He bowed, thanking me clumsily. Took his bag, edging toward the door. He had no idea how important his presence had been each and every day.
BERLIN! The horror-name of my childhood. It was from Berlin that what had happened to me and my family had come. And wasn’t what we lived through after the war also a consequence of it? The journey could be a pilgrimage to the place that was a crossing for one’s existence and that of so many others.
I arrived at noon. Snowstorm, cold. The city rose amid arrows and ribbons of neon. Well-lit, warm apartment. I went out to orient myself. Rathenauplatz. I recalled Musil’s character in his great novel … First contact with the city. Partir, c’est brûler un peu? (To leave is to burn a little?)
I’m more interested in people than in houses, in streets rather than in monuments, in the atmosphere of a small, picturesque pub, rather than in contemplating statues or public events. I’ve probably lost interest in, and respect for, history. Have I ever truly had it? In childhood, no one told me the stories one usually tells children, I had no chance to like them. They bore me, I didn’t learn this kind of escapism early on. I would be content if I meant nothing to it too, if it let me alone, after bothering me for so long.
And yet, one evening I went to see the Reichstag. Then I arrived at Checkpoint Charlie. History embodied? Two eras were in dialogue within me, through me. A dialogue I would rather have forgotten. At least for a while, even for a very short while. The need to forget, its impossibility.
After several weeks of isolation, I looked for the people. Berlin gradually came to life, unveiling its rhythm, its diversity. I was stimulated by the city’s contrasts, not only by its heterogeneous population and by its political and administrative division. The peacefulness of the neighborhoods spread amidst woods and lakes, pastoral enclaves with a look of imposing solidity and the comfort of civilization bestowed upon them by well-being. In contrast, there was the bohemian vibration of the city’s vivacious downtown.
But I fell in love with Berlin’s population as a whole the night I watched them at a circus show. They instantly became ideal partners of gags and mime. The wonderful Roncali evening conquered even the most skeptical of spectators. I’d heard so many times: “Berlin is not Germany,” “Hitler conquered this city only after heavy fighting,” “What is livelier today in Germany one discovers in Berlin, in its tension, complications and ferment …”.
They often talk here of the dark Nazi period, but also of the ambiguities of the postwar political situation. I listen in silence. “At a certain human level, individuals understand each other instantaneously, you know. No matter what language, color or experience,” the German teacher who works with the foreign guests says. My librarian friend adds: “Don’t idealize. If you had to work, live the daily grind, you’d soon run into cunning, meanness, and envy.”
Berlin puts me in an advantageous position: I don’t have to discover the routine; I can simply look for possibilities.
“We hope you are over the pre-departure turmoil and that this year will be therapeutic,” my friend writes from Italy.
“The situation has worsened. Mother can no longer see at all. She often has angina attacks. To take her from her bed to the bathroom takes a quarter of an hour. The mail arrives with great difficulty. We received the postcard you sent forty days ago only yesterday,” Father writes from sweet Bukovina.
“First of all, we’d like to send you our warm greetings and to wish you the best on the occasion of your visit to Berlin and for the New Year. I can’t understand it that you didn’t know that we signed a contract for your book,” my new friend from Zürich writes.
Yes, the letters have begun to arrive. They are different from what they used to be. Less tense, it seems, less codified.
He who arrives with a fellowship from Eastern Europe isn’t the same as his French, English, Swiss, or Brazilian colleague. No, it isn’t just the letters that have a different vibration. The everyday tension comes from the successive, alternating shocks of normal life. The powerfully lit streets, the heated houses, the buses arriving as scheduled, the numerous stores full of merchandise. That is to say, the very attractive packaging. A friend told me: “The most important industry here is that of packaging.”
Yet, aside from the great ease and comfort, is man still alone and vulnerable? How does he deal here, in his freedom, with uncertainty, illness, demagoguery, greed — so many of reality’s sad aspects? The similarities between systems, as well as their differences, are being worked out in a dialogue that is far from reassuring for the future of today’s world.
The comings and goings at night on the Ku’damm, the burlesque joy around Württemberger Plaza or on Europa-Center. The charm of the little square of Savigny Platz. The Parisian street corner with its little garden in front of the Kurbe theater. The picturesque Kreuzberg oriental ghetto. The distant quiet reigning around the mansions of Grünewald. The train and the little pleasure boats crisscrossing the city. The natural frame of daily life. In the end, an inner landscape. A sign that I am adapting, maybe. Or maybe the beginning of a real relationship with the surroundings? Discussions about Nazism and prewar Berlin, about protecting the environment, and the student movements of 1968, about glasnost and Reagan, and the modernist monuments on Ku’damm. About literature and Boris Becker’s latest tennis game, about the marriage crisis and the Queen of England’s visit. I watched the Berliners on the street and at the theater, at outings and in offices and buildings, but also in parks, joyful and naked under the stingy sun of a crippled summer.
I won’t declare theatrically, like so many officials: “I am a Berliner.” If I were, I would probably see its difficulties and contradictions more clearly, I would find a less superficial, more critical and articulated, reason for my attachment to it. The city’s spirit would attract me not only with its lights and movement, but also with its opposite face of shadows and failures, wounds and howls.
One beautiful July afternoon, in the Rathaus-Schönberg bus station, a young woman answered my question with unusual graciousness. She took a map from her purse to show me the place where I wanted to go. In the bus we sat next to each other. I understood that literature meant something to her. I waited until she got off to accompany her … I lost her, like a slender apparition, as always happens to me with promises I don’t know how to keep, how to appropriate. She had told me, however, that she lived in Wilmersdorf, but there was no way I could send her a copy of my book, coming out here this fall. Was this brief encounter a sign of acceptance by the city?
One morning, my friend paid me a visit. He rang the doorbell. I looked at my watch. It was barely past ten. I rapidly brushed my hair with my fingers, I straightened my collar. I rarely received visits, and the time was not convenient.