I hadn’t been in Berlin since 1942, and I wouldn’t have been tempted to come if the fastest route to Cottbus hadn’t been by plane via Berlin. I knew that the five-story house in which I had grown up had been destroyed in 1945, along with all the neighboring houses, and replaced in the fifties by a six-story apartment block. My parents had died in the attack. Klara’s parents had moved out of their villa near Wannsee to a villa on Lake Starnberg shortly before the end of the war. The friends of my childhood and youth had dispersed in all directions. In the seventies we had a class reunion. I didn’t go. I don’t want to remember.
I found a cheap hotel at the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden. As I stood by the window, looking down at the traffic, I got the urge to go out and take a look around and perhaps find a restaurant where the food tastes like it used to, like it did at home. I went to the Brandenburg Gate, saw the buildings rising on the Pariser Platz, the cranes towering into the skies. On the Potsdamer Platz they had sawed open the city’s torso and were conducting open heart surgery: floodlights, excavations, cranes, scaffolding, and building skeletons, sometimes already floor after floor with finished masonry, balconies, and windows. I walked on and recognized the Ministry of Aviation and the remains of the Anhalter train station, and on Tempelhofer Ufer the building where I had worked as a junior clerk for a lawyer. I avoided the street where I had been a child.
I didn’t find a restaurant whose food promised to taste the way it used to. But I found an Italian restaurant where the perch and the crème caramel were the way they ought to be, and the carafe of Sardinian white wine overshadowed all the Frascati, suave, or pinot grigios. I was content, asked where the nearest metro station was, and set out for my hotel.
I wanted to transfer at the Hallesches Tor, but as I got off the last car I came face-to-face with seven or eight young men with shaved heads, black jackets, and military boots, standing there as if they’d been waiting for me.
“Hey! Granddad!”
I wanted to keep going but they wouldn’t let me through, and when I tried to sidestep them they wouldn’t let me pass. They forced me back toward the outer edge of the platform. The metro line here crosses the Landwehr Canal like an elevated railway, and I could see the dark water beneath me.
“Where are you heading, Grandpa?”
On the opposite platform I saw some youths who were looking at us with interest. Otherwise the platforms were empty. “To my hotel and to bed.”
They laughed as if I’d just uttered the greatest one-liner. “To his hotel!” one of them hooted, leaning forward and slapping his thighs. “To bed!” Then he said: “You were there, right?”
“Where?”
“With the Führer, where else? Did you ever get to see him?”
I nodded.
“Give Grandpa some of your beer; he saw the Führer.” The leader of the pack nudged the young man next to him, and he offered me his can of beer.
“Thank you, but I’ve already drunk enough this evening.”
“Did you hear that? He got to see the Führer!” the leader announced to his pack; he also yelled it out to the youths on the opposite platform. Then he asked me: “And how did you greet him?”
“Come on, surely you know that.”
“Show me, Grandpa!”
“I don’t want to do that.”
“You don’t want to show us? Then do as I do!” He clicked his heels together, flung his right arm into the air, and yelled: “Heil Hitler!” The others didn’t utter a sound. He brought his arm down. “So?”
“I don’t want to.”
“You’d rather take a swim down there?”
“No, I just want to go-to my hotel, and to bed.”
This time nobody laughed. The leader came closer and I edged back until I felt the railing against my spine. He raised his hands and patted me down, as if he were searching for weapons. “You’re not wearing a life jacket, Grandpa. You might drown. If you get water in your nose-” With a jolt he jammed his index and middle fingers into my nostrils and pushed my head backward until I was at the point of losing my balance. “So?” He let go of me.
My nose was smarting. I was frightened. I couldn’t think fast enough: Should I play along? Would that be cleverer? Was that cowardly? Was it some sort of betrayal? Was this and what it symbolized worth getting hurt or getting pneumonia? They grabbed hold of me and I stuttered out a “Heil Hitler.” The leader of the pack told me to say it louder and I said it louder, and when he again said, “Louder!” and they let go of me, I stood on the platform and shouted as loud as I could: “Heil Hitler!”
Now they were laughing again and clapping. “Bravo, Granddad! Bravo!” But their leader shook his head silently until all the others fell silent and then said: “He didn’t raise his arm, though, did he? It doesn’t count without the arm.” They stared at him and then at me and then at him, and they understood before I did. They grabbed me by the arms and legs, hooted, and swung me back and forth-“one, two, three”-and as the metro came thundering into the station, they flung me over the railing into the canal. When I surfaced, I could still hear them hooting.
The stone embankment on the near side was too steep, but I made it to the other side and managed to climb onto the street across a wooden landing. Two taxis didn’t stop, but the third driver had plastic covers on his seats, so twenty minutes later I was back at my hotel and under a hot shower.
I hadn’t come to any great harm. The following morning, the side of my body that had hit the water was a single big bruise. I also had a runny nose and a slight fever. But my injury was elsewhere. I’d had a chance to make up for the wrongs I had done in the old days. And when does one ever get such a chance? But I’d done it wrong again.
19 Everything comes together
The Sorbian Cooperative Bank is on the old market square in Cottbus. I went inside and took a look around until I ran the risk of being noticed. Then I went to the teller and got 91.50 marks for the fifty-dollar bill I’d just purchased across the street at the Deutsche Bank for 99.50 marks.
It was like any other bank. The modern furnishings were of wood and steel, the walls covered with large abstract paintings. What was different was the life-sized wood relief of Hans Kleiner by the door, guarding the entrance. Also different was that Vera Soboda, the manager, had her desk right in the main hall, which was either a legacy of the Socialist past or state-of-the-art management and administration. If the woman sitting at the desk was Vera Soboda, then the Sorbian Cooperative Bank had a manager of middle years, somewhat plump, somewhat tough, more tractor driver on a Socialist farming cooperative than banker. But the staff going up to her from other desks interacted with her with such deference and speed that I concluded she must have given them the best of training.
In this bank, too, there was a gate on the side, but I didn’t see any cars driving in or out, even though I lingered all day, frozen to the bone, in various stores, at an Eduscho café, and in doorways. I didn’t see any young men in dark suits, either. The abundant bank clientele was made up of local people: modest savers, some in anoraks and gray loafers of the kind Karl-Heinz Ulbrich wore, some in bright and shiny tracksuits, some in pants and jackets that looked as if the blue of the East German Youth Movement shirts were vying for a second career in West European fashion.
The only remaining sign of East Germany was the people’s clothes. The stores belonged to the same chains as those in Mannheim and Heidelberg, Viernheim and Schwetzingen. I looked into side streets and saw more streets that had just been dug up, more houses that were being renovated, sometimes also a house in a state of utter ruin. On the other hand, there were fewer of the architectural sins of the sixties and seventies. The housing projects I had seen as the train headed toward the station were no worse than those in Waldhof or Boxberg. Everything was coming together.