Fear of Mirrors. Tariq Ali
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We had our differences, of course, but I preferred to believe they were generational, even oedipal. In recent years, you have mocked my beliefs and, on one occasion, I was told you referred to me in public as a dinosaur. I was born in 1937. Not that old, is it Karl? It was your choice of epithet that surprised me.
Dinosaurs died out over a million years ago, but we are still obsessed with them. Why? Because the knowledge of how and why they became extinct has a lot to teach us about the life of our planet. There is even talk of genetically reconstructing a dinosaur. In other words, my boy, I am proud to be a dinosaur. Your analogy was more revealing than you think. Perhaps deep, deep down we are still on the same side?
My parents were revolutionaries in the golden days of communism as well as through its bloodiest years. I was a child in Moscow during a war that is now a distant memory in Europe. I have lived most of my life in the twentieth century. You were born in 1971, and with luck you’ll live most of your life in the twenty-first century. All you remember is the death agony of the Soviet Union, the final decadence of the state system they called communism, your mother and me working for a future that never arrived, and the re-unification of Germany.
And, of course, you remember your mother packing her case and walking out of our apartment. I know you hold me responsible for the break-up of the relationship and your mother’s subsequent decision to accept the offer of a job in New York. You think it was my affair with Evelyne that was the last straw, but you are wrong. Helge and I were far too close for that to happen.
How does a marriage like ours come to an end? I think we were too similar in temperament, too like each other in too many ways. Our marriage had been an act of self-defence. She needed me to break from her orthodox Lutheran household. I needed her to get away from my mother, Gertrude. When the outside pressures disappeared, our lives suddenly seemed empty, despite the tumult on the streets. We were trapped in ourselves. Evelyne was a postscript.
Sometimes I feel that you also hold me personally responsible for the crimes that were committed in the name of Communism. And now you are angry because I have joined the PDS.* Why? Why? I can still hear the anguish in your voice when I first told you of my decision. I, who had never been part of their officialdom, was now joining a Party you saw as nothing but a cover for the old apparatchiks.
Was it just that, Karl? Or did you think it might affect your own meteoric rise inside the SPD† and your future career? Am I being unfair? All I can say is that I would be very surprised if my decision to join the PDS kept you out of an SPD government in the next century. Judging from what I read and what I hear, I feel you will go far. You are already an expert at making socialism ‘reasonable’ to its natural enemies, by purging it of any subversive charge. Better that than a turn to religion. If you had become a priest or a theologian, your mother and I would have excommunicated you from the church that is our heart.
Please understand one thing. By the time you are sitting in the antechamber of the Chancellor’s office, memories of the Cold War will have evaporated. You will be faced with very different, real-life monsters. Europe and America are full of demagogues, each busy working on his particular version of Mein Kampf, even though the style will be different. The animal ferocity of the old fascists is giving way to the unctuous paternalism of their successors.
I joined the PDS to protest against the squalid situation in which we Easties find ourselves, to publicly declare the dignity of distress, to show people that there might be a collective way out of our mess. There have been more suicides in East Germany than anywhere else in Eastern Europe. We don’t starve, but we feel psychologically crushed. It affects us all, regardless of the initials that command our allegiance and for whom we vote in the elections. I know many supporters of our gross chancellor who feel exactly as I do.
The Westies thought that everything would be fine once our past had been destroyed and all traces of the DDR* eliminated. How foolish they are, these women and men of the West. They thought that money, their money, was the magic solution. It is the only language they understand themselves, and I don’t blame them too much for this weakness. After all, in the post-war period their motto was to strive for money, more money and only then would people recognize their own true worth. They became so preoccupied with this task that it served as a therapy which helped many of them to erase the memories of their own complicity with the Third Reich.
In our case it wasn’t so simple. However awful, however grotesque the old DDR was – and it was that from the beginning till the end – it was not the Third Reich. The equation is stupid. It insults our intelligence. You know that as well as I, so please make sure that it trickles down to your new masters.
Over forty years we evolved different cultures. Take our language, for instance. We even speak differently. In the West grammar has been almost forgotten. Life in the DDR schools was stifling, but our kindergartens were really good and in the sixties and seventies the Prusso-Stalinist structures in the universities were beginning to reveal dangerous cracks.
Your children will never see The Sand Man. Wasn’t it much better than the American rubbish they show the children in the West, or am I just a pathetic old bore, who is beginning to get on your nerves?
Many of us are happy that our country is one again, but sad that everything here is being crushed. Their new Berlin, the official Berlin for the next century, is being designed and constructed to obliterate the past, to put the genie of history back into the lamp. Yet they are simultaneously creating the conditions to revive the old polarizations. The rich Westies are buying up all the real estate so that they can become even richer. And they bring their own towels and soap when they stay in our hotels. A new homogeneity is being imposed on us. Of course, we have the freedom to protest. This is good.
Gerhard’s letter arrived the day after I had heard his suicide reported on the radio. A few lines. A former professor had hanged himself in his garden in Jena. That’s all. I read Gerhard’s letter over and over again. This was the voice of my closest friend. Less than a fortnight ago, we had spent an evening together. Like me, Gerhard had been dismissed from his post. He could not remain Professor of Mathematics at the university in Jena because of his political views. Here was a man who had celebrated the fall of the Wall like everyone else.
Alas, Gerhard’s father had been a general in military intelligence. The Westies were purging us with a vengeance. Tell me something, Karl. What use is a Germany that sentences people like Gerhard to death? You wept when I showed you his letter. Do you remember that mild, beaming face, often dreaming, often filled with self-doubt, but never withdrawn or gloomy?
At first it’s like an ember. Then it begins to flicker and soon there’s a flame. It is this flame that penetrates the brain. The result? Constant pain. It’s when my mind cannot contain the pain; when it overpowers everything – hope, love, pleasant memories, everything – it’s when it brutally occupies the past that the thought first occurs. The pain refuses to go away. And then, on a beautiful sunny afternoon like today, I think of the best way to go. Why shouldn’t I hang myself from the old oak in the garden? A semi-public act. The neighbours will report the event. Ultimately, Vlady, it is the only means of escape left to us. The Westies want to write us off completely. We never existed. Everything was shit. I cannot live in a country where human beings are once again being seen as rubbish to be swept aside … Spiritual poverty is worse than death, degradation or suicide …
The only image you have of us, Karl, is that of a vanquished generation whose entire legacy is poisoned. Telling you Ludwik’s story may give me the opportunity to tell you more than you know about your grandmother and about myself. Don’t panic just yet. Spare me your condescension and pity. This is not going to be a self-justification or an attempt to wean you away from the apparatus to which you have become so attached. Everything in this world is now relative. I rejoice that you are a Social Democrat and not a Christian Democrat, and one day you must explain what divides you from them today.
What I want, above all, is to rescue the people in this story from the grip of all those whose only interest