‘As a young man I was fascinated by the West,’ he said as we set off along Norweger Strasse towards Mauerpark. ‘In the West one could read any book, go to any university. But it was a place I knew I’d never be able to visit, as long as there was a Wall.’
Brussig had grown up to the east of Mauerpark, a large linear park which in its time served as a drill ground for the Prussian army, a railway station and the death strip between the French and Soviet sectors. Around the same time I’d lived on the western side of the Wall. In those days neither of us had imagined the city – let alone the country – reunited.
‘I did dream of free speech, of free travel, but I was unwilling to make that jump into the dark, to try to leave and risk imprisonment. Also I didn’t want to be corrupted by the system.’
Nevertheless Brussig found the courage to join many East German protest marches, often fearing – as he closed his front door behind him – that he might never see his apartment again.
He also listened to Bruce Springsteen.
‘In 1988 I had a job as a porter at the Palast Hotel. As I earned tips in West German Marks I could afford to buy a Walkman, and five Springsteen cassettes. I listened to them over and over every day on the way to and from work. When Springsteen came to East Berlin it was a concert I’d waited a lifetime to hear.’
That July ‘the Boss’ had played to 100,000 fans at the Weissensee cycling track, across town from the Mauerpark. The authorities had invited one of the West’s most popular musicians to the people’s republic in the hope that the event would vent mounting pressure for reform. The state newspaper Neues Deutschland championed Springsteen as a working-class American who ‘attacks social wrongs and injustices in his homeland’ with ‘hard and unadorned songs about the shady side of American reality’. The article failed to mention the anxieties that mark his songs, and his rebellion against authority.
His four-hour concert, the largest ever staged in East Germany, did not relieve tensions. ‘Es ist schön, in Ost-Berlin zu sein,’ Springsteen had called out with a clear political message. ‘I’m not here for any government. I’ve come to play rock ’n’ roll for you in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.’
Then he launched into Bob Dylan’s ‘Chimes of Freedom’, helping to inflame the spirit of rebellion, said Brussig.
‘It was a big event but it wasn’t big enough,’ he told me, his aquiline features – pointed nose and slightly hooded eyes – accentuated by sparse, receding hair. ‘By then we’d started to imagine new possibilities.’
The Berlin Wall was never a neat and orderly construction but rather a zigzagging atrocity, shearing across streets and through neighbourhoods, dividing families, built to stop East Germans escaping to the western half of the city. It encircled the west, cutting it off from the rest of the country, yet paradoxically it was the Ossies who were trapped.
Brussig and I turned onto Bernauer Strasse. Along it, yawning caretakers opened doors, raised electric shutters, lit their first cigarette of the day. Overhead balconies sprouted window boxes and a woman cleaned her windows. Every apartment building seemed to house one or two small businesses: a physiotherapist, a Chinese acupuncturist, a vet. In one – a reptile specialist – a metre-long albino snake sunned itself in the window. Children darted by it on their way to school, lugging colourful, oversized backpacks. A young mother cycled over the tram tracks towards a kindergarten, her toddler balanced on the back of her gleaming black bike.
In the Cold War only border guards had walked along Bernauer Strasse. As one side of the street had belonged to West Berlin and the other to East Berlin, the buildings themselves had become border fortifications. Dozens of East Germans had escaped through them and, after the doors and windows were bricked up, through tunnels dug in the city’s sandy soil.
Brussig had also escaped, through words.
‘I had no early ambition to be a writer,’ he recalled, stopping and standing with hands on hips and elbows angled outwards. ‘My father was an engineer, my mother a special needs teacher. In school I trained as a builder, taking odd jobs as a dishwasher and museum guard. I even worked on a light-bulb assembly line. I had no clear direction for my life.’
Then during a compulsory, unhappy spell in the Volksarmee, he discovered a love of reading.
‘I found that words could articulate my contradictory emotions. Suddenly I saw that I wasn’t alone, and I became fascinated by the ability to express myself on the page. I started to write as a means of helping me to make decisions. I realised that I had a talent for it.’ Brussig laughed at himself. ‘In other words, I began writing because I didn’t know what I wanted to become, and in the process I became a writer.’
On the morning of 9 November 1989, Brussig submitted his first novel to the leading East German publishing house. But he wasn’t the only writer to take advantage of relaxing censorship laws. Aufbau Verlag’s office overflowed with hundreds of manuscripts, stacked in teetering piles on tables and radiators, crammed into cupboards. Some like Brussig’s were new but others, typed on old yellowed paper, had been pulled out of secret drawers or unearthed after years of hiding.
‘I dropped mine onto a pile, believing that I’d never see it again.’
That evening, at a press conference after the emergency meeting of the Central Committee of the ruling Socialist Unity Party, the East Berlin party chief, Günter Schabowski, made his bumbling announcement of a new travel law. Foreign travel was permitted, he said, ‘with immediate effect’.
Within minutes, thousands of East Berliners took Schabowski at his word and headed to the border. At first the guards at Bornholmer Strasse had stamped and invalidated their passports, expatriating the holders without their knowledge. But as the crowd grew, the strategy was abandoned. The barrier was raised and within an hour, tens of thousands crossed the Bösebrücke into West Berlin. Similar scenes unfolded at Sonnenallee, Oberbaumbrücke and other checkpoints. One month later as many as half a million people stood on the Gendarmenmarkt to hear Beethoven’s Ninth, with three united choirs – the East Berlin Radio Chorus, the West German Bavarian Radio Chorus and the Children’s Choir of the Dresden Philharmonie – singing ‘Ode to Joy’ as a spiritual hymn to hope.
Die Wende gifted a lifelong subject to Brussig. Apart from in Heroes Like Us, he imagined in most of his novels that the Wall hadn’t fallen. In his mock-autobiography Das gibts in keinem Russenfilm (That Ain’t No Russian Movie), he conjured up a confident East Germany that did not humble itself to West German expertise but rather pioneered revolutionary technologies (including hybrid electric vehicles and wind-powered generators built by convicts and conscripts).
‘My made-up alternative East Germany was ruled by the party and as successful as China,’ he told me.
Of course East Germany provided him with rich material because of its inherent ludicrousness: the absurd iniquity of a death strip cutting through Berlin’s heart, of the U-Bahn trains running beneath it, of a child spying on the Stasi.
Near Schwartzkopffstrasse, we paused at a corner cafe. An office worker perched in the sun on a chrome chair, breakfasting on sweet Kirschstreusel. A window cleaner abseiled down the front of a glass building. Outside a Lidl supermarket, Russian residents grumbled about the meanness of German child benefits.