Fear of Mirrors. Tariq Ali
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and self-confidence exhibited by the young SPD apparatchik. Like them, he was interested only in power. They could certainly do business with him. They asked him to come and meet their colleagues in a few days’ time.
The same evening Karl went to an early evening drinks party hosted by the local boss of CNN in honour of a visiting dignitary from Atlanta. At least three government ministers, numerous ambassadors, the SPD High Command and other denizens of the videosphere. A senior colleague introduced Karl to Monika Minnerup, a young woman who could not have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five years old. She smiled and her almond-shaped eyes lit up like oil lamps. Karl shook hands and looked at her. She had a wide, sensuous face framed by short, curly black hair, thin lips and was dressed in a loose grey silk suit, which made any speculation on the shape of the body that lay underneath a bit difficult. She was a systems analyst at a big bank and she earned a small fortune. Karl was impressed. If it had been any other occasion he would have stuck with her, but his eyes began to wander above her head, trying to glimpse the famous and the powerful. He wanted to go and join the group listening to the Foreign Minister.
‘If you want to go and kiss arse, why don’t you piss off? I loathe making polite talk with small town careerists. Goodbye.’
Monika walked away leaving him in a state of shock. His first instinct was to run after her, but she was already near the exit and, anyway, he told himself as he recovered from her impact, he really did want to hear what the Foreign Minister was telling the Americans.
After graduating, Karl had wanted only one thing: to run away, to get out of Berlin as quickly as possible. Helge’s dash to New York had initially upset him. Bitterness had set in soon afterwards. He was angry with her for deserting him. She could have moved and set up a practice in Frankfurt. Why leave the country at such a time? Karl was genuinely puzzled by her choice of New York. Ultimately he’d convinced himself that it must be a lover. Fine, but why hadn’t she told him?
He knew she wasn’t pleased when, in one of her letters, she referred to him as an ‘apparatchik on the make in Bonn, and working for an apparatus full of shit’. Her letter had made him laugh, but his sharp reply had led first to a ceasefire and then a total cessation on her part. She no longer wrote. Instead they exchanged greetings and indulged in small talk on the phone, once, sometimes twice a week.
Karl sighed when he thought of his father. He was beyond redemption. Vlady was no bloody use at all. He lived in his own world, cocooned from reality. He had achieved nothing in his own life, apart from a few jargon-filled books on Marxist aesthetics which were no longer fashionable. In previous years, even though very few students had understood what he was trying to say, his books had been obligatory bookshelf decoration for left-wing intellectuals on both sides of the Wall. Nobody bought Vlady’s books any more. Karl felt completely alienated from his father. Vlady’s lifestyle – he still refused to dress properly – was a disgrace. His politics just left Karl speechless and angry. Why couldn’t the old fool understand it was all over? Karl had stopped arguing, but Vlady still had enough intellectual power to provoke and irritate his son. On the last occasion Karl had struck back, his voice uncharacteristically high.
‘It’s all over, Vlady! Finished. Unlike the phoenix, your DDR will never rise again. And I’m glad.’
Vlady smiled.
‘So am I, but what has any of that to do with Marxism?’
This time Karl almost screamed in dismay.
‘Finished. Finished. Finished! A utopia flushed down with the rest. How can Marxism exist, when it has been abandoned by its subject – the heroic proletariat? Can’t you and Helge understand? Marxists are nothing but flecks of foam on the dark blue ocean.’
He, who had once been so close to them, now wanted to disremember his parents. He was building his own career. He had a time plan. Success, he told himself, was the quickest way to erase DDR memories, which still haunted him. Karl intended to be a member of the Bundestag in 2000 and Chancellor by 2010.
This was ironic, given that he had never revealed any real interest in politics. His addiction was very new. He had chosen the SPD like one chooses a football team. There is a simple rule. If you stick with your team through bad times, there is a reward sooner or later. When he was young he had simply ignored the endless chatter about history and politics. He had loved his grandmother Gertrude. She had spent a lot of time with him, but not like the others. She always put him to bed with adventure yams, stories of heroism during the last war and the resistance to Hitler in Germany. Perhaps some residue from that time had made him prefer the SPD to the Christian Democrats. Perhaps.
Karl wanted to start life afresh. He had seen an advertisement for a researcher’s post and applied, never imagining that he would get an interview, let alone the job. The Ebert Foundation had advertised for graduates. They wanted bright young things in their twenties, whose brains could be attached to computers which would then churn out documents for the policy staff at SPD headquarters on the Ollenauerstrasse.
He had interviewed well. His cold-blooded critique of the DDR had impressed the two women who interviewed him. Unlike those of some of his competitors from the old East, Karl’s presentation was emotionless. No grandiose proclamations of freedom had spouted from his mouth. His approach was clinical. He had concentrated on the inability of the state-ownership system to deliver the goods. For him, the collapse was due to material shortages, an insolvent economy which exposed an impoverished ideology. It was this, he told them, that triggered the Fall, rather than any great yearning for abstractions like democracy and freedom.
The women were impressed. They looked carefully at this tall young man in his dark-blue suit and grey bow-tie. He was clearly intelligent. His instincts were conservative. Everything about him – the way he took notes, the meticulous filing system in his briefcase – indicated a neat and systematic approach to work.
They kept him talking for nearly two hours, but the only time he had shown any trace of emotion was when they asked whether he would have been equally happy working for the CDU.
‘Of course not!’ Karl’s voice was a note higher. ‘I am a Social Democrat.’ The older of the two women, Eva Wolf, a veteran of the sixties’ student movement, would have preferred it if this young man had displayed just a tiny sign of rebelliousness, but he did not, and she had shrugged her shoulders. These kids were different.
In her written report on Karl to the Foundation, in which she recommended that he be given the job, Eva described him as the archetypal new model Social Democrat. She noted that he was ‘a complete slave to power, obsessed with one idea: how to propel the SPD into power. If it means developing ideas that are acceptable to the Bavarians, he is ready to prepare a draft; if it means ditching old party shibboleths, even at the cost of annoying our friends in IG Metall, he is strongly in favour.
‘When we asked him if he was prepared to move to Bonn within a few months, he smiled and said he was prepared to leave Berlin tomorrow. I think Tilman should have a long session with him and then we should make a final decision. Karl Meyer would be wasted as a researcher at the Institute. He should be given a position immediately in the Party apparatus. He thinks quickly but is not the sort who leaps to intuitive conclusions. Everything is thought out carefully. I am enclosing a copy of the speech he wrote when we tested him. You will notice a few original phrases. If Scharping can deliver speeches like this, who knows but we might even win.’
Eva’s intuition on these matters was greatly respected by her friends at Party headquarters. Within a month of joining the Foundation, Karl was safely settled in the research bureau of the SPD.
One outcome of his move to Bonn was a strong personal friendship with Eva. Twenty-five years his senior, she had partially replaced Vlady and Helge in this crucial transition period of his life. She was the only friend with whom he could talk about his past. He told her about Gerhard’s suicide, which had upset him a great deal. Gerhard, who understood him, but was worried by Karl’s indifference to Marxist politics. Gerhard, who had taught him a song that began: ‘From the devil’s behind blows unrest/From God’s backside only boredom …’
There were moments, Karl told Eva, when he used to wish that Gerhard had been