Six years later: Sabbatical again, in German again. This time, home was the ancient university town of Göttingen, just a few miles from the fortified border. It was Deutschland ’83.
The Cold War was reaching its nadir. But we didn’t know that. The Soviet Union acquired a new leader that year: Not Mikhail Gorbachev, who emerged only in 1985, but the white-haired, vodka-faced Konstantin Chernenko—a Communist Party General Secretary from Central Casting. Ronald Reagan, on the American side, seemed like a countervailing stereotype: The rock-ribbed, bullet-headed, straight-talking cowboy. Against the fading glow of the Carter years, he had famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) branded the Soviet bloc an “evil empire.” The Soviets, in response, called him crazy, imperialistic, warmongering, etc. There was a lot of terrifying talk about fighting and winning a limited nuclear war; even more terrifying talk about the impossibility of any such thing. “War Games,” about a supercomputer that almost brings about Mutually Assured Destruction, was the hit film.
A crisis erupted almost as soon as we arrived in Göttingen, when Korean Air Lines flight 007 strayed into Soviet airspace and was shot down, with the loss of 269 lives. Then, at the end of October, the United States invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada (which had fallen under Cuban influence). NATO was deploying medium-range nukes across Western Europe, including the new “cruise” missiles, which flew so low they evaded radar and therefore constituted a dangerous “first-strike” capability. This was supposed to offset Soviet superiority in land forces, which, it was said, could get their tanks to the English Channel within a week of hostilities breaking out. They would have been outside our windows within an hour.
That November, my Dad and I re-visited Berlin, travelling this time by train. We again crossed the Wall, but via S-Bahn (subway)—you went through passport control at the FriedrichStrasse station—which was a lot less dramatic than my memories of the street-level checkpoint. It was, I remember, a sunny, pleasant day. We walked around, ate some mediocre pastries, and visited the Pergamon Museum, where we marvelled at the Blue Gate of Babylon. This is not a very interesting story, and that is why I tell it, because unfolding around us at exactly that time and focussed on exactly that place was one of the most dangerous episodes in the history of US-Soviet relations (although historians disagree about how dangerous): The confusion caused by NATO’s annual military exercise, code-named Able Archer, which was conducted in November ’83 under radio silence, and simulating a nuclear first-strike on the East. So large and realistic was this exercise that the Soviets were afraid it might not be one, and prepared to pull their own triggers. At the time, we had no idea; the crisis did not reach the media. But my Dad and I, that day in East Berlin, stood at a Ground Zero of the twentieth century.
In Göttingen, as the son of a visiting Herr Doktor Professor, I was enrolled in the city’s classiest Gymnasium (that is, a liberal-arts high school for students who will go on to university). Like everything important in West Germany, the school was named after the physicist Max Planck. It lay on the opposite side of the city’s historic centre from our apartment, which meant a pleasant brisk tramp for me through the cobbled Rathausplatz, with its colorful, seasonal markets, and past the city’s landmark medieval churches. My German I worked up enough to participate in school pretty well, although I had to sit out Latin class.
The Latin teacher also taught History. That autumn our topic was British North America and the Seven Years’ War; I assisted with the pronunciation of “Massachusets.” The students did not like this teacher: He had a little rectangular moustache, cringingly reminiscent of you-know-whom, and was rumoured to support the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU). In other words, a total Nazi. Yet they respected him. I remember he once lost his temper a bit because nobody could parse the name “Montréal”: “Lateinisch! Mons rex! Die Stadt heisst ‘Königsberg,’ Leute!” My new peers accepted this ruefully. He was smart, authoritative, and brooked no bullshit.
Which I mention because other teachers—at this lovely, privileged school, in a magnificently neoclassical nineteenth-century building, its interior focal point a wrought-iron-and-marble staircase crowned with a statue of Apollo—really, and regularly, and sort of professionally, did.
The German teacher, for one. Poor man! My fellow 15-yr-olds held him in anarchistic contempt. To me he seemed well-meaning and intelligent. But he was an understated presence, and on that basis they ignored him, talked constantly, wrestled, exchanged stationery missiles, etc. I don’t think I ever saw this man get angry. He had the patience of a Tibetan Lama. Only when things got really bad would he use his countermeasure, which was to push his spectacles up his nose, clear his throat, and say evenly to the malefactor of the moment: “Gehst du bitte mal raus [will you please leave the room for a moment]?” Repeated as necessary.
Eventually the kid would laughingly and obligingly leave, sit in the hall for a few proud minutes, then get called back in and carry on as before.
The lady in charge of math was competent and kind, but also weary and slovenly: Bird’s-nest hair, bag-lady fashion, and a general aura of unwashedness. Thus the students regularly made her classroom a chaos, too. A favourite move was to seize your book-satchel—they all carried these beautiful, expensive leather satchels—and hurl it, for no particular reason, against the classroom wall. The teacher would just go right on trying to do what she was trying to do. I was flabbergasted.
The popular teachers were those of: Music—a chill dude; Physics—a magnetic hippie; and Geography–a beautiful, stylish, and severe lady. Now, she was an interesting case, because, like her Latin/History colleague, she was politically rightish. But unlike him, she wasn’t even quiet about it. “Kuck mal [Check it out], Mister Honecker,” she’d say, mockingly, beginning a point about military deterrence of the East German communist leader. The students she was addressing were pretty darned communist themselves, and all-but-universally convinced that an aggressive posture against the East Bloc was asking for apocalypse. So you might have thought they would despise her. But she was so cool, they accepted her politics without a murmur.
The post-war generation in West Germany—the generation of my classmates’ parents, and teachers—had come of age ascribing the rise of Hitler to their own parents’ conservative values: Good order, self-discipline, respect for authority, and the like. So those young Germans, in the 1960s, turned instead to the countervailing, basically Romantic values of rebellion, self-assertion, and creative destruction. The Baader-Meinhofs and similar groups—which were still celebrated in graffiti all over Göttingen, when I knew it—were nothing more or less than an extreme version of this tendency.
My peers’ behaviour was one of its secondary expressions, I think. Having been raised to be little radicals, so they acted—when they pleased. But what stands out so vividly in my memory is when, and why, they pleased. Their attitude toward their teachers wasn’t determined by competence, or ideology. It was determined by aesthetics. They victimized the weak and dull; fell into line behind the charismatic and strong. An ironic result, I would say, for the anti-fascist ethos of nie wieder [never again].
But then, it was, especially in retrospect, a very ironic time.
We lived in the consciousness, even the faith, of impending nuclear holocaust. The figures we revered—such as the West German Green Party leader Petra Kelly, and the New Zealand anti-nuclear campaigner Helen Caldicott—weren’t telling us, in the early 1980s, that the world might end. They were telling us that it would end, as a matter of time, not chance. For there were far too many weapons, and our leaders were far too bent on acquiring far too many more. Eventually, it would become statistically impossible for the Rube Goldberg machine of so-called deterrence not to go off; whether by intention, or mistake. That was the argument. The only hope—die einzige Chance, as my friends and I in Göttingen gravely told each other—was if we could somehow, somehow, slow and stop the juggernaut. And while we certainly granted this to be a burden that fell on both sides of the Cold War, we had no doubt that blame for the growing crisis lay mostly on ours. We marched against the new US missiles, and held at school a Nachdenken zu Frieden in which we talked, à la Kelly, about the obvious necessity of bringing peace to Germany through socialism (Honecker, perhaps, could not have put it better). I was very proud that the Canadian National Film Board had produced the documentary If You Love This Planet, a lecture by Caldicott about the near-inevitability of nuclear war, and the almost unbearable imperatives that resulted: To shut down air bases, defenestrate politicians, engage in demonstrations radical enough somehow to make them see. Her favourite idea, eliciting laughter from the audience, was to “release a hundred naked toddlers into the US Senate Chamber.” The Bosch-like image stuck in my mind.
On the other hand: There was no chance whatsoever that the forces threatening our continued existence could do anything other than terminate it, if left to their own devices. The general hope, in other words, that the Cold War might be won—that the Soviet bloc might collapse—that Germany might be reunified—that the fences and guard towers and tank divisions on the border might just disappear, and even within a few years—that was cartoonish, ludicrous, the kind of ignorant and absolutely destructive nonsense that was so appropriately satirized that year in Nena’s #1 hit song 99 Luftballons. Here was the soft-focus fantasy that provided cover for the aggressive schemes of the dangerous idiot Reagan, the cruel bitch Thatcher, and of course, the obese rube Helmut Kohl, West Germany’s CDU Chancellor, who so deserved his nickname Birne [pear]. Sure, if we thought about, which we didn’t, dissolution of the Iron Curtain and suspension of the nuclear standoff and freedom of movement and speech for the East Germans and Poles and Czechs and Romanians and Hungarians and maybe even Albanians might seem like a vision of Utopia. But the whole point of such a theoretical state, for a serious person, is that you know it doesn’t, and can’t, exist.
*
Not quite a year after the Wall came down, I travelled to Berlin on my own (from London, where I was then living, but that’s another story). I was 21. Many things were strange about this trip, starting with the then-brand-new experience of a borderless continent. Not a customs officer appeared, not a passport got checked on the entire long train journey from Rotterdam. Not even when we crossed the phantom frontier of the DDR—which was still, technically, extant at that time; or when we recrossed it to attain Zoo Station.
In the bars across the street, at 7:30 a.m., tradesmen and clubbers were hoisting steins of pilsner.
The city was tense and confusing. The shops in the East were stuffed with Western goods, but empty of Ossies, who couldn’t afford them. Anarchists camped—behind a palisade—in the Death Strip. Sections of wall were piled up all over the place, like an oversupply of giant’s bookshelves. Glassy-eyed tourists attacked them with hammers. On Alexanderplatz, a Buddhist monk tapped a drum over a dozen hippies on a hunger strike, all of them wearing, for some reason, bright orange bibs.
Despite the surreality, or maybe because of it, I considered staying for a while, and even went so far as to look at an apartment: Trudging past tower blocks and hulking Socialist Realist statues to a tidy little place of tile and formica where I could, if I chose, spend the winter banging out short stories on my portable typewriter.
In the meantime, I crashed with an acquaintance in one of the old tenements of Kreuzberg. Shower in the kitchen, toilet on the landing; the whole Haus smelling, cozily, of drains. There were punishing nights followed by gibbering afternoons when it was all I could do to drag myself to the café for a restorative Thé mit rhum.
But before any of that:
I arrived at Zoo Station. Made my way to my acquaintance’s place. Dumped my stuff. Then, map in hand, I walked straight to the intersection of FriedrichStrasse and ZimmerStrasse.
Nothing remained, there. Just open space—but then, I remembered, there had actually been quite a lot of that, there.
So nothing, literally, remained.
The day was unseasonally warm, and very still. I was the only person around.
I walked up FriedrichStrasse from the intersection for a few paces, then back over to the other side of ZimmerStrasse. Walked back up, came back over. Stopped. Looked around.
There is a Winnie-the-Pooh story in which Pooh and Piglet suddenly realize that it is Eeyore’s birthday, and nobody has given him anything. Since the poor donkey is close to suicide at the best of times, the two friends rush off to get him presents.
Pooh, of course, chooses a pot of honey. But on the way back to Eeyore’s he decides to test it, just to make sure it’s ok. Having done so, he worries that there may be something wrong with the honey a little deeper in the pot, so he tests that too—and it goes on like that until he has licked the pot clean.
Piglet, for his part, finds a pretty red balloon at home (just one) that he got from Christopher Robin, and goes running back with it—only to trip, fall on the balloon, and burst it.
So the shamefaced stuffies are only able to give their friend a rubber rag of burst balloon, and an empty pot.
Eeyore, however, is not displeased. For he finds it quite diverting to put the rag into the pot, then take it out again. Put it back in, then take it back out. As often as he likes, at will, and so on, and so what.
That was crossing the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie in the autumn of 1990.
Libber leeber 