Читать книгу Fear of Mirrors - Tariq Ali - Страница 9

LET MY FATHER LUDWIK and his friends wait awhile. Krystina is training them in the arts of political warfare and I will return to them soon, but there is something else worrying me, keeping me awake at nights.

More than anything else, I want to repair our relationship, bring some laughter back into our lives. I can see where the danger lies. Unspoken bitternesses and unresolved tensions have become lodged within us both. I want to find an antidote to this poison. I hope you agree, Karl.

Even as I write, it seems ridiculous to go so far back into the past instead of coming to terms with more recent histories. I mean your mother’s decision to leave us, for which you have always blamed me. Perhaps if she had stayed and I had left, you might have censured her instead, though that would have been equally unjustified.

Everything seemed to go wrong after the death of your grandmother Gertrude. Your mother and I found we had less and less to say to each other. With our apartment empty I noticed her absences much more and began to feel that she had lost interest in me. She was spending more and more time in her clinic. Then one day while I was having coffee with Klaus Winter, he said something he shouldn’t have said. You remember Klaus, don’t you? He was a very old friend of Gertrude and was weeping a great deal at her funeral. He’s the one who bought you a pair of jeans from the other Berlin on your fourteenth birthday.

Klaus told me quite casually that he had seen Helge with a friend at a concert two days ago and asked why I had not been present. The point being, Karl, that not only had Helge not told me she was going to a concert, she had explicitly said that she couldn’t attend a meeting of our Forum that same night because of a patient, whose condition was such that his appointment could not be cancelled. Why had she lied?

I left Klaus Winter stranded in the hotel where we were meeting and rushed home. I was crazy with jealousy. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, you were out with your friends. When your mother returned I confronted her with the facts. To my amazement she smiled and called me pathetic. I hit her. I felt ashamed immediately afterwards. I pleaded to be forgiven. She did not speak, but walked slowly into our bedroom and began to remove her clothes from the cupboard. I was paralysed. I could neither say or do anything to stop her. I sat silently on the bed as she continued to collect her belongings and then pack them in her faded green pre-war suitcase, which had once belonged to her grandmother. I remembered the day I had brought her home after our wedding and carried this same suitcase into our bedroom.

‘I did not lie to you, Vlady. I never have. The man with me at the concert was a patient and it was part of his treatment. Your reaction is a symptom of your own guilt-ridden mind. I’m going. We’ll talk next week when you’re calmer, and then we’ll both talk to Karl. Tell him I’ve gone to Leipzig to see my mother. And if you want Evelyne to move in, I have no objection.’

That’s all she said as she walked out of our home. I wanted to scream, to run after her, to drag her back, to fall on my knees and plead with her to stay and give our relationship a last chance, but I did nothing except shed a few silent tears as she walked away.

Perhaps something inside me told me it was no use. We had grown apart and nothing, not even you, Karl, could bring us back together again. The rest you know. She came back and I broke away from Evelyne. The big break came much later and for reasons we both understand.

Helge was wrong about Evelyne. If I’d confessed to her, she would have been angry, but she would have understood. She found out by accident – a stupid letter from Evelyne to me which I should have destroyed. A letter in which she argued that the female orgasm was a male invention and that I should not despair at my inability to satisfy her. I only kept the letter because it amused me. Your mother read it differently and ascribed powers to Evelyne which that young woman, alas, never possessed. I suppose I should begin at the beginning.

This may come as a surprise to you, Karl, but I was a popular lecturer at Humboldt. Comparative literature is a field that permits a great deal of creativity in its teaching. Evelyne was one of the students in my special seminars on Russian literature.

I used to, for instance, talk of Gogol reading extracts from Dead Souls to Pushkin and the students would then write an imaginary dialogue between the two men. Evelyne was quick-witted. We were all smiling at her clever dialogue till it reached a surreal stage. She was allergic to the prevailing orthodoxy and, as her imagined exchange neared the end, she had included some savage references to Honecker and the Politburo. Everyone looked at me. I did not comment, but moved on to the next student.

I had never spoken to her after my classes. Our relationship had been restricted to regular and sympathetic eye contact and the occasional smile, especially when a student trying hard to move upwards in the party hierarchy posed a particularly uninspired question.

That same week it was my fiftieth birthday. Helge had organized a party. To my surprise, Evelyne showed up with a few of her university friends, none of whom had been invited. Helge welcomed them all.

It was a haphazard and disordered occasion. Evelyne alone remained sober that night, observing us all through a haze of tobacco smoke. That was when I first saw her as an attractive young woman. Medium height, slim, short blond hair and exquisitely carved. Her breasts were not voluptuous like Helge’s, but small and firm. Overlooking them was a pair of sharp blue eyes and an intelligent, angular face.

A week later we made love for the first time in a tiny apartment overlooking the old Jewish cemetery. It belonged to her aunt, who was never at home during the afternoon. For a few months we shared everything: experiences, confidences, worries, fantasies and dreams. Our love grew like a wild rose. We would walk to the park and sit on the grass, holding hands and kissing like nervous adolescents. Just when I was thinking seriously of telling your mother, the affair died suddenly. What had pruned it out of existence? On my side, I guess, it was the knife of reason. One afternoon I couldn’t take her. She was mocking and cynical.

‘My stock is clearly going down and yours is refusing to rise. I think we’ve exhausted each other. Time to move on. You look surprised, Vlady. You’re not bad-looking for your age. I was into you because of your acid tongue. You were different from the other robots at Humboldt. You used to make me laugh. I never intended a long stay at your station, you old fool. Anyway your signals need repairing and you need a more experienced engineer than me.’

I thought then that she was driven by pure ambition. Her overriding need to change lovers was determined by which of them could help further her career. I had introduced her to a film-director acquaintance and had seen her at work on him. I had no doubt that he would replace me. He did.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps she had simply outgrown me, moving to a different phase of her life. I had spent a lot of time on her compositions, making critical notes and compelling her to rewrite and rewrite till I thought she could do no better. It was I who had read her short stories and poems. It was I who had noted she had a good ear for dialogue and pushed her in the direction of writing film scripts.

A few days after we had ended our affair, I saw her on the street with the film director. I behaved badly. I disrupted their talk and dragged her away. Her reaction indicated that it really was all over. She poured scorn on me. Hatred flowed out of her like molten lava. She threatened to ring Helge. Then she walked away. I was embittered. I felt I had been exploited. I wanted to confront her once again, but she had disappeared. She and the film director had fled to the West. One of her friends told me she had settled in Heidelberg.

It seemed pointless to tell your mother anything. It was over. But someone had recorded the episode. Unknown to me or Evelyne our summer trysts in the park had attracted the attention of Leyla, a Turkish painter from Kreuzberg who had been commissioned to paint a set of East Berlin landscapes. Her portrait of us had a surrealist flavour. We were buried deep in an illicit embrace in the park. She had entitled her painting Stolen Kisses.

Many months passed. Evelyne was happily ensconced in my unconscious. One day there was a rainstorm. Your mother, desperate for shelter, entered an art gallery. A coincidence, of course, but what wretched luck. She saw the painting, pierced through the surrealist mask, recognized me and questioned Leyla with some intensity.

Helge could not afford to buy the painting, but Leyla, observing her distress, gave it to her. When the exhibition was over, Helge brought the painting back to our apartment. A hurricane swept through our relationship. I am shuddering as I write this, Karl. It was a horrible day. Our relationship was probably doomed, but Stolen Kisses sealed its fate. She took the painting with her when she left, informing me that though the subject made her nauseous she really liked the composition and had become good friends with Leyla.

There are times in life when a single setback encourages another, like a small, dislodged rock triggers an avalanche. A month later I met Klaus Winter for lunch and he informed me that the State Security was getting regular and detailed reports from the leadership meetings of our Forum for German Democracy. He repeated verbatim remarks that had been attributed to me. His report was completely accurate. That was when Winter told me that he was a senior figure in Foreign Intelligence and that Gertrude, your grandmother, and he had both worked for Soviet Military Intelligence since the late twenties. After the Second World War they had been assigned to the DDR intelligence services.

I was thunderstruck, Karl. I had no idea that Gertrude was still involved in all that stuff. She had left no trace of it in her papers. I did not let Winter see the effect of the blow he had dealt me. Gertrude had encouraged the formation of our Forum. She had actually helped me write our founding document. She had attended some of our meetings. I had discussed our innermost secrets with her, including a plan to steal documents from the Politburo, since one of our supporters worked in that building.

As I walked away from Winter’s apartment, I wondered how much Gertrude had told Winter. Everything? Nothing? A few bits and pieces? In which case why had they not arrested us and disbanded the Forum? They could have done it very easily. Perhaps they had reported directly to Moscow and the men around Gorbachev had counselled them to let us grow.

I wanted answers, but before I was ready to confront Winter I had to discover the real Gertrude and the ghosts that had possessed her. She was dead. I had to piece together the disparate strands that had made up her life. How had it interrelated with that of Ludwik? When did she first meet Winter and where? And who was she in the first place? Her life was now beginning to haunt me.

I remember, not long before she died, you asking her whether she had any photographs of her family. I used to ask her that when I was a child and she would shake her head quickly and change the subject. When you asked her, she began to cry. Do you remember? Do you know why, Karl? Because she had left home in such a state that all relations between her and the family were broken.

Gertrude’s parents were third-generation German Jews. Her grandfather, who had done well in the tea and caviar trade, had built a large mansion in Schwaben, then a fashionable Munich suburb. Most of those old houses have long since been destroyed. Not by the war, but by developers.

Gertrude’s father was a greatly respected physician. Her mother led a life of leisure. Neither of them was religious. If anything, young Gertie and her brother Heinrich learned about religion from their cook and the two maids, all of whom were good Catholics.

Her childhood was happy. She would talk sometimes of the big garden at the end of which was a little gate that led to a small forest where she and Heinrich used to pick wild strawberries every summer. There was an old cedar tree and a swing. She used to delight in pushing Heinrich higher and higher till he was screaming, half in fear and half delight. The maid would rush from the house and rescue the little boy.

They were brought up like any other Germans of their class and generation. At the gymnasium she was punished for her insolence for refusing to accept the casual anti-Semitism of her history teacher. The head of the gymnasium wrote a strong letter to her father. Dr Meyer refused to take the matter seriously.

‘They are ignorant, Gertie,’ her father would tell her. ‘To show anger is to come down to their level. You must learn to control yourself.’

‘If he is ignorant,’ she responded, ‘why is he permitted to teach us history?’

Her father would smile and finger his beard, but could not reply. When she recalled all this her eyes would light up. It was the first time she had won an argument.

‘I have no answer to your question, Gertie. May I simply recommend that you learn what they teach, pass your exams and prepare to enter the university. Do you think I could have become a physician if I had responded to every insult or curse? Anti-Semitism is strongly rooted in their culture. They imbibed it with Christianity. Luther made that side of it only worse, but it doesn’t mean anything. Nothing at all.’

Gertie did pass her exams, but during her very first year at the University of Munich she fell in love with a fellow-student with the name of David Stein. There is a photograph of them as students, which I found as I was going through her papers a few months ago.

He was of medium height, with a shock of dark red hair and twinkling eyes. The son of a railway worker, he was a rarity at the university and the object of a great deal of prejudice. A Jew, and from a poor family.

Gertie was impressed by his remarkable self-confidence and his ability to rise above the jibes to which he was continuously subjected. This might seem strange to you, Karl, but don’t forget that the German universities were the strongholds of reaction. Long before Hitler became Chancellor, his ideas had already triumphed in the universities.

Stein was a brilliant mathematician and Gertie always felt that if she had not distracted him, he would have easily reached the pinnacle of his profession. Perhaps, but had fate not intervened in the shape of your grandmother, he might just as easily have ended up in Auschwitz.

The two of them became inseparable. Slowly they began to explore each other’s emotions and bodies. Together they flouted Jewish orthodoxy. Gertie’s household may have been secular in every way, but the kitchen was never defiled by pig meat. David’s parents were staunch atheists. They were both active in the Social Democratic Party. Here too, the old taboo against pork was strictly observed.

David and Gertie cemented their love by walking into a non-Jewish butcher’s shop and buying some cooked ham. They walked to the old Jewish cemetery, sat on the grave of David’s grandfather and consumed the ham. Once they had finished, they appealed to the Creator to prove his existence by striking them dead. The sky remained still. The excitement proved too much for Gertie. She vomited in the street, but as David helped to clean her mouth they both began to laugh. They had cured themselves of all superstitions forever. It was only after this episode that David had dragged her off to meet his parents.

The Steins lived in a two-room basement with a tiny kitchen. A fading portrait of Eduard Bernstein was pinned to the wall. How times change, Karl. In those days Bernstein was regarded as the father of revisionist thought. A turncoat. A reactionary who had made his peace with the class enemy. Twenty years ago, this view was still widely held. Read a few of his essays now, Karl, and compare them to the speeches you write for your new Social Democratic masters. Bernstein now seems to be a die-hard, a dinosaur no less! Of course, times have changed. Why do I keep forgetting this fact?

Next to Bernstein’s portrait was a framed sepia-tinted photograph of David’s father and six other men, all of them dressed in their Sunday best, with watch-chains proudly displayed. This was the executive of the Munich railway workers’ union. Gertie was awed by David’s father. She became a regular visitor. The only subject of conversation in the kitchen was socialist politics. David’s father was one of the local leaders of the SDP, but he was entirely devoid of self-importance. He spoke softly and was always prepared to listen to his political opponents, whose numbers were growing within the railway workers’ union.

It was 1918. Germany had been dismembered by the Allies. Lenin and Trotsky were in power in Petrograd and Moscow. Ferment was sweeping through Europe. The Kaiser had been toppled and the Prussian Junkers were talking to Social Democrats, seeing them as the only way to avoid the German revolution.

Finally the day came when Gertie felt she had to take David home. If they were going to get married she had to introduce him to her parents. Aware of the polar contrast between the two households, she was dreading the occasion. Gertie’s parents did not even attempt to conceal their shock. David’s twinkling, intelligent eyes made no impact on them. They were horrified at the thought of their daughter marrying a penniless pauper, whose parents were probably recent arrivals from the steel.

They saw a totally different David. A young man in patched trousers and tattered shoes. Gertie had prevented him from wearing his only suit. They noticed that he spoke in plebeian accents and, worst of all, was not in the least embarrassed by his poverty. The kindly Dr Meyer and his even kinder wife decided that the boy was cheeky. What they really meant by this was that David was not deferential. They decided to teach him the rudiments of civilized behaviour by subjecting him to an insolent inquisition. Who were his parents? Where were they from? Was his father a socialist? Where did they live? How large was their apartment? How had David got into the university?

Gertrude was horrified. She could not see that her parents were simply expressing a fear of the other and worried about losing their daughter. She saw it as a display of decadent, bourgeois philistinism. She told me that it was a side of her parents that she had, till then, sought to ignore and repress.

David registered only mild amusement. He had replied to each and every query with impeccable dignity, while simultaneously trying to warn Gertie with his eyes to calm down and avoid a tantrum at all costs. It was no use. Your grandmother was too far gone by that stage. She was livid. Ashamed of her parents, ashamed of their house, ashamed at the presence of uniformed maids, who couldn’t keep their eyes off David, and ashamed of herself for belonging to the Meyer family.

She never asked David to visit her again. Instead, she began to spend more and more time with his family. It was in the Stein basement, where she spent most of the days of her vacation that December, that Gertie learnt of the significance of the Russian Revolution.

David’s father thought that Lenin was fine for Russia, which had no tradition of political parties and trade unions, but not for Germany. He had little time for the revolutionaries of the Spartakusbund who had split the great German Social Democratic Party, accusing even Karl Kautsky of treachery. When David pointed out that the great German party had voted war credits to the Kaiser while the Russian party had not simply refused to support the Tsar, but had instead suggested to the workers that their real enemy was at home, his father nodded sadly. He, too, had been unhappy with the SPD policy of supporting the war, but he remained adamant on the other question. Germany was not prepared for Lenin’s revolution. The old tried and tested methods of the German party were the only hope.

‘There is an old German proverb,’ Herr Stein told David and Gertie one evening. ‘A silk hat is indeed very fine, provided only that I had mine. But Karl and Rosa are a long way off yet …’ For Herr Stein, the Spartacists lived in an unreal world.

David, not wishing to upset his parents, had refrained from telling his father that he and Gertie had started attending Spartacist study classes in Munich. This was not so much because of their differences. David knew how much his parents had sacrificed in order to educate him. They would be worried that his new-found interest in politics would take him away from the university and his career.

When, a month later, in January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered in cold blood by the Freikorps in Berlin, the whole Stein family went into mourning. Did you know, Karl, that one of the officers involved in the murder was a man called Canaris, later Hitler’s admiral and someone greatly admired by certain Western leaders during the war? They thought they could have done business with him. They were right.

David’s father wept loudly as he shook his head. He was sad and angry. He had heard Rosa and Liebknecht speak at many meetings before the outbreak of war. He had raised funds for them when they were imprisoned for opposing the war, but despite his admiration for the slain revolutionaries, he still could not defend their decision to launch an uprising.

‘Crazy dreamers,’ he told David and Gertie while the tears were still pouring down his face. ‘That’s what they were. The workers will miss them in the years to come. Rosa should have known better. We have to act now. We can’t sit still. If we don’t move, the Junkers will kill us all. Spartacists, Independents, Social Democrats. We’re all the same for them.’

David embraced his father, but did not speak. Old Stein was wrong. The Junkers knew the difference between the groups only too well. And Field Marshal von Hindenberg knew that in Friedrich Ebert, he had found a German patriot who would not flinch from the task that confronted him. Without the support of the Social Democrat leaders, Ebert, Noske and Scheidemann, the Junkers could not have drowned the Berlin uprising in blood.

Perhaps, Karl, you should persuade the Ebert Foundation to fund a commemoration of the uprising and the murders in 2018. Your SPD can claim that Ebert is the Father of German Democracy. My PDS, if it is still there, will argue that the Berlin tragedy of 1918-19 paved the way for the catastrophe of 1933. Engels once remarked, in a letter to a friend, that history is the result of conflicts of many individual wills, who have been affected in different ways by a host of particular conditions of life. The final result is often something that no one willed. As a general statement I think he’s right, but Hindenberg and Ebert wanted to crush the revolution in Berlin. And they did.

So you see, Karl, my century began with a tragedy and is ending on the same note. Our generation was brought up on stories of how it might have all been different if the revolution had triumphed in Berlin. You might think I’m still trying desperately to cling on to something, to anything, even if it is just the debris of failed revolutions. You might even be right but, if only for a few minutes, forget I’m your father. Let me assume the guise of a professor of comparative literature and suggest that you read one of the great novelists of this century.

Even though Alfred Döblin was not a favoured author of the DDR commissars, I often used him in my lectures at Humboldt. I read passages from his works and had the following proposition by him put up in large type on my noticeboard:

The subject of a novel is reality unchained, reality that confronts the reader completely independently of some firmly fixed course of events. It is the reader’s task to judge, not the author’s! To speak of a novel is to speak of layering, of piling in heaps, of wallowing, of pushing and shoving. A drama is about its poor plot, its desperately ever-present plot. In drama it is always ‘forward!’ But ‘forward’ is never the slogan of a novel.

Döblin was not simply the author of Berlin, Alexanderplatz. He wrote two other epic novels. When you have some time you should try and read A People Betrayed: November 1918: A German Revolution and its sequel Karl and Rosa: A German Tragedy. I’m not alone in this opinion. Your very own Gunter Grass, the lyric poet of German Social Democracy, is in full agreement with me on the Döblin question. He has acknowledged his own debt to Döblin, putting him on an even higher pedestal than Mann, Brecht and Kafka. I’m not sure that Grass likes the two novels I want you to read. I’ve not read anything by him on them, but don’t let that bother you.

Like Brecht, Döblin found refuge in Los Angeles during the bad years. He worked under contract to MGM, waiting impatiently for the end of the Third Reich. Brecht returned to the East, Döblin to the West. Much of this you’ll find in Schichsalreise, his memoirs, which affected me greatly thirty years ago.

Read him, Karl. Read him. It will make a refreshing change from those interminable Bundesbank reports which are clogging your brain. Of course, you have to study them in order to feed the jelly-fish who employ you, but give yourself a break.

Gertrude and her lover, David Stein, were making plans to run away together. They were thinking lofty thoughts. Your generation does not understand this, but for most of this century there have been millions who thought lofty thoughts. In those times large numbers of people were prepared to sacrifice their own future for a better world.

David and Gertrude were obsessed by the fate of their comrades in Berlin. They knew that the survivors of the Berlin massacre were traumatized. People from other cities were needed to help rebuild the Berlin organization. People like them.

Even as they were mapping their future, a revolution erupted in Munich. The very thought is unthinkable today. Bavaria? Which Bavaria? The land of beer cellars where Hitler’s audiences became intoxicated on hatred and which later became a fascist stronghold or, in our own post-war times, the fiefdom controlled by Franz Joseph Strauss? I’m talking of another, older Bavaria.

In November 1918, Kurt Eisner, leader of the Independent Social Democrats, proclaimed a Bavarian Republic and was elected its prime minister. Three months later Eisner was executed by Count Arco. Even the moderates, men like David Stein’s father, wanted revenge. They pleaded with the SPD leaders to do something, but were told to leave the decisions in tried and trusted hands.

‘Tried and tested in murder!’ old Stein had shouted in anger as he walked out of his party offices in Munich. The workers were, without doubt, in an angry mood, but did they want a revolution? Eugen Leviné did not think so. He had been despatched to Munich by the Comintern^* to help prepare and organize the revolution.

Munich was full of dreamers and utopians. Gertrude and David were certainly not alone. There were several thousand others and they wanted to seize power immediately. Poor Leviné! He knew the attempt was doomed. Gertrude was half in love with him. She used to talk of how he would sit up the whole night trying to deflate their dream-filled heads. Leviné warned them that they were still isolated. He wanted the uprising postponed, but Gertrude and her friends outnumbered him.

When news reached Munich in March 1919 of the uprising in Budapest and Bela Kun’s proclamation of a Hungarian Soviet Republic, David told Gertrude that this was their first real chance to make history, to avenge the deaths in Berlin, to move the revolution forward. And so it happened. To the great horror of the middle classes and the Catholic peasants, the Bavarian Soviet Republic came into existence.

Moscow was overjoyed. Lenin and Trotsky were hard-headed men, but they were also desperate. They knew the price of isolation. Lenin firmly believed that without a revolution in Germany, the infant Soviet Republic could not last for long. He was right, wasn’t he, Karl? I mean, the historical space occupied by seventy-five years is next to zero. It’s nothing. So Lenin and Trotsky sent Munich their solidarity in the shape of hundreds of telegrams. They were hoping that Vienna, too, would fall and had already instructed the Red Marshal, Tukachevsky – the Tuka whom my father loved so deeply – to investigate the military possibilities of a corridor from the Soviet Union to Bavaria. Their man in Munich suffered from no such illusions. Levine bade farewell to his wife and new-born child and prepared to sacrifice himself for a cause that had no hope of success.

The Junkers could have taken Munich painlessly, but that might not have been a sufficient deterrent to the rest of the country. Blood had to be shed. It’s the same today. Serbs and Croats could capture a village peacefully and spare their civilian opponents, but they rarely do so. Bloodlust. The animal instinct that still echoes in human biology.

General von Oven crushed the Bavarian Republic with exemplary brutality. Citizens were pulled out of their beds, then shot, knifed, raped and beaten to death. Gertrude fled to her parents in Schwaben. David was given refuge by his professor. Levine went into hiding. He thought of his wife and child and then all he could think of was flight, but he was betrayed, captured, tried and executed. His trial was a big show. Gertrude, dressed as a bourgeois Fräulein, attended the court every day. Till her dying day, your grandmother never forgot Leviné’s final speech to the court. She used to recite it to me when I was still a child, growing up in what they once called the Soviet Union.

We communists are dead men on leave. Of this I am fully aware. I do not know whether you will extend my leave or whether I shall have to join Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. I await your verdict in any case with composure and inner serenity. I have simply done my duty towards the International, and the World Revolution …

The words continued to haunt her long after the system to which she’d sold her soul had degenerated beyond recognition. They tell us now that it was always so, but I don’t believe them, Karl, and nor should you. There was a nobility of purpose. It may have been utopian, but for a majority of the foot-soldiers it was never malignant. Otherwise it is impossible to understand the motives of those men and women who sacrificed their lives in those early years. People for whom the map of the world had no meaning if Utopia was not inscribed on each continent. These are the people whose lives I’m trying to reconstruct for you.

They executed Leviné early one morning. Two soldiers in the firing party had to have alcohol poured down their throats before they could pull the trigger. That same afternoon Gertie told her parents that she had become a Communist. She was never to forget the look of horror, mingled with fear, that transformed their faces. Her father left the room and a few minutes later she heard him being violently sick. Her mother simply sat down on a chair in the hall and wept.

A young officer, Otto Müller, who had been slightly wounded during the street battles, was bivouacked in their house. He came up behind her as she was staring out of the window at the old cedar and the swing and whispered in her ear.

‘I heard everything. I greatly admire your decision. I wish I had been on Leviné’s side. He refused to plead for mercy. His face was proud and held high just before they shot him.’

The initial shock gave way to amazement. If men like him, men on the winning side, could say things like that to her at such a time, then all was not lost. Strange, the trivial incidents that leave such an impact. Your grandmother was sure that the young officer’s encouragement made up her mind for her. Many years later she met Müller in Berlin, where he was practising as a doctor. He was in a hurry. It was 1933 and he was helping to get his best friend’s furniture to Denmark. The name of his childhood familiar was Bertolt Brecht.

When Gertie’s father recovered he spoke to her in a hard but trembling voice. ‘You are no longer my daughter.’

Her mother did not speak. Gertie went to her room and wept. ‘Mutti, Mutti,’ she sobbed. ‘Why did you not speak? Why?’

Then she packed a few clothes, a framed photograph of Heinrich and herself, her books, and a tiny green shawl that had once belonged to her grandmother. Her brother was away on a school trip. She sat down at her desk and wrote him a farewell note: My dearest Heiny, I have to leave now, but I will miss you terribly. Don’t forget me. I will write and give you my address in Berlin. Many kisses and a big hug from your loving Gertie.

She walked out of the house and down the drive. As she reached the bend after which the house became invisible she was desperate to turn round one last time, but she was proud and resisted the lure. Heiny later wrote and told her that their mother’s tear-stained face had been pressed to the first-floor window, watching Gertie leaving her family house. She had told him so when he returned from his trip. I’m sure that none of them really believed in the finality of the breach, but then none of them knew what lay ahead.

Some years after the war, when she had returned to Berlin, Gertie wanted to return to Munich and see the house again. That was before the Wall was built. Travel between the two zones was easy. She took me with her. I was eleven at the time. I remember well our trip to Schwaben. The house was still there, just like it used to be. Gertie held me close and began to cry. She, a Communist, had fought the Nazis and survived. Her father, a staunch German nationalist, a man of the Right, perished in the camps with Heiny, her mother and the rest of the family. Gertrude and I were the sole survivors. We had been staring at the house from the driveway. Gertie was too frightened to go in. Slowly we turned round and as we began to walk out we noticed an old man on crutches who had stopped and was observing us from outside the gate.

‘Who are you?’ he asked Gertie.

She tightened her hand on mine. ‘I used to live here a long time ago.’

The old man came close and stared right into Mutti’s eyes. ‘Fräulein Gertrude?’

She nodded.

‘Haven’t you recognized me? Frank. The gardener. I used to give you and little Heinrich rides on my back.’ The old man’s eyes filled with tears. Gertrude hugged him. When finally she moved away she was going to ask him what had happened, but he read the question in her eyes even before she spoke and shook his head.

‘I was conscripted in ’36. They were still here. The Doctor had many influential patients. Nazis who respected him, wouldn’t change doctors for anything. When I returned in 1942 – I was one of the first casualties on the Russian front – they had all disappeared.’

We nodded. ‘And the house, Frank?’

‘You remember the young doctor who sometimes assisted your father. He joined the Nazi Party. This was his reward. He moved in with his family. Took the practice, the house, the furniture. Everything. A few years ago he got scared and sold the property. It’s empty now. They’re going to knock it down and build apartments. The garden will disappear completely. He’s still in Munich. One of our distinguished citizens. He’s set up a medical publishing house.’

We had lunch with Frank in a cafe. Gertie wanted to give him some money, but realized that she had none herself.

I thought of that visit, Karl, when, about two years ago, the inquisitors arrived from Bonn. I remember the date, because it was Helge’s birthday. The sixth of April. These three men had come to investigate me and to decide whether I was a fit person to teach at the university. They were not in the least interested in the fact that I was opposed to the old regime, that I had shielded dissidents, distributed pamphlets, marched on the streets, helped bring down the Wall. They actually laughed when I showed them the manifesto I had helped to draft for the Forum for German Democracy.

‘Marxist gibberish,’ was the verdict of the man with red hair.

‘You may have brought them out on the streets, but they voted for Chancellor Kohl!’ his colleague informed me in a polite voice.

I never discussed this event with you before now Karl, because I was frightened. I thought you might agree with them. I was wrong. Forgive me. I wanted to shout at these hypocrites. Remind them of Schwaben. Ask when I could have Gertrude’s house back. Ask why the Nazi who had stolen my grandparents’ house was still thriving while they were making us all redundant. Instead I remained calm. I explained the volatility of the situation. Reminded them of how Turks and Vietnamese were being burnt alive in their homes while the citizens of the new Germany stood by and the Chancellor washed his hands.

‘Why,’ I asked them at one point, ‘do you despise us Easterners so much? For us, not even a Treaty of Passau!’

They looked at me with blank impressions, none of them wanting to admit that they had no idea when or what the Treaty of Passau was. It was my only triumph that day. I explained that through the Treaty of 1552, the Lutherans had accepted a surly and grudging co-existence with the Catholic Church.

They questioned me for three hours, but it took them fifteen minutes to reach a verdict. They called me in to the investigation room, where, in the old days, I had often faced the hostility of our own ideological commissars.

‘Professor Meyer, please sit down. After careful consideration, the Commission has decided that you are not fit to teach the course on Comparitive Literature at Humboldt University. We are aware of your gift for languages, your knowledge of English, Russian and Chinese. We are confident that you will carry on your translation work, which is of a high quality. But teaching. Now that, in our new conditions, is something different …’

I wrote you a brief letter telling you that I’d been sacked. I wanted to tell you how I was haunted by fear, tormented by insecurity, desperate for your mother to return. I walked around the city aimlessly for several hours. There was dust everywhere. Scaffolding on every main street. Hitler and Speer had wanted to rebaptize Berlin. Germania was their favoured name. Berlin will be a capital city once again.

At least it will bring you back here, Karl, away from the Ollenauerstrasse and quiet, old Bonn. That will be nice. I get the feeling that the architects are reverting to the nineteenth century, trying to forget that this century even happened. If they succeed, they will destroy Berlin.

I thought of our two cities in one. For too long, the Western half had been a forbidden zone. Did you know that sex shops have taken the place of churches and chapels? They cater for every taste. In Wedding, where Gertrude and David lived when they ran away from Munich, and which was a Communist working-class stronghold, the new entrepreneurs are trading in exotica. Rare tropical birds, powder from the horn of a rhinoceros, dried pigs’ ears and a lot else.

Berlin is a shamelessly consumerist city. Art consists of the chassis of an old Cadillac fixed to slabs of concrete and wooden benches with carved breasts and penises.

To my own amazement, Karl, I began to miss the drab, dingy, prudish Berlin where both you and I grew up.

_______________

^*The Communist (Third) International (Comintern) was launched with great fanfare in Moscow in 1919. Its aim was a World Revolution of which it was the General Staff. It laid down a set of twenty-one conditions for membership, the principal function of which was to split the existing Socialist Parties of the Second International and form new Communist parties. For the first four years, the heroic period of the Comintern, this aim was pursued vigorously. Later, the Comintern became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. It was dissolved unilaterally by Stalin in 1943 to convince Churchill and Roosevelt that he was a reliable ally.