Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [1]
‘That’s a long time.’
‘Sure is. I have my regulars, I can tell you. They know me, I know them. I had a prince once, a von Hohenzollern.’
I think she must use the prince on everyone. But it works—I’m curious. ‘U-huh. Before or after the Wall came down?’
‘Before. He was over on a day trip from the west. I used to get quite a few westerners you know. He invited me’—she pats her large bosom with a flat hand—‘to his palace. But of course I couldn’t go.’
Of course she couldn’t go: the Berlin Wall ran a couple of kilometres from here and there was no getting over it. Along with the Great Wall of China, it was one of the longest structures ever built to keep people separate from one another. She is losing credibility fast, but her story is becoming correspondingly better. And, suddenly, I can’t smell a thing any more. ‘Have you travelled yourself since the Wall came down?’ I ask. She throws her head back. I see she is wearing purple eyeliner which, at that angle, phosphoresces.
‘Not yet. But I’d like to. Bali, something like that. Or China. Yes, China.’ She raps her painted nails on the glass cabinet and dreams into the middle distance over my left shoulder. ‘You know what I’d really like to do? I’d really like to have me a look at that Wall of theirs.’
From Ostbahnhof the train pulls out and finds its cruising speed. The rhythm soothes like a cradle, hushes my tapping fingers. The conductor’s voice comes through speakers reciting our stops: Wannsee, Bitterfeld, Lutherstadt Wittenberg. In northern Germany I inhabit the grey end of the spectrum: grey buildings, grey earth, grey birds, grey trees. Outside, the city and then the country spool past in black and white.
Last night is a smoky blur—another session at the pub with Klaus and his friends. But this is not one of those hangovers where you write the day off to darkness. It is the more interesting kind, where destroyed synapses are reconstructing themselves, sometimes missing their old paths and making odd, new connections. I remember things I haven’t remembered before—things that do not come out of the ordered store of memories I call my past. I remember my mother’s moustache in the sun, I remember the acute hunger-and-loss feeling of adolescence, I remember the burnt-chalk smell of tram brakes in summer. You think you have your past filed away under subject headings but, somewhere, it waits to reconnect itself.
I remember learning German—so beautiful, so strange—at school in Australia on the other side of the earth. My family was nonplussed about me learning such an odd, ugly language and, though of course too sophisticated to say it, the language of the enemy. But I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together. Things could be brought into being that had no name in English—Weltanschauung, Schadenfreude, sippenhaft, Sonderweg, Scheissfreundlichkeit, Vergangenheitsbewältigung. I liked the sweeping range of words from ‘heartfelt’ to ‘heartsick’. And I liked the order, the directness that I imagined in the people. Then, in the 1980s, I came to live in West Berlin for a while and I wondered long and hard what went on behind that Wall.
A barrel-stomached woman opposite me unwraps black bread sandwiches. So far she has managed to pretend I am not here, although if we weren’t careful our knees could touch. She has painted on her eyebrows in arches of surprise, or menace.
I think about the feeling I’ve developed for the former German Democratic Republic. It is a country which no longer exists, but here I am on a train hurtling through it—its tumbledown houses and bewildered people. This feeling needs a sticklebrick word: I can only describe it as horror-romance. It’s a dumb feeling, but I don’t want to shake it. The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name. East Germany has disappeared, but its remains