In Europe (103 page)

I had been introduced to Teresa by a mutual acquaintance; now she sits a bit uneasily in the hotel lobby, it's still hard for her to talk about it. Her first husband was tortured: British soldiers blindfolded him and put him in a helicopter, flew around and then threw him out, two metres above the ground. A joke. It led to a ruling against Great Britain by the European Court of Human Rights. Teresa herself was detained for a week, in total darkness, interrogated at the strangest hours, without any charges pressed. ‘When I came out, I was completely disoriented.’ That was only two years ago.

In 1976, a spontaneous peace movement arose among the women of Belfast; the two initiators, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, actually won the Nobel Prize. ‘I knew both of them well. I sympathised with their idea completely, but of course all those wonderful meetings didn't work. After all, it wasn't about a personal conflict between Catholics and Protestants. It was about a Northern Irish government that treated us like trash, simply because we were Catholic.’ According to her, that is what finally put an end to the women's peace movement as well.

Now the thaw has truly begun. The police stations are still electronic fortresses, but the armoured cars are off the streets and the men of the
IRA are gradually coming out of prison and out of hiding. Teresa knows quite a few of them, they are all thirty-five or forty years old by now. ‘Some of them were always on the run, had all kinds of girlfriends, marriages fell apart. Most of them have spent a good part of their lives in prison. They were already falling behind when the civil war started, and now it's even worse. What's more, today we have a completely different Northern Ireland from when they went into prison. That whole generation has to find its way back to a normal life.’

Teresa was divorced, and recently remarried. ‘When I go out these days, I'm still afraid. But then, so many women have led a life like mine.’

Lost lives. Jean McConville's children never stopped looking for her. This spring, the IRA finally admitted that she had been murdered. In June 1999, a search began of the beach at Templetown to recover her remains. The McConville children, adults by then, gathered in the dunes and watched as policemen dug a huge L-shaped hole behind flapping plastic curtains, then systematically dug up the rest of the beach. ‘Finding her body would bring us back together again as a family,’ Helen McConville, the eldest daughter, says. ‘This is destroying us.’ A reporter from the
Independent
wrote: ‘One of Jean McConville's daughters walked across the car park, her eyes fixed on the ground, full of sleeplessness and worry, an attitude of pain and despair. She walked to a car in which other members of the family were sitting. The digging was over for the day, and there was little reason to stay any longer, but the family remained, maintaining their endless wake for reasons deeper than any logic …’

Jean McConville's remains were finally found in summer 2003. For the IRA, her death had been merely a working accident: she had been interrogated with a plastic bag over her head, and had suffocated.

‘
FAMILY,’ MY GERMAN FRIENDS TELL ME, ‘FOR US IT WAS ALWAYS
family ties that determined the choices we made in life.’

There are eight of us at the table, it's a chance get-together, and I cannot remember how we hit on the subject. ‘I was born and raised in Wuppertal,’ the woman across the table from me says. ‘But only because my mother was bombed out of her house in Berlin while she was still pregnant, and the only thing she could think of was that she had family there somewhere. That's how I became a real
Wessi
.’

‘With my mother, it was completely the other way around,’ says the woman next to her, who comes from the former DDR. ‘She was pregnant too, my father was in the army, and he had family in Rostock. That's how I ended up there.’

Her husband: ‘Almost all of us have a story like that.’

The woman beside me starts talking about the building of the Berlin Wall. ‘I'll never forget it. 13 August, 1961. I was eighteen. I was standing there in Oranienburger Strasse when workers began rolling out the barbed wire and throwing up a wall. Meanwhile, the most amazing things were happening. It's been described so many times, but I saw it with my own eyes: how two friends were standing on the east side, they said goodbye, one of them took a running jump over the wall into the West, the other one started a life in the East. A
Wessi
and an
Ossi
, and no doubt it was years before they saw each other again.’

She herself had felt absolutely no urge to jump over the low wall; there was no way she would have left her mother behind. ‘Everyone around me had been thinking about it for a long time, most of them had already decided what they would do even before they started building
the wall. My older brother chose to go to the West, he was seventeen, and he left as soon as he'd finished his final exams. My closest girlfriend went too, suddenly she was gone, without a word. That was terrible. Now she lives in Nancy, she married a Frenchman.’ She herself met a Pole, and these days she lives in Warsaw.

Everyone at the table starts talking at the same time. ‘Yes, that's exactly the way it was at first, in the East: as far as you knew, you were making a decision for the rest of your life, for ever.’

‘There was hardly a German family that didn't have brothers or sisters, grandfathers and grandmothers, nieces and nephews on the other side.’

‘You weren't even allowed to cross the border for your parent's funeral.’

‘It was only in the 1970s that
Wessis
were first allowed to travel to the East, every now and then. Finally you saw the brothers, uncles, nieces and nephews who you'd been talking about and writing to so much.’

‘And then it turned out that you really didn't have anything to say to each other.’

Berlin, 9 November, 1999. In the dilapidated head offices of the former national bank of the DDR, just off Unter den Linden, the tenth anniversary of the fall of the wall is being commemorated by an unusual concert: the favourite music of both former chancellor Helmut Kohl and former DDR leader Erich Honecker. We listen to the Hennigdorf brass ensemble (‘My Way’), the Berliner Schalmeienexpress (stalwart DDR marches) and the Generation Berlin Orchestra with a special piece composed for the opening of a lignite mine. Between the pieces of music, someone reads out texts written by Kohl and letters from Honecker. The arches of the great hall of the old bank have been patched with bare brick, there are huge holes where the proletarian art once hung, the rain rattles on the roof and drips through the ceiling. The audience, mostly young people and artists, listens intently.

A record player starts up with the song ‘Ein Augenblick der Ewigkeit’, a hit from the old DDR radio programme
Stunde der Melodie
. The evening's host reads a letter, written to Honecker when he was in prison. ‘Dear Mr Honecker, thank you very much for the lovely music we were able to listen to for thirty years, thanks to you.’ Outside, the great celebration is being skilfully stage-managed by the new Germany: the Brandenburg
Gate glistens in a firmament of television camera lamps, there are three police cars on every corner, and through it all the Berliners walk in the rain, drinking beer and being mostly silent.

Later, for no real reason, I stroll over to the playground close to Hotel Adlon. There is no one there. I sit down on a bench. Pop music is blasting in the distance, to the left are the bright lights of the new Potsdamer Platz, to the right the fireworks. Beneath the grass and the climbing frame lies the bunker, forgotten now. Four mentally handicapped people are taking the S-Bahn home, accompanied by their supervisor. They cheer at every illuminated glass palace they pass, sing along with every electronic peep, admire the new glass dome of the Reichstag as though it were a firework display. They are the only ones who view the new Berlin with unadulterated pleasure, ten years after the collapse of the wall.

The next morning Alexanderplatz reeks of old-fashioned DDR coal. The smoke is coming from the chimney of a wooden caravan. On the door is a sign: ‘SIND IM WESTEN’. In front of it are racks of cards on which all passers-by are invited to write down their thoughts and wishes concerning the 9 November celebrations. Dozens of people stop to read. ‘It went too fast,’ someone has written. ‘And the thinking is still going too fast.’ Someone else writes: ‘I wish for better education and less violence. Oh, if only we were back in the DDR!’ ‘I certainly wish YOU were!’ someone else has written angrily beside it.

Big words like ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘heroism’ are used at all the commemorative meetings, and famous names are dropped: Helmut Kohl, George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev. But the ones who actually razed the wall were the people of Berlin themselves, and ten years later their feelings are a good deal more complicated. Their thoughts hang in the rain on Alexanderplatz, on all those cards: ‘We must learn from each other, really learn. Not accuse, not exaggerate.’ And: ‘From the terror of the Stasi to the terror of consumption. Congratulations,
Ossis
!’ And: ‘The DDR took my youth, and it took other people's lives. Only after turning fifty am I allowed to see the world.’ And: ‘I want a dog and a house, and I want my parents to get back together, and a bicycle and an electric toothbrush, and I can't say much about when the wall fell, because I was only three then.’

What is left of the barrier that once divided this town? Along Bernauer Strasse, the last remains of the wall have been elevated to the status of monument. Aficionados can still hear the linguistic differences between West and East Berlin: forty years is apparently enough time to develop a separate dialect. The last
Goldene Hausnummern
– the DDR insignias for model tenants – are being unscrewed from the shabby doors. But the cheerful little DDR man on the traffic lights is allowed to stay, he walks straight ahead through red and green, nobody pays him any attention.

I spend an afternoon with Walter Nowojski, retired DDR journalist, radio and television programme maker, editor-in-chief of the Writers’ Union journal and editor of the diaries of Victor Klemperer. He got to know the old professor back in 1952, as a student in Berlin. Klemperer, he tells me, was a cult figure even then, the only one in the entire DDR who had something to say. ‘His lectures were real happenings. He was old and sick, he talked mostly about eighteenth century French literature, but the auditorium was always packed. His book about the language of the Nazis,
LTI: Lingua Tertu Imperu
(1947), made a deep impression in the DDR. Everything in our minds was contaminated, we knew that, it was all old Nazi garbage. What he carried in his mind, though, was an almost forgotten treasure: the German-Jewish intellectual tradition, of which he was one of the last great representatives. When he began talking we would cling to every word, in complete silence, for an hour and a half.’

It was not until 1978 that Nowojski first heard about the existence of Klemperer's diaries. Rumour had it that they were being kept in the municipal archives in Dresden. He took the train the very next day, and from that moment he spent almost all his free time on the project, in total fascination. It proved to be a Herculean task: the war diaries in particular turned out to be full of errata, misspelled names, all kinds of things. ‘Klemperer was in a special house for Jews, he barely went outside at all, he heard everything at second hand. But at the same time, in that closed house, he was often better informed than the general population. And he knew what to write down, which is another thing that makes his diaries so fascinating. He made notes about how people in the street greeted him, as a Jew, about what people ate, the rumours about the camps, everything. As a historian he had an unerring sense for the details
that could be important later on. Some of the bathing resorts on the Baltic had signs saying ‘JUDENFREI’. Was that in 1938? No, it was in 1924! Everyone has forgotten that, we only know about it thanks to Klemperer. He did the same thing with the language, with all those buzzwords he documented:
Weltjuden
,
volksnah
,
volksfremd
,
Staatsakt
. For me, as a thirteen-year-old in 1938, the word
fanatisch
had a very positive connotation. Klemperer documented that. And the diaries show that he continued his collection during the DDR period.
Kämpferisch
,
gigantisch
, he was able to put together a whole dictionary again, just like that.’

How could an old man like Klemperer have such a productive life in claustrophobic East Germany? ‘It's very simple, really: he had a great sense of urgency. Between 1933–46, for thirteen of the most fertile years of his life, he had been unable to do a thing. In the West he would have been put out to pasture. In the DDR, though, they regarded him as a celebrity, they made him a professor at Humboldt University, just what he had always dreamed of.’

That feeling is one that Nowojski, a celebrated literary critic in the DDR, experienced for years himself. ‘I was at the centre of the system, but from 1978 I still worked each and every evening on Klemperer's diaries. I knew exactly how the DDR censors worked. I led a schizophrenic existence: propagating the official literature by day, working by night on Klemperer, a set of volumes which I knew would never be published here, for a host of political reasons. But I couldn't leave it alone, I couldn't stop, I was too enthusiastic.’