As well as imagined worlds, we talked about the real past, for in Berlin one can never escape it, nor the noble and necessary act of remembering. Over strong bitter coffee I told him of my conviction that Germany had become an open and dynamic society as a direct consequence of its people taking responsibility for their history. In a courageous, humane and moving manner, they’d unearthed and memorialised their past for the psychic health of the country.
‘That’s true for the Nazi years,’ he replied, shading his eyes with his hand. ‘But of the socialist period that I knew, all that remains now is the TV Tower at Alexanderplatz. The Palast der Republik was demolished. The Rathauspassagen has been Westernised. Lenin’s monument has been removed even though he can’t harm anyone any longer.’ Brussig nodded back in the direction of Bernauer Strasse where a single, short stretch of Wall has been preserved. ‘Above all I feel sorry that nowhere can a long length of the Berlin Wall be seen, in all its naked brutality.’
We jerked south, passing one-time ‘ghost’ U-Bahn stations, closed for almost thirty Cold War years and now freed of their phantoms, and cut across Invaliden Strasse to reach the Spree. Here the Wall had once flanked both sides of the river. Now Norman Foster’s Reichstag dome rose above it. Tourists swirled around the Brandenburg Gate, posing for selfies at the site of my long-vanished observation platform. Ahead of us the vast glass-roof parasol at Potsdamer Platz caught the sun.
As we followed the paving stones, stepping from east to west and back again, I asked Brussig about the other rock star who had touched his life. ‘You told me once that Udo Lindenberg is world famous, throughout Germany,’ I said.
Outside the country, the thick-lipped, cigar-smoking Lindenberg is almost unknown. But at home he is venerated as the godfather of Krautrock. He’s especially honoured for having looked east, unlike his contemporaries with their ambitions to break into the British or American music scene. For over a decade he aspired to perform in East Germany, writing pleading letters to the Politburo, and even composed a pop song for its leader Erich Honecker. In ‘Sonderzug nach Pankow’ (‘Special Train to Pankow’), he speculated – in a melody based on the swing classic ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ – that the dour Communist Party Secretary was in fact a secret lover of rock music.
‘Udo tried for years to do a big tour,’ Brussig told me. ‘In the end he was given a single gig, but only because he shared an agent with Harry Belafonte. When the East Germans had asked to book Harry for a festival, the agent insisted they take Udo as well.’
In October 1983 Lindenberg performed three songs at Berlin’s Palast der Republik, his only appearance in old East Germany. Brussig had been in the crowd outside the venue.
‘I wasn’t a particular fan but I simply had to be there. It may be difficult for you to understand but to us Lindenberg was more popular than the Beatles or even Springsteen.’
Twenty-four years later, after the fall of the Wall and publication of Heroes Like Us, Lindenberg rang Brussig – they’d met once during the intervening years at an awards ceremony – and asked him to write a rock musical.
‘I’d never written a musical. I didn’t even like musicals. But when someone like Lindenberg calls such details don’t matter.’
Lindenberg, no stranger to self-promotion, wanted the story to revolve around his hit singles and the myth that he’d fathered a child in East Berlin.
‘You know the scene in Apollo 13 where NASA scientists cobble together parts to save the space ship?’ Brussig asked me. ‘That’s what it was like for me, building a story around his songs.’
Hinterm Horizont (Beyond the Horizon) took shape as a fictionalised love story between Lindenberg and an East Berliner. The Wall, the Stasi, a Moscow tryst and an unexpected pregnancy came together in Berlin’s most successful musical of all time, which would be seen by more than two million people. Across the stage lovers swooned, dancers danced and border police unwound barbed wire beneath a nine-metre-wide Lindenberg fedora, designed along with much of the set by Renzo Piano, architect of parts of revitalised Potsdamer Platz and the Shard in London.
‘I make my living by telling stories about that time so I feel a responsibility towards all of us who lived through it,’ said Brussig. We’d found a bench on the edge of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s vast, wooded inner-city park. ‘I’m happiest when I overhear people say, “That’s exactly how it was.” They are my true audience. They are my real readers. But I also want to win over those who did not experience life in the East.’
It was lunchtime now and Berliners spilt out of offices and into parks and outdoor cafes. They turned their faces towards the sun, set aside their salad bowls and inhaled clouds of lilac perfume. An African man and an Asian woman sat on the grass holding hands. Taxis drove by with open windows, trailing the music of Farid al-Atrash and Alisa’s Exile in their wake. Thirty years ago at this very spot, I’d stepped through a hole in the Wall and made that trail of footprints across the sand of no-man’s-land.
‘Nostalgia is a sweet and cosy look into the past,’ Brussig answered when I asked about the dangers of romanticising the past. ‘Everybody feels nostalgic from time to time. It’s part of human nature. But as long as political decisions aren’t based on nostalgia, as long as nostalgia is kept in the heart and out of the mind, everything will be okay. For nostalgia lies about the past, just as Utopia lies about the future.’
He paused, then went on: ‘Hinterm Horizont is a musical, as is Billy Elliot. Both draw on historical events, the fall of the Wall and collapse of the British coal industry. Both tell a truth about those events. But if you want historical accuracy, you’d be better off reading history books.’
In spite of his success, Brussig remained a humble man – no designer shades, no mobile phone calls cluttering our conversation – and he radiated a boyish excitement over the unexpected nature of his success.
‘I can’t say that I miss the old East Germany, although I suspect – if the Wall really hadn’t fallen – I would have still been an author. I might even have declared – as does my character in Das gibts in keinem Russenfilm – that I wouldn’t visit the West or read Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being until everyone could do so. I might have become infamous for such a statement. I might even have been seen as a dissident for it, although in truth I was always too fearful to be a real dissident.’ Brussig added, ‘It’s a different world now.’
His work has brought him into contact with writers and film-makers across Europe, in Latin America and in the US. While a writer-in-residence at the Goethe-Institut in New York, John Irving invited him to Vermont for the Halloween weekend. Over dinner Irving’s son Everett – who was fourteen years old at the time – announced that he planned to dress up as Abraham Lincoln. In response Irving quoted the complete text of the Gettysburg Address, from memory, adding his interpretation from time to time.
‘For me it was a Great American moment, a Great American writer quoting a Great American speech for his son.’
Over the years the two authors stayed in touch, Irving writing to Brussig soon after the election of Donald Trump, ‘Hatred is everywhere, Thomas, but in the US hatred has been ELECTED.’
At the end of our walk, Thomas and I stood outside the Theater am Potsdamer Platz where Hinterm Horizont had played for so many years. Given the nature of my journey, I needed to ask him about identity and nationalism. We talked for a time about the concept of Unbehagen, the weighty unease of the unfamiliar that is shaping much of modern Europe. Then I reminded him he’d once expressed a fear that a reunified Germany might ‘in a great failure of imagination’ carry on where it had left off in 1945. Unexpectedly he didn’t talk of neo-Nazis or the far right but rather revealed that his fear had been swept aside by football.