at least meant you immediately knew you were dealing with a man of God. The consul general had all the stature that his name and title implied, and an additional fifty centimeters on top of that; it was not hard to imagine him in a movie. There was also a rather endearing woman from the American Customs Service, who glowed as she told us about all the bureaucratic hurdles she had had to overcome to get this painted piece of concrete into the port and, of course, a Dutch professor from the Department of Political Science, who had come up with the whole scheme. The historic object itself stood there like a little orphan girl without an orphanage, shy and perhaps a little unhappy. It was doing its best, but it no longer represented any real threat. There was a declaration of love on it to someone called Kristin, which was surrounded by the kind of painting you can see in every gallery throughout the first, second and third worlds nowadays: cheerful, childish colors in a design that was not entirely without structure. The students, standing in a large circle around the Wall and wearing clothes in the same color palette as the art, listened attentively to the sacrosanct stream of words flowing over the green lawn: Oppression and Freedom, Conflict and History, platonic ideas dressed in capital letters, their Sunday best, abstractions that, in this context, appeared to have as much connection to that block of concrete as the two sparrows that briefly perched on it, with all the innocence of creatures that are their own eternal repetition and live outside of human history. I felt those young minds around me trying with all their might to think something, but I doubted that they would succeed.
And what about me? When I closed my eyes, the weather changed. It became winter, because it was winter when I saw that Wall for the first time, the winter of 1963. Now, in order to picture that day again, I had to imagine that the consul and the rector and the students were not there. I had to deny the existence of the green leaves on the tree above us. I had to make it become icy cold, summon up the biting snow of Central Europe and, using only the power of my mind, seamlessly reinsert the lonely concrete between other broken fragments. Only then would I once again be standing before a Wall, only then would I be twenty-nine again, cold again, frozen into place within history as history, and not in this curious, ironic, postmodern offshoot which—and here is the irony—is just as much a part of history, one of Hegel’s blank pages. You could almost die laughing.
But I was not in the mood for laughter. What had I thought about it back then, at the time? I thought it sounded like the kind of situation that might have existed in Greek antiquity, or indeed any other an-tiquity: a city divided in two by a wall. Wrapped in legends and stories, an almost obsolete proverb, a comedy by Tirso de Molina, found in a corner of the library of Salamanca, an adaptation of Molière, an opera by Salieri, and later, of course, a couple of hours of highbrow video froth, an anecdote with symbols popping up all over like mushrooms, cultural heritage. But the kind of antiquities we usually encounter are no more than a few thousand years old, as old as we ourselves have grown throughout the interlocking series of civilizations to which we still belong. Perhaps that is why, in spite of the nuclear arsenal that is as much a part of the world as the ozone layer, an air of antiquity clings desperately to everything we do, an archaic atmosphere that no journeys to Mars or Jupiter will ever dispel. And that is how it looked: all you had to do was stand in front of that Wall and squeeze your eyes half-shut, and you could see the clumsy bustling of medieval foot soldiers guarding a city wall in the Land of the Others. The same species that is able to cover thousands of kilometers in a day, that can visit planets at home and split atoms like a piece of old rope, can also build a wall, two or three meters high, a wall that can never be crossed. An Egyptian or a Babylonian would not have been able to climb over it either, a person from the Middle Ages would have had to surrender his weapons at the gate, an Athenian might have drowned in the River Spree, while this Dutchman banged his head on the Wall and woke up decades later, on the other side of the earth, to see a priest and a diplomat removing a cloth from a piece of concrete with childish drawings on it, a remnant that must always remain there as a reminder of something that is not easy to sum up, and never will be summed up, if only because history has a head like Janus’, looking in two directions, at the past and, paradoxically, at the future. I believe it was Schlegel who said that historians are prophets who face backwards; that is both true and untrue. Through some inimitable alchemical manoeuvre, yesterday’s future has transformed the threat and force inherent in that chunk of concrete into an innocuous sight for tourists; this monument is pulling the wool over my eyes even as I stand there in front of it. My fear, or my fury, or my abhorrence, has become invalid. I have to summon up images of men and guns, of watchtowers and searchlights, in order to feel any sense of the reality, images that the other bystanders do not have in their inner archives. And yet, I was always an outsider as far as that Wall was concerned, so how would the insiders fare in this place? How could you bear the denial of your past in a monument that was intended to perpetuate it? How would you feel about this minimisation of something that was always so much more than the concrete of which it was made, a symbol, on permanent display, which for you was not just a symbol, but a daily reality that dominated your life, in many cases, until death?
Berlin, 1997
Potsdamer Platz, 1997
Two weeks ago, back in Berlin, I had the opportunity to think about this again. I wanted to pay another visit to the Hotel Esplanade, because I have sentimental memories of the place, but I could not find it. I came up out of the S-Bahn on Potsdamer Platz and found myself in pandemonium. I was standing on what seemed to be a temporary bridge, which shook from the weight of the heavy lorries, and I did not know where to look first. Far below, swarms of laborers were working away on the foundations of the Tower of Babel or maybe even a giant tunnel to Moscow; anything was possible here. I looked at the chaos of yellow and white helmets, leaned over the railing, saw men down there in profundis installing reinforced concrete, and gazed back up at the forest of cranes, their lights waving, transporting black slabs of marble through the air and slowly lowering them, all to the accompaniment of the ancient sound of iron on stone. I attempted to follow the labyrinthine movements of the hundreds of people beneath me and wondered who was choreographing this movement, how all of those men knew so precisely what they had to do, how anyone could find the way through all those pipes, cables, tubes. These men were driving all kinds of things into the soil, but it felt more as though a gigantic city was in the process of rising up out of the earth, as though a city wanted to exist here and was creating a path for itself using natural force. I felt a sense of euphoria at all that activity, but also, I will admit, something more like a shiver of disquiet, because of the implications, because of the power that was in evidence here, which seemed such a contrast to Germany’s recent lamentations, as though that had all been some kind of masquerade, a theatrical gimmick to lull the rest of the world to sleep. If what I was witnessing here was not some kind of phantasm, a Potemkin village, then it must simply be exactly what my eyes could see: a vision of future power. Here, with the thunderous force of the pile driver, a page was being turned. No fewer than three pasts were being buried in this place; history was being dug into the soil of this magical landscape of orgiastic labor at the rate of a million images per second: trams, fashions, armies, bunkers, barriers, walls, the People’s Police, all of them disappearing beneath the foundations of the temples to the new powers. Once again, I was standing in this square in the midst of something that meant a lot more than what could actually be seen at that moment. Somewhere in a corner were a few miserable pieces of Wall, like scenery pushed aside after a failed performance. What had it been? An operetta? Wagner in modern dress? A play by Heiner Müller? Or just reality after all, its lingering shadow trying to connect with the other lonely piece that I had seen in California in May?
Construction of the new Reichstag dome, 1997
Again I shivered, but this time it was the cold. In the distance I saw the wooden frame of the new dome of the Reichstag, a Renaissance theater model, and suddenly there it was, the dwarfed Hotel Esplanade, looking a little foolish among all that violence, and at the same instant the memory within me also shrank. What did it look like here back then? How could the hotel suddenly be so small? There it stood, strangely boxed in, surrounded by the oval, gleaming, rising force of Sony. I tried to imagine future Mercedes and B.M.W.s slinking into the car parks, nouveaux riches from Warsaw to Novosibirsk entertaining themselves behind the windows of new apartments, following the rituals of the new age, pampered by Filipino maids and with the gentle buzz of Dow Jones, D.A.X. and Nikkei in the background. It was just as difficult as picturing my own bygone reality, in which, for several winters, I had spent days on end in that building with a long-gone lover. She was a singer and her recordings had been made there, in that empty, hollowed-out building. Her producer came from Cologne and had been in the Luftwaffe. In a way, he is back in the air now, because his feet no longer walk this earth. From the hotel windows, there was a view in every direction, and the producer had once pointed in one of those directions, towards the Führerhauptquartier, where he had had to deliver a message as a courier from Bordeaux. As he was about to slip the sealed envelope into the letterbox, he had felt a hand on his shoulder and, turning, he found himself face to face with Hitler. “Diese Augen, nein, das kannst du dir nicht vorstellen.” No, I could not imagine those eyes; I was too occupied with what was happening in the empty, snow-covered square below, the mobile etching of men and dogs among those strange, angular pieces of metal that were reminiscent of an early Mondrian, the beach at Domburg.
But it was also exciting inside the building. I spent hours with its only resident, Otto Redlin. This was in the early 1970s, and Otto was already seventy-six, so I suppose he too is no longer around. The hotel had 418 rooms, but now it looks so small that I cannot imagine how that was ever possible. “Ich bin der älteste Bundesangestellte,” he always used to say: I am the oldest federal employee. His wife was dead and he lived, as I can still remember, in Room 31. I have a photograph of him sitting at one of the empty tables, which were neatly laid with tablecloths, in an empty salon. Sofas, lots of chairs and barstools that no one sat on anymore. We had lit the chandeliers for the photograph, and they reflected back at us, multiplied in a huge mirror in which I am just about visible behind what looks like a monstrous Chinese vase. Downstairs somewhere, there was a wooden platform that tourists could stand on and see all the way to Vladivostok. Not far away was the ruin of the Bayerischer Hof which had recently been demolished. I made a note in my diary back then: “. . . a few laborers are working on the demolition, golden Germanic mosaics thunder down into the mud. I wipe one of them clean with a little rainwater and read: Deutsche Frauen, Deutsche Treue, Deutscher Wein, Deutscher Sang Sollen In Der Welt Behalten Ihren Alten Schönen Klang.1 Not in this place, not anymore, I think. The things on the ground were once attached to something, but now are attached to nothing. Lonely toilet bowls, baths without taps, taps without baths, glasses from which no Breslauer, Nordhäuser or Cottbuser will ever flow again, everything, boots, dirndls, waiters, menus, ashtrays, trumpets, all crushed, pulverized and taken up into Heaven, gone forever. The small and rather modest café next door has two menus in the window, perhaps in remembrance. ‘1940’ is written at the top, followed by a list of what some Messerschmitt pilot or holder of the Knight’s Cross, killed in action long ago, might have eaten on that day: Geschmortes Kalbsherz, Westmoreland, mit Spinat und Schwenkkartoffeln (100 Gramm Fleischmarke und 10 Gramm Fettmarke, 1 Mark 65). Did he drink the 1938 Niersteiner Spiegelberg with his meal, as suggested? The café itself is closed, the chairs are covered with dust and arranged as though the last customers have just left for the front, but maybe,” I wrote at the time, “they will return and everything will begin all over again.”
Now, thirty years later, I no longer think that. I have been here too often and for too long, and know that whatever might begin anew in this place, it can never be the same. And yet, even now, the date on that menu, the unfortunate year of 1940, is forcing me back to my own past. I do not want to linger on this for too long, but even though my life began seven years before that date, I am unable to explain myself to myself without thinking of 1940, if only because the start of the war—which will be over and done with only when everyone who remembers something about it is dead—seems to have erased the first seven years of my life, aided by something I discovered only recently.
I am going to have to take a couple of different detours at the same time now, which is impossible in real life, but possible on paper, which is probably the reason I became a writer.
The first of these detours has to do with being a writer. There is a famous controversy between the novelist Proust and the critic and essayist Sainte-Beuve, which boils down to the latter believing that we should know as much as possible about a writer’s life—his attitudes and opinions, his character, his relation to and relationships with women, money, politics—while Proust thought it should all be about the books, and only the books, and never about the biography. Proust also believed that writers and poets never truly express themselves in conversation, so that too is meaningless in comparison with what an author writes, because then he is drawing on a completely different, much deeper layer of his personality, one that is often hidden even from himself, through which he wanders like an explorer, returning with treasures that should not be wasted on a superficial conversation. This implies a degree of mystery and maybe also isolation, which Proust, who spent much of his life wearing the mask of the worldly sophisticate and who, judging by his magnificent dialogue, must in fact have been a masterful conversationalist, saw as a prerequisite for a life of writing. Now I cannot compare myself to Proust, but in this respect I am most definitely a Proustian: in the shameless showcase culture we live in—perhaps less so in Germany than in the Netherlands or in America—it seems that private life has to be played out in public. Writers become their own public performance and are required to remain in character. We know their personas better than their books, because their writing can never capture them as well as an interviewer does. The hidden core of their being is no longer mysteriously transformed into the wondrous and sacred lies of fiction, but flows unfermented from the glass screen into a thousand living rooms of people who would never, and will never, read their books. The point of this entire detour is to say that I think we can speak about ourselves only in moderation. And yet, in the more elevated form of conversation that is a speech, I cannot escape doing so.
And this brings me to the second detour, which is about my peculiar lack of memory. Nabokov was able to command his memory to speak—Speak, Memory is after all an imperative, or at least an entreaty expressed in the imperative form—but such a command has not the slightest effect on me: my memory simply will not respond. Augustine talked about memory palaces through which we might wander and find all sorts of treasures; for me, that palace remains closed. I cannot even enter the building. One of the key moments in Proust’s great novel occurs when he dips a certain cake in his tea. At that same moment, to remain with Augustine’s analogy, the door of a room in the palace flies open. Nabokov writes in his last great novel, Ada, that he is against the idea of the mémoire involontaire, the involuntary memory: the doors of the palace must be forced open; remembering is an act and we need to work to achieve it. But that suggestion does not work for me either: scraps, shadows, fragments are all that I can make out through the dirty and broken windows of my palazzo, which also appears to be situated in a part of the world where it is always twilight.
In my simplicity, I have always believed and maintained that this is a result of the thunderous clap of the first day of war, its deafening effect extending both forwards and backwards, creating a hole into which children’s books, friends, teachers have been sucked, namelessly. However, I recently discovered that perhaps the Heinkels and the Stukas of those early days and the sight of Rotterdam burning on the distant horizon were not the only causes. At the end of October, an exhibition about my life and work opened in The Hague, the city where I was born. This also involved, much against my will, a search for my past, undertaken by a very thorough investigator, who soon discovered that during the years of crisis before the war—I was born in ’33—we moved within the city no fewer than seven times. My mother, who is still alive—she is eighty-seven—denied this vehemently, but she had to give in when she saw the copies of the official registration documents. This was followed by the war years, chaos, my parents’ divorce, evacuation, the winter of starvation, my father’s death in a British bombing raid: that, in short, is how to lock the doors of a palace. Later, when I gained a degree of control over my life, I added a new wing to which I have access—life, and therefore writing, would have been impossible otherwise—but the main building remains closed. I will never, like Borges, be able to say which books I read as a child in my father’s library or, like Proust, be able to write about my long conversations with my grandmother or, like Nabokov, hilariously reveal the eccentricities of my Swiss-French governess. This is not only because my father had no library, because both of my grandmothers died before I had a chance to know them, or because the woman who could have been described as a governess only if you were being exceptionally charitable had run off with my father in the middle of the war, but also, and primarily, because something had been wiped out, radically and permanently, by a destructive external force, leaving me with nothing.
I am not saying this because I wish to elicit even an ounce of sympathy, as I have no need for sympathy. It gave me the opportunity to invent a life for myself by travelling and by thinking. More than that, it left me with a fascination with the past, with disappearance, with transience, with memories and ruins, with antiquity, with everything that can be summarized under the heading of “history.” And I have related this history—because even those personal stories that make up only a very small part of history are still entitled to be called history—in order to explain, not so much to you as to myself, why this city has fascinated me inordinately for such a long time. I feel that here, on an infinitely larger scale, and with horrifying consequences for the fates of so many people, somehow the same has happened as happened to me, that the ruins and the gaps I encountered here that first time had something to tell me that I did not yet truly understand. That something was, at first, nothing. All of those gaps, those lacunae, those absences wanted to speak to me about nothingness, about destruction, which in both German (Vernichtung) and Dutch (vernietiging) is founded on the notion of turning something into nothing, the negative, negation, nicht, niet, not, a city become nothing. This emptiness and absence resulted from the actions of a man who, back in the 1920s, wrote a book that loudly and clearly proclaimed a program: the Vernichtung of a Volk. Of all the Berliner Lektionen I have read—and this is not about aesthetics, but about historical essence—I found Daniel Libeskind’s the most effective and the most affecting, if I may use those two words, which do not always belong together. He constructed his thoughts and his museum around the site of that nothing, the something missing, the present absence. A place for building nothing is something that only art can create, but the power of the constructed nothing resides precisely in what is not there—and what is not there is what was there. What was once present is commemorated in the intangible absence. This is something we can speak of only hesitantly, because it is all so mysterious.
Frederick I of Prussia, Charlottenburger Tor, West Berlin
During my first visit to Berlin, I was not yet capable of thinking in this way. Reality had continued to write that man’s book, and it resembled an orgy of destruction, the morning after the dance of death. You could still taste the war and it seemed like a continuation of what I had seen and heard as a child. Yet at the same time a new element had been added, a crack that ran through the world and which was more visible here than anywhere else, like a heart attack turned to stone, as though once again Berlin had the task of demonstrating something to the world, the logical conclusion of Yalta, which was itself the logical conclusion of the desire for destruction that had begun in this place. I made my journey with two older friends who had both been in Dachau, which added to the apocalyptic effect of those first experiences, along with the nuclear threat—which now seems to have been so carelessly forgotten—that was hanging over our heads like a plague cloud.
No, the 1950s and early ’60s were perhaps not the best time to be young. I had seen Budapest in 1956, so I already knew what impotence and betrayal were. Now I was seeing, in its German form, the practice of that doctrine to which so many of my friends still clung, full of hope. So I was immersed in a chaos of emotions and experiences that was fortunately eased by hard-boiled concentration-camp humor, and the amazing ways my travelling companions had found to deal with their memories. Perhaps it will never again happen that two such different social and political philosophies are put into practice in one language, not merely in the forms they have always assumed—pamphlet, essay, newspaper article—but also in the wording of laws, regulations, verdicts, government policy statements, orders to shoot, warnings, editorials in the party newspaper, secret reports. The shared, inherited language became a divided language, another language developed out of the same language, the language became bilingual, exposing its fundamental ambiguity, a lesson for later ages. The philosophy that enabled people to resist one dictatorship, risking their lives, mercilessly steered them towards another dictatorship. The heroes of one age became the culprits of another, and in order to justify themselves they invented a plausibility that was valid nowhere else. Two countries that could not physically distance themselves from each other entrenched themselves, and it would later require huge mental exertion to recapture every intellectual millimeter they had ceded.
I could perhaps sense all of this back then, but not yet contemplate it; I was too busy thinking about the rest of the world. My first travels, when I was about eighteen, took me to the North, to countries of great brightness, but also of doubt and melancholy, that monstrous alliance of clarity and angst that dominates the films of Ingmar Bergman and which preoccupied me at the time. But my own terrain was the South, the Mediterranean, Provence, the theatricality of Italy, the dazzling radiance of the Spanish plateau, where the light conjures up fata morganas that allow the imagination to run riot, and which seemed capable of driving away the darkness of those post-war years. The Netherlands was then, like Germany, a place without color; I remember those years as predominantly grey. On my way back from that first hitchhiking trip to the far North, I had traveled through Germany for the first time. The scraps that my faulty memory throws me reveal broken roads, whole neighborhoods collapsed, the wanton, unimaginative uniformity of reconstruction, and when I focus more sharply I can see and hear shunting locomotives and a deserted railway yard at night, as I bid a dramatic farewell to someone, while a voice from a loudspeaker makes incomprehensible announcements in that language that I have not yet become accustomed to, a language that refuses to resemble itself, that does not want to be the same language as the language of the poems of Goethe and Rilke that I studied at school.
My first novel was published in the Netherlands not long after that, probably far too soon. Its illusionism was far removed from the razor-sharp realism that was the norm in those post-war years. But in that book I had said all that I had to say. I was suddenly a writer because I had had a book published, but I had become one in the same way as a swan is born, or a bat, without expressing any explicit desire. Swans and bats have an easier life in that respect—they already have the Kantian a priori in their wings—but I had no other option than to set off travelling again with the aim of gaining the knowledge required by this peculiar career that had chosen me, a career that I tried to shake off in my new novel by having the main character, who was of course a writer, commit suicide, even if only, I think in retrospect, so that I would not have to do it myself. And so I travelled, the surviving doppelgänger of my own self, to Bolivia and Mali, to Colombia and Iran and all those countries in the so-called Third World, where I found a deformed mirror image of my own world, in military dictatorships and pseudo-democracies and all those other variants that, in one way or another, belonged to the same family as the vast schism that divided Europe and Germany. That schism found its perfect metaphorical expression in the fission of the atomic bomb, devised by the iconography of science to keep fear alive and so confirm the systems that made all of us, each with our own slogans and lies, our own scholastic rhetoric and exorcism, merely bit-part players in an absurdist theater, players who thought they were just actors, until the year when the violent fiction exploded and the cards of appearance and reality were reshuffled, and our maps changed along with them. Faites vos jeux! Rien ne va plus! One of the legs of the card table upon which the great game was played stood in Berlin, where I was living at the time, because the D.A.A.D. had invited me to spend a year there.
That year was 1989, and I experienced everything that happened that year not just as a casual visitor, but as a resident of Berlin. I may not have been a German, but I was certainly a European, and it was not just a country that was being welded back together again, but, all being well, an entire continent. Once, in 1962, when Germany was again responsible for 45% of Europe’s annual production, I had seen Adenauer and de Gaulle standing on a balcony in Stuttgart, a strange couple, older than the century itself. De Gaulle had raised those peculiar long arms in the air and cried out his heavily accented declaration of Franco–German friendship, “EZ LEBBE DOIZLANT! EZ LEBBE DIE DOITZFRANZÖZISCHE VROINDZAVT!” He had started work on that great construction from the Atlantic to the Urals—Willy Brandt would kneel in Warsaw on one of the stops on the journey, and later Mitterrand and Kohl would stand hand in hand on the battlefield of Verdun in an attempt to bury the war for good. But old fears are not so easily buried, not in Moscow, not in Paris, and not in London, let alone in those other, smaller countries that lie in the shadow of that one big empire in the middle. History may perform a few lightning-fast pirouettes and pull a fait accompli out of its hat, but the ancient specter of the Gleichgewicht continues to trouble the age-old family of Europe. The historical imperative is accepted as though by a class of obedient Marxists sitting at their school desks, but the old distrust shimmers in the memoirs of both Mitterrand and Thatcher. England, France, Germany and Russia sit in their theater boxes like jealous old actresses and keep an eye on one another: Who is flapping her fan too much? Who is spending too much time with whom? Who has been given the most flowers? Who is going to play the lead? Why is she being so nice to that insignificant supporting player? Why was I not invited? Intrigue and suspicion in Theatre Europa. Behind a semblance of absence, the memory of nations is an ancient, viscous mass, and one question was on everyone’s mind at the time, and by everyone I perhaps mean the Germans themselves most of all: What kind of country are we becoming? Students at my readings would ask, “Aren’t you frightened of us?” No, I wasn’t, but I was concerned that they thought I should be, as though they still did not trust their own country.
The historical imperative is a religious idea that I am unable to believe in. There are always too many imponderables, too many irrationalities, fanatics, starry-eyed idealists, rabid dogs darting out of their kennels. They operate within a specific territory, but no one can be certain of anything in a world that, intellectually and materially, is no longer in synch, where the power of destruction is already almost within the reach of individuals, and the death of as many other people as possible has become one of the cheapest commodities. At the end of a saeculum horribilis, the prevailing mood is one of disquiet, not unlike the mood at the end of the first millennium, as described in the writings of the Benedictine monk Raoul Glauber, a tale of plague and famine and cannibalism that makes the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch look like happy fantasies. When you read his words, you feel inclined to think that we have made progress over the past one thousand years, and that, of course, is true. And yet, there is poison gas hidden in Iraq, throats cut in Algeria, mass slaughter in Rwanda and in Europe (so much closer to home), and landmines in Cambodia. None of this seems like a world that has learned its lesson from the wars that began on this continent in this century and which, as Václav Havel recently calculated for us, have cost over two hundred million lives. It is these absent ones who haunt the space around us. Their names, at least the ones we know, are on monuments from Sicily to Stavanger, from Athens to Kaliningrad, but the world seems able to live with their absence. Maybe this is the only way, but it also means that the world could probably manage just as well without us too.
Once again, no, twice again, to Berlin. After 1989, I went away and came back again. I added to my notes on Berlin, and travelled through East and West, which made my notes more like notes on Germany, rather than just Berlin. I read about the history, which meant reading lots of things I had not known about before, and made new friends, which is not so easy at my age. In short, I felt comfortable in Berlin and I frequently returned in the following years. And yet there were still things that surprised me. I may not believe in the historical imperative, but I do believe in a vague notion of the relative density of countries and a certain natural way of the world. It seemed “natural,” for example, that Germany should once again become one country—just as it seemed natural that this would require a great deal of effort. It seemed equally natural that Berlin would become the capital city of that one country, and that the united Germany, which had developed into a modern European democracy over the past fifty years and which, as evidenced by the never-ending stream of publications, had focused on its ill-fated past by means of increasingly intense commemoration, would now take up its place among the other countries of Europe. But in Germany itself I heard different voices, voices that ridiculed the new German citizens, who of course had something to say in response, and voices that attempted to resist the relative density of their own country by refusing to send soldiers on European and other peace missions. This reluctance elicited the following comment from one of my more bitter compatriots: “It’s always the same with them—when you don’t invite them, they come anyway, but when you ask them to take part, they don’t turn up.”
East Berlin, 1990
Meanwhile, in Germany I was held responsible for tomato growing in the Netherlands, for the behavior of our Dutch football fans, who clearly represent the most intelligent element of every nation, and for every survey in which yet more half-baked sociologists secured their positions for the next few years by asking a bunch of teenagers what they thought about Germans, while in my own country—which has never entirely come to terms with its colonial past—I was suddenly nominated as an expert on Germany. That meant that I was required to debate on television whenever something happened in Germany that also happens in other European countries, but which has a different impact there, because of the country’s difficult past and also because of the laziness of the media.
It was a Dutch friend—Willem Leonard Brugsma—who took me to Germany for the first time. Brugsma was arrested by the Gestapo as a young member of the Resistance in Paris, and was interned in Natzweiler and in Dachau for a number of years. He died a few weeks ago, and at his funeral I recalled memories of the past, of that emotionally charged first trip to Germany, which had been so astounding for me because he harbored no resentment. The same man who could tell horrific tales about his time in the camps, a big man who weighed only forty-five kilos when he was liberated, was a passionate advocate of German Unity, not, as people sometimes cynically say, in order to render Germany harmless by tying it to Europe, but because he believed that one Germany belonged in one Europe. I am mentioning this now because such voices appear to be increasingly rare in Germany. Lately, all we seem to have heard from that country are sounds of infinite fatigue, lamentation and defeatist complaint emanating from the depths of the sacred piggy bank.
Suddenly it is no longer about ideas, but only about money; not about one of the greatest adventures in European history, but about fear of the neighbors who have been buying things on credit from the grocer; not about the Europe of Erasmus and Voltaire, of Tolstoy and Thomas Mann, of Rembrandt and Botticelli, of Hegel and Hume. No, it is about much greater faceless figures, like 3 point 0, 3 point 1, and the satanic 3 point 2, which the politicians hide behind, since for reasons of their own they do not want Europe, or not yet, or not ever. Any child can understand, and certainly in this city every child understands, that there have to be criteria, but taking the whole idea of Europe, a subject about which many of the same people have waxed lyrical for years, and reducing it to abstractions following a decimal point, has meant employing the demagogy of common sense to bury the citizens’ enthusiasm under ashes. Ash is not a vital principle, but it fits very well with the lamentation I just mentioned. This has always been a dangerous continent. It has long been after its own blood, because of land, because of dynasties, because of religion and because of colonies. All by itself, it came up with both of the ideologies that made this century the most disastrous in history, a twin ideological catastrophe from which America rescued us not once, but twice. Perhaps we should not count on a third time. I know that the Europe of the single currency is a massive, extremely complex political and economic maneuver that scares many people. I also know that political unification is limping behind like an unhappy child, hampered by multiple languages, ineradicable national ambitions and a parliament that is pampered, impotent and often invisible. But that is precisely the challenge. Once, for better or for worse, this continent discovered the rest of the world. If the Europeans back then had spent as much time ruminating as these Europeans now seem to require, everyone would have stayed at home. But then there never would have been a piece of the Wall standing in Los Angeles either.
December 1997
Potsdamer Platz, 1997
1 May the ancient and beautiful melodies of German women, German constancy, German wine and German song resonate throughout the world.