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Into the heart of Greene-land on a journey without maps
2 October 1990
Don’t worry, people said, they all speak English. They don’t. The foreign language taught in East German schools for the past 45 years is Russian, so I had to rely on what German I could muster. I wanted to ask people for their feelings about October 3, the day when the two Germanies unite. Would it be a day of happiness or sadness? Thanks to Beethoven’s Ninth I knew the word Freude from Schiller’s Ode to Joy. Then, from the only lines of German poetry I know by heart, Heine’s Die Lorelei, I remembered the word for sad, traurig: ‘I don’t know why I should feel so sad, but there’s a fairy-tale from the olden days that I can’t get out of my mind.’ So, was it to be a day of Schiller or of Heine, Freude and all men as brothers, or Traurigkeit and a fairy-tale from the olden days?
Fifty-fifty, said an East Berlin taxi-driver. Eighty per cent Freude, 20 per cent traurig, said the driver in Chemnitz. There are rioters in the streets who are 100 per centers against unification, but all the people I spoke to had, for various reasons, feelings that were at least slightly mixed.
I asked an East Berliner I was sharing a restaurant table with, when was the first time he ever visited West Berlin? November 10, he said, the day after the wall came down. What had he felt? ‘Like nothing else,’ he said in English. ‘Impossible to describe. I can’t describe it in English. I can’t describe it in German.’
The 50-50 taxi-driver has spent three years studying economics, accountancy and business studies. Now he’ll have to forget the whole lot and start over again. Was that why he was 50 per cent traurig? No, he said in a loud voice. Then after a long pause he murmured ‘I have known East Germany for 27 years, all my life. October 3 will be like going abroad and knowing that you’ll never come home. East Germany may not be a good country but it is my country.’ When I came to pay him I saw that he had tears in his eyes.
If you want a real arsehole of a town then go to Chemnitz, I had been told in London by an East German expert who hadn’t himself been to the town. Chemnitz is in the Erzgebirge, the region in the south bordering Czechoslovakia. Erzgebirge means the Ore Mountains and the ore is what the industrial town of ‘Smokey Chemnitz’ was built on.
When I got off the train the first thing I noticed was the acrid smell in the air. A nostalgic smell because (though positively bracing compared with the last killer London pea-souper of 1962), it was enough to bring back the smell of any major British industrial town before the Clean Air Act began to take effect. In appearance Chemnitz, like other places in East Germany, with its grottiness, run-downness, its need of a few coats of paint and a thorough overhaul, its greyness, its Graham Greeneness, its drabness, all took me back further still to the England of the immediate post-war years.
Chemnitz was founded in 1136 and bore the name for more than eight centuries. Then in 1953, in commemoration of the 135th anniversary of the birth and the 70th anniversary of the death of the man the official Guide to East Germany calls ‘the great son of the German people,’ Chemnitz became Karl-Marx-Stadt. In April this year there was a plebiscite and they decided it was called Chemnitz after all.
A West German television programme decided to record the changeover. The idea was to show a Karl-Marx-Stadt sign being taken down and a Chemnitz one replacing it. The trouble was that by the time they got there all the Karl Marx signs had gone for souvenirs. The answer was to have a new Karl-Marx-Stadt sign painted, but before the cameras were in position the fake Karl-Marx-Stadt sign had been nicked.
Throughout the GDR every town has its Karl Marx Platz or Strasse or Allee, with Engels, Liebknecht and Ernst Thalmann not far behind. In the official Guide to the GDR, which is only a few months old, numerals in the text refer you to the street maps. There are no street maps. The Guide blandly explains that ‘for technical reasons it was not possible to reproduce the maps in this edition.’ The technical reasons are obvious enough. Who knows what the streets will be called in a few months’ time? And it’s not just the names of streets and towns that are changing but the name of the country.
My only previous visit to East Germany was in 1964. At the border, teams of uniformed men with side-arms barked and shouted and checked passports and then checked them again and then once more. My diary records that it was intimidating, and when the train arrived in West Berlin there was a palpable feeling of relief in the compartment.
On the train last week a West German official checked passports at the border with Holland. It was only when we came to Magdeburg some hours later that I realised that we had been in East Germany for the last 30 miles, ever since the border town of Helmstedt. Except that Helmstedt is no longer a border town. There’s no border. It’s an idea that is not hard to grasp in the abstract, but not so easy to take in in practice, especially when it’s in defiance of all existing maps.
Magdeburg was a Krupp armaments town that was 90 per cent destroyed by bombing in the second world war. Now it’s a rebuilt industrial city with works which are (for the time being) named after Karl Marx, Ernst Thalmann, Karl Liebknecht and other socialist heroes, but what Magdeburg is best known for is the sphere with which in 1654 Otto von Guericke demonstrated the power of the vacuum. He pumped the air out of two copper hemispheres and 16 horses couldn’t pull them apart.
The Magdeburg sphere seemed an apt symbol of the divided/united nation, but I soon found that at the moment everything in Germany can bear any weight of symbolism. From the train window I saw a field of cows all facing west, which seemed pretty symbolic, as did the rows of poplars all leaning to the east. The fact that the prevailing wind was blowing at the time merely emphasised the point. If a prevailing wind blowing from the west isn’t symbolic, then I don’t know what is.
Then I thought of Humpty Dumpty. This time it’s the wall that has had a great fall, but will all the king’s horses and all the king’s men be able to put Germany together again? There’s a lot of resistance to the idea on both sides of what used to be the border. A poll in Der Spiegel last week showed that nearly a third of West Germans are against unification. In Berlin I saw a T-shirt bearing the words Ick will meine Mauer wieder ham! which is Berlin slang for ‘I want my wall back!’
People had got used to the wall. They hated it but had learned to live with it. Now, after the wild excitement of November 9 when the wall came tumbling down, Germans on both sides have woken up with a mother and a father of a Katzenjammer, a national hangover on a scale unknown since 1945. Unemployment, immigration, the infrastructure, bankruptcies, corruption, pollution, morale, law and order, what to do about the Stasi and its files the problems are endless and intractable. But the wall had to come down.
Even with a British passport and a visa, going through Checkpoint Charlie with its searchlights and dogs and thugs with guns had been a frightening experience. Now it’s a spooky one. I have never before been in a place where I felt I was surrounded by ghosts. People walk nervously through the deserted hundred yards or so of Checkpoint Charlie and its abandoned buildings, and take snapshots of one another when they’re safely through.
There’s a new sound in Berlin, the pick-pick-picking at the wall. If you want a symbol of the triumph of capitalism it’s all you need. You can buy bits of wall with stripes of graffiti on for a pound or so.
The buildings of East Germany are visibly crumbling, a result of years of neglect and shoddy construction in the first place. The wall is made of stronger stuff and it’s going to be a lot harder to take down than it was to put up.
Karl Marx is a different proposition, being made of bronze. There’s a huge one of him and Engels in Marx-Engels Forum, just off Unter den Linden. Also in East Berlin there’s Soviet sculptor N Tomski’s Lenin, 19 metres high in red Ukrainian granite, not as tall as Volgograd’s Guinness Book of Records pre-stressed concrete Motherhood, who stands at 270 feet in her socks, but still very big indeed. Pneumatic drills could demolish Lenin eventually, but more difficult will be Soviet sculptor Lev Kerbel’s Ernst Thalmann, at 14 metres slightly shorter than Lenin but much wider and, being bronze, of a harder material.
But the really big problem is Marx’s head in Chemnitz. This is also the work of Kerbel and it stands on a mighty plinth in front of a vast wall bearing not the words ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair’ but ‘Working Men of All Countries Unite!’ in German, English, French and Russian. Marx’s mighty brain and massive beard and shaggy mane require seven metres by seven metres by seven metres and must be the biggest piece of bronze in the world. In fairness it really is a very impressive piece of sculpture, but the people of Chemnitz can’t be blamed for wanting to be rid of it.
I asked the man sitting next to me in the theatre in Chemnitz what was to be done with Marx? He made a wipe-it-away gesture. But how? Who or what could move it? You couldn’t cut it up. You’d need a diamond just to scratch it. High explosives would take most of Chemnitz with it. All the acetylene torches in Germany might make some head-away, but the country has more urgent tasks, like clearing up the pollution of Bitterfeld, which may take hundreds of years. The only thing I can think of to do with Marx’s head is to put a huge bronze pair of pince-nez glasses on it and call it a statue of Brahms. I’m afraid this idea will be dismissed as facetious, but there’s really no feasible alternative.
I wanted to try my idea out on the man next to me in the theatre, but my German wasn’t up to it, and anyway the play was starting. It was William Shakespeare’s Mass fur Mass. I thought A Midsummer Night’s Dream would have been a more timely choice. Some consider ‘Exit, pursued by bear’ to be the Bard’s best stage direction, but I’ve always liked ‘Exit Wall.’ And Wall’s words before his Exit couldn’t fail to be a hit in Germany 1990. ‘Thus have I, Wall, my part discharg’ed so. And, being done, thus Wall away doth go.’
But from the first words of Measure for Measure it was clear the choice of play was inspired. It starts with the Duke divesting his power to the hypocrite Angelo. The whole play is about the use and abuse of power, about vice and virtue, about justice, punishment and mercy, about the conflict between abstract ideals and frail, venial human realities, and Claudio’s crime which is too much freedom. Every line is relevant to Germany today. It was a very Brechtian production, but as far as I could tell stuck closely to the original. Pompey was a superb clown all the actors were superb. In fact I think it was altogether the best Shakespeare production I have ever seen. I know nothing of the Chemnitz theatre company, but their programme is very adventurous (Brecht, Bulgakov, Ibsen, Cocteau, Animal Farm), and if the other plays in their repertory are up to this standard then they certainly deserve a worldwide audience. But, but . . . presumably they are state-subsidised, and predictions for the future of East German theatre are very gloomy: actors are already being laid off. And it was the actors and directors, the artists and musicians and writers, who did so much to bring down the communist regime. It would be tragic if, like Samson, they have brought down the temple on their own heads, but it may well prove so.
Collectivisation has been as much a disaster for the agriculture of East Germany as for its commerce and industry, but in the countryside you see isolated houses with small plots of land with one cow and a few hens or ducks or geese like a child’s idea of a farm. These people have no need of manuals on self-sufficiency or subsistence farming. Beside the railway lines there are tiny scraps of land which are assiduously cultivated, as are the flourishing areas of allotments outside each town, evidence of the survival of vigorous individual effort. Like the theatre they are at least something to give hope, as fragile but as indomitable as the plants that grow in the cracks of a city’s concrete.
The awful communist regime and the wreckage it has left behind are only too apparent and are in no danger of being forgotten, but East Germany is still a beautiful country and it has fine and brave people. The Stasi and the bureaucrats and apparatchiks deserve all the contempt and whatever else they get, but by the same token in the new Germany there must be support and admiration for the brave people who suffered under the monsters and who brought them down. The idea that the whole thing has been about bananas and Trabants and money must not take hold.
If it’s not impertinent for an outsider to say so, it would seem to me that Freude and Traurigkeit are both in order for October 3, but keep your fingers crossed.
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