Ancient History: Berlin Notes 1995-1996

[from the deep-storage archives]

I've just come from a reading in a cafe located in the rear courtyard of a large, deserted-looking building, just south of the Friedrichstrasse train station, whose lower half is encased in scaffolding. The street, Clara-Zetkin-Strasse, named by East German officials in memory of a resistance fighter killed by the National Socialists, is to have its name changed back again to Dorotheenstrasse, the name of a princess, as it was called before the war. Xeroxed notices posted along the street encourage passers-by to attend a demonstration protesting the name change, but that was over a week ago and most of the posters are torn and rain-smeared. A policeman patrols the far side of the street, in front of the old Hotel Metropol, a mammoth structure which appears to be in the process of being rebuilt from the ground up: the bottom two floors have been stripped to their concrete-beam supporting frames, while the upper stories are battered but intact. A number of other buildings nearby await renovation, some with ornate stone scrollwork about their high entryways that suggest they once housed government ministries.

The reading, held in a bright, high-ceilinged room lined with an exhibition of paintings, was so crowded that dozens of extra chairs had to be brought in from other parts of the building, and even so not everyone sat. The lights failed just as the proprietor began his introduction, and a man stood up out of the audience, identified himself as an electrician and began to dissemble part of the fuse box. When this failed, candles were brought in, and the young poet we'd come to hear began to read a poem in Japanese. Clearly it was a poem, her voice rose and fell in a rhythmic cadence, certain sounds repeated over and over, and when she was finished she looked up, smiled at her audience, and told us we'd hear the translation later. Only when I was walking down Clara-Zetkin-Strasse an hour later did I realize she'd tricked us, hadn't read the German text of the poem after all.

I walk home to Käthe-Kollwitz-Platz, a good three miles away, because the streetcars are out of service for the night, as indicated by a sign posted near the stop. Following the route north, I come upon two workers polishing the tracks with large machines that send up huge sprays of yellow sparks like Roman candles. Many people are on the street, walking in twos and threes, mingling their laughter with the voices and radio music of the city's open windows.

*

The Amerika Gedenkbibliothek is the unlikely repository for a rather large collection of secondary materials on Kleist, bequeathed by Georg Minde-Pouet, who led the Kleist-Gesellschaft under the National Socialists. (Some of his unsavory letters from the period have been published, leaving no doubt as to his political orientation.) The basement of this otherwise poorly-stocked neighborhood library is a chilly, underlit space cramped with shelves, its only seating a row of small desks along a glass wall facing an unkempt courtyard. The desks are roomy for one, too small for the two library users who usually share them. Old people from the neighborhood wander in to read the newspaper. I sit rifling through envelope after envelope of Minde-Pouet's notes on Kleist's letters, for the most part scribbled comments in Suetterlin script on scraps of paper: his attempts to track down the many persons, events and places referred to in passing in Kleist's often maddeningly cryptic correspondence. For the most part he discovered dead ends, though the occasional envelope contains a postcard from the great-grandchild of someone or other who remembers a family legend according to which...

The bathrooms at the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek are located at the foot of a narrow little staircase on whose subterranean landing sometimes sat one or two young men with AGB badges marked "attendant." One day I ask one of them what he's doing there, since he is clearly not a janitor (the typical condition of the AGB bathrooms suggests there is none). He replies that his is an ABM job (Arbeitsbeschaffungsmassnahme, a good German word amounting to "make-work"), and that he, Heiko, is required to sit there in front of the bathroom for a certain number of hours per week so as to continue to receive welfare benefits. He is reading a book about health hazards associated with various forms of heating, and explains to me why my dusty radiators at home increase my risk of lung cancer. His ABM colleague shows up for work with a stack of comic books and a walkman, but Heiko is always reading something or other. He says he doesn't want to go back to a real job because he's had such bad experiences with working conditions and harassing supervisors.

*

An attempt to buy a monthly pass for the Berlin public transit system:

The ticket window at the East Berlin subway station Dmitroffstrasse (now called Eberswalderstrasse) is closed and covered over with posters like the rest of the wall, with no indication of where tickets were now being sold. I wait in line at the kiosk opposite the steps leading down from the platform, but the old man behind the counter says only, "Of course I don't sell tickets" and has already turned to the next customer before I can ask anything else. I ask at a discount vegetable shop down the block, where the saleswomen sends me to a tobacco shop two blocks away. Here I request the bus pass from a middle-aged woman, plump and uncomfortable in her too-tight clothes, who immediately demands to know what sort of pass I've held before. I've never had one before, I tell her, I've just moved to Berlin. Then there's nothing I can do for you, she says. First you have to go to a major train station and fill out a form and submit a current photograph. Then you can come back here and get your card. But there are cards you don't need photos for, I protest. A major train station, she said, go to Alexanderplatz. On the way home I pass another tobacco shop, go in, and ask the elderly man behind the counter what sort of bus passes he has. He pulls out an "environment pass" the size of a credit card, no photo required, and sells it to me over the counter.

*

One day the Wilhelm-Pieck-Strasse is gone. The street signs still stand, but each bears a careful diagonal of red tape connoting its invalidity, and each signpost has now sprouted an additional white rectangle, mounted above the first, bearing the name Torstrasse, Gate Street, a harmless replacement for the name of one of the GDR's first leaders. A subtler change: the tiny rectangles bearing the numbers of the addresses to be found on each block have been removed from their metal frames beneath each obsolete sign and transferred to the one above, leaving below each Pieck-Strasse a stripe of framed empty space. But the streetcar still follows the old Pieck-Strasse to Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, where, from the six-story ruins of a corner building, stripped to a skeleton of brick and steel, someone has hung a huge banner bearing a quote from Walter Benjamin: "Example - Architecture - City - Distraction."

*

Encounter with an anti-Semite: I buy a pair of vintage Swiss Army trousers in a tiny shop in Kreuzberg and start chatting with the owner while the shop's seamstress hems them. He's a friendly, liberal-sounding man in his early thirties and talks to me about how displeased he is with the way Germany has tightened its immigration laws. Then he moves on to America, a country which in his opinion is going down the tubes because the Jews run everything, the newspapers, the schools, indeed the entire government. "I beg your pardon?" I say, and thus begins a long and heated discussion that soon drives all other potential customers present from his shop. The strangest thing about the man's argument is that he vehemently denies being anti-Semitic. There are lots of different people in the world, he says, and plenty of room for all of them, you just have to be careful not to give too much power to people in whose nature it lies to take over everything if you let them. When I tell him that these are precisely the stereotypes that made the Third Reich possible, something clicks in his head and he asks me if I'm Jewish.

*

I translate a handful of stories by the Japanese author Yoko Tawada, who read in the Clara-Zetkin-Strasse cafe. She writes in German as well as Japanese, her principle theme the experience of moving between cultures, of feeling and being foreign. Describing a phone booth lit up at night on a dark street, she writes:

Sometimes the phone booth resembled a transparent tree occupied by a tree spirit. The Japanese fairy tale 'The Bamboo Princess' begins with an old man seeing a luminous bamboo trunk and chopping it down. Inside he discovers a newborn baby girl that he raises together with his wife. The tale ends with the girl, who has become a grown woman, flying back to where she really comes from: the moon.

Tawada's images often serve as hinges that allow her to move between different cultural iconographies. The phone booth she is describing stood at the corner of a park in Tokyo near the house where she grew up, but she invokes it now in a context of specifically European enclosures that allow the tale "The Bamboo Princess" to be imported into a Western present. The writer travels in both space and time.

The nocturnal phone booth might also have been a spaceship that has just landed in the park. The moon men have sent a moon girl to Earth to inform them about our life. The girl is just making her first report. What would she say about the park? Would she have much to report so soon after her arrival?

The foreign writer: a moon girl making her report.

*

Käthe-Kollwitz-Platz is a grass- and playground-covered triangle surrounded by cafes: 1900, Rosenstuebchen, Westphal. Once artist hangouts, they are now swamped with tourists—not only Americans, but also West Berliners, for whom Prenzlauer Berg has become what Kreuzberg was for decades: a relatively exotic place to have a beer. Ask a local his reaction to the influx of West Berliners and you will hear: "It's good they come, but not all at once." "You aren't among friends anymore, who are these people?" and "Just another form of exploitation." The bars around the water tower just a block south expanded to accommodate the influx, but now they, too, have been given chic new interiors and overflow with Wessies. When residents complained of the noise from the sidewalk cafes, the city passed an ordinance requiring cafes to fold up their outdoor tables at ten o'clock, but now patrons purchase their beer indoors and go out to sit on the curb or the low wall beneath the water tower; the noise levels are unchanged.

*

The graffiti in the area has several leitmotifs. "Nazis out" is common, a translation of the neo-Nazi slogan "foreigners out"—and is sometimes accompanied by the graphic of a swastika dangling from a hangman's scaffold. Then one often sees "we mourn W. Grams" or "Wolfgang Grams - never forget!" Grams, a member of the radical left-wing terrorist organization Red Army Faction (which officially swore off violence in 1992), was presumably murdered in 1993 at the train station in Bad Kleinen by half a dozen secret service agents whose assignment had been to apprehend him. For weeks afterward, newspapers were full of confused reports, contradictory information. Of the six agents present, none could say how Grams was killed and by whom. The government then issued a statement declaring the death a suicide, which no one believed even then. The third bit of recurrent graffiti reads: "bei Raeumung 18.00 Kolle," a cryptic message for insiders: Kolle being Kollwitz-Platz, and the "clearing-out" in question referring to police eviction of house-squatters. Since there is an apartment shortage in Berlin, and since many East Berlin apartment buildings, most in bad repair, stood empty for years, there is a huge community of squatters, not all young, not all from the drug scene, inhabiting them. Many have sought legalization of their residences, some with success. But if the police launch an attack, there will at least be a demonstration, on Käthe-Kollwitz-Platz at six.

*

I wonder whether I shouldn't write my dissertation on the German postal system. An entire chapter could be devoted to the demise of the celebrated "Postsack," which has been replaced by an elusive creature called "Sendung zum ermässigten Entgelt im besonderen Beutel." Postal clerks nowadays have to look this one up in their guide to products and services, but don't encourage them to peruse their manuals too thoroughly, or they might discover that they are actually breaking the law if they surrender up to you one of the German postal system's mailbags to pack your book boxes in. This information is included in a tome one generally does not lay eyes on unless one finds oneself on the last leg of a four-hour book-schlepping trek from one East Berlin P.O. to the next which lands one in the supervisor's back office somewhere in the wasteland behind the Rotes Rathaus. This German postal service Bible contains a page-long list of specifications to be followed in the construction of an acceptable postal sack, to be furnished by the client (you). There is also a list of instructions, somewhat shorter, for the address tag. Many a postal clerk, out of ignorance or kindness (but don't count on it), can nevertheless be persuaded to make you a gift of a genuine official postal sack. The supervisor at Alexanderplatz eventually, after a good half hour of our studying the rules together, came up with an Italian mailbag for me (not Bundespost property). Meanwhile other disgruntled customers are banging away at his door. One old man, just as ancient and crotchety as the supervisor himself, complains that he's been waiting for twenty minutes already. "You can wait another twenty as far as I care!" cries my heroic protector. Book boxes can also be mailed individually, for four marks a kilogram, but each box is rounded up to the nearest kilo.

*

I move into an apartment in Neukölln, a working-class neighborhood south of Kreuzberg in the West. It's Sunday morning, and the need for caffeine drives me to one of the bars down the street (the Hobby Horse), which my landlady, herself a cabinet-maker, disdainfully refers to as a "prole's hangout." The place is clean, cheerful and surprisingly crowded; everyone there looks to be around sixty, and everyone is drinking beer, even the women. (One or two are drinking coffee and beer.) The only single man at the bar (drinking beer and schnapps, clearly not his first of the morning) comes to sit beside me, a glass in each hand. Have I just been to vote? he wants to know. It's local elections day, and there are polls set up in the high school across the street. I tell him I'm not allowed to vote, being a foreigner, and a moment later half the people in the bar are involved in an open discussion of why there's no point to voting, since it won't change anything anyhow. The man tells me he worked for many years at Tempelhof Airport, which is only a mile or two away, but a significant presence in Neukölln, which is crossed by the strip of air space used by approaching planes.

*

The manuscript of Kleist's translation of Molière's play Amphitryon has been lost, in fact scholars cannot even agree on the year of its composition. The most likely scenario, to my mind, has Kleist translating during the period (1805-1807) he spent in Koenigsberg. A literary nomad, Kleist was partial to borrowed books. Perhaps the Molière edition he used still exists, with his scribblings in the margins? The magnificent old library at Koenigsberg, now Kaliningrad, was destroyed during the war; I read the report of its last director, who fled shortly thereafter. The books have been dispersed to libraries throughout the former Soviet blok, to Vilna, Warsaw, Petersburg, Torun. I write to these libraries requesting information on their holdings, and find them surprisingly well stocked in 17th century French literature. This might make an interesting research pilgrimage some year--some other year.

*

Neukölln still displays its origins as a cluster of small villages. The old market squares still exist, spaced a good ten minutes' walk from one another; on some of them, farmer's markets are still held once or twice a week. Now there is a large Turkish population, which makes for lots of small groceries full of wonderful things like fresh olives and flatbread and sheep's milk cheese. Everyone talks about the tensions between Germans and Turks, and of course they do exist, but I never see anything of this in Neukölln. My neighbors (not that this is any better) are more likely to make nasty comments about Ossies.

A joke of sorts about foreigners and Ossies: an encounter actually experienced by East German friends of mine, a couple in their sixties. They find themselves in an unacceptably long line at the supermarket one day, and one remarks to the other, this is just like under Socialism. Whereupon the man in front of them, a Turkish local, turns around and says: well, we never sent for you!

*

I have been researching the role of translation in German Romanticism, and am astonished at the richness of the material I find. It seems all the important Romantic figures were thinking and writing about, if not also practicing, the art of translation. I spend many happy afternoons in the rare books section of the Staatsbibliothek flipping through issues of the Allgemeine Litteratur-Zeitung from the 1790s, a daily literary journal widely read at the time. Not only is there a strong emphasis on works in translation, but frequent reviews appear of language-learning textbooks, grammars and foreign-language and bilingual dictionaries. In addition, the journal regularly publishes reviews of books that have appeared in foreign-language editions both in Germany and abroad, in languages including not only English, French and Italian but also Latin, Danish, Polish and Hebrew. Reviews of translated books tend to place emphasis on a discussion of the translation itself; often books are reviewed in pairs: the original and its translation, or competing translations of the same book. And occasionally reviews discuss exclusively the translation. In American book reviews today, a translation's merits and failings are rarely discussed.

*

Next door to my house is a second-hand shop for housewares. I never see anyone inside. The owner, who seems not to recognize me even after I'd been saying hello to her on the sidewalk for months, keeps a short-tempered Doberman on a chain beside the door—this surely accounts at least in part for the absence of customers. Through the windows of the shop you can see piles of dishes, dusty chairs, children's toys, the odd half-assembled bicycle; there doesn't seem to be space enough to walk. The shop serves a more social than practical function: neighbors gather here to talk, particularly my building's superintendent, who can be found having a cigarette on the front steps in all weathers, since his wife won't let him smoke in the apartment. He has a dog too, a dark gray Pekinese that has become frail with age and has to be lifted up the front step. In fact, Neukölln is full of dogs, and since custom here does not require the dogs' owners to clean up after them, the sidewalks are eternally embellished with dog shit. This is the punchline to my landlady's joke: why is everyone in Neukölln hunchbacked?

*

It is December 31, 1995, one day after Heiner Müller's death, and the Berliner Ensemble is in mourning. After the evening's performance of Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui, the last play Müller staged, there are no curtain calls, just a heavy second curtain lowered over the first to signify that the stage is closed. The actors have played particularly well in Müller's honor. The lead actor, Martin Wuttke, will later be named Müller's successor as the theater's artistic director. He does an astonishing job of creating character in a role as highly stylized as Müller's conception of Brecht's Ui (whose rise to power transparently references that of Adolf Hitler). In the opening scene, he stands on all fours as a loudly panting dog, his lips and tongue dyed a bright red that makes the role all the more grotesque; he maintains this pose longer than seems possible. By the play's climax, Ui is giving speeches contorted into the shape of a swastika, arms and legs bent at right angles, gasping out the word "belief" with particular emphasis each time it occurs. Several days later I find myself having drinks in Kreuzberg with a handful of West Berlin acquaintances, none of whom seem to find Müller's loss significant.

*

A new subway stop opens a few blocks from my house, and the BVG, the Berlin transit system, organizes a street festival to celebrate. It's a bit like a county fair: on the shoddy, glitzy side, but surprisingly extensive, with a miniature ferris wheel, swing-you-in-circles rides, merry-go-round (with cars instead of horses), and then real horses, sort of: four of these tiny little ponies being led around in a tiny circle with excited children on their backs by handlers who look about ready to flip out from boredom; the whole show gets held up when one of the ponies stops to pee all over the place. Lots of beer stands, Schiessbuden, discount plant sales, rack upon rack of excellent polyester clothing. (Neukölln is the fashion capitol of the universe: they've perfected the art of wearing high heels with jogging pants.) I watch this woman putting "fantasy make-up" on little kids, slapping it on lovelessly with a sponge like someone who's painted more fence slats than is fun. Then someone pushes me out of the way and I wind up stepping on some guy who immediately gets this huge smile on his face as if he's enjoyed being stepped on, so I beat it out of there right quick. Neukölln is always good for excitement. The subway stop itself (Hermannstrasse, on the U8 line, linking it to the S-Bahn) is new and shiny in its seafoam blue tiles. Even the escalators are shiny.

*

The week I'm due to leave the country, the grocer from the little shop across the street where I've bought my vegetables all year asks me where I'm from. When I tell him, he looks surprised and says he'd assumed I was Yugoslavian. I've felt at home here, but it isn't so much my having adapted to the neighborhood as the neighborhood's having assimilated me. Americans don't live in Neukölln, Tempelhof Airport notwithstanding, and so Neukölln has provided me with an alternate history.