I remember one summer in a house in the countryside, a house that hasn’t been our house for a long time now: I was sitting at the electric typewriter, writing a seminar paper on a fairly obscure topic, but one that had provoked me to intensive reflection and obsessive writing. I hadn’t even chosen the topic myself, it was my professor’s suggestion. That was the first time that I experienced how someone else could open a door for me into my own reflections. I typed, looked out at the lake, typed some more. Whenever I wanted to change some part of the text, I would take scissors and cut it up into individual paragraphs, shuffle them around on the floor until the collage was just right, and then reach for the glue. A long-forgotten approach to writing, it was 1992, a time we now refer to as “the last century.” When my friends came to visit, they left me alone with my work in the morning, in the afternoon we would go for a swim together, cook, talk, lie in the sun. I was in my mid-twenties.

It was probably during that time that I learned to live with unfinished things, and with the knowledge that houses built for eternity aren’t really eternal. Only as an adult did I learn that when Hitler planned the major building projects for his Thousand-Year Reich, he intended them to be magnificent ruins even after those thousand years had come to an end. So the destroyed city of Berlin offered many opportunities to learn which parts of a dome or a department store survive, to learn that it’s possible to live quite comfortably in the bottom two floors of an apartment building even when the top two floors have been bombed to rubble. And that’s the sort of knowledge that you never forget. Even today, without thinking too much about it, I automatically transform all shopping malls into the ruins of shopping malls, I see clouds of dust rising up in luxury boutiques, I imagine the glass facades of office buildings shattering and crashing to the ground, revealing the naked offices behind them where no one is working anymore. I know very well what it would be like if all of the rubber trees in the living rooms and all of the geraniums on the balconies dried up because no one was there to water them, or because the people who were there had more urgent tasks to attend to than watering their plants. I see fountains full of wreckage, I see streets that are no longer passable, and I wonder which pieces of furniture in my apartment might still have a piece of floor left to stand on when the rest of the apartment is no longer there. Similarly, I’ve always known how the people sitting across from me on the subway — children, teenagers, adults in the prime of life — will look when they’re 80 years old, I’ve had no choice but to transform those people into their own ruins, too, into sick, wise, barren, or overripe ruins of faces and bodies, I’ve known what kind of decay awaits them, and I’ve seen it again and again in different forms. This compulsion for transformation is still with me today, as if the decay of everything in existence were simply the other half of the world, without which nothing could be imagined.

And at the same time, I myself was living right in the middle of a construction site that could only be there because nothing, or almost nothing, remained from before — but I didn’t even understand what I was experiencing. And that’s probably always the case: It takes us an entire lifetime to unravel the mysteries of our own lives. Layer upon layer of knowledge accumulates upon the past, revealing it anew each time as a past that we certainly lived through, but couldn’t even begin to understand.

At the time, I assumed that these tales were supposed to end happily, so I approached them with that expectation, always prepared to keep searching for the Isles of the Blessed. And so as a teenager I arrived at the Rosenhaus in Adelbert Stifter’s Indian Summer, where life is arranged in the service of beauty, where nature is recorded and ordered and organized according to new categories, the narrator has an inheritance that provides him with an income for life, and he roams through the mountains collecting botanical samples in his vasculum, learns to arrange statues in the proper light, he studies the trades of men with equanimity and kindness, engages in philosophical conversations, contemplates cameos and paintings, and everything that he does is filled with meaning and order — and free from the constraints to which people are otherwise subjected in their earthly existence. The Rosenhaus is the vision of an elite existence in freedom, a secure existence within an orderly world, but that order is not imposed from without, it is self-created. But even here, the narrator’s freedom is not only spatial, it is also temporal. It is the narrator’s good fortune to be able to choose his own tasks, and to allow for each of these tasks as much time as he deems necessary. From the very first page, the book puts the reader at ease, the same sort of ease that the narrator enjoys thanks to the circumstances of his life. Perhaps it was this sense of ease — or the nearly autistic organization of the world in this book — that made it seem to me like a place where my own thoughts could find refuge, an inward escape, a utopia, leading away from a system that sought to explain all things in worldly terms, and into a microscopic infinity.

I encounter such lost souls again as I read the Spoon River Anthology, in which Edgar Lee Masters gives the dead residents of a small town ten or twenty lines each to describe the lives they have led. Alcoholics, secret affairs, crooked business dealings, old maids, lunatics, as well as some people who didn’t drink, didn’t make crooked deals, who just married this or that neighbor, didn’t lose their minds — but all of them have died, each one a different death. All of that in ten or twenty lines.

The world is there in every word, no matter how small. The world is poured into each of these literary words as into a funnel, which draws together all of the writer’s life circumstances and experiences, everything the writer knows, and possibly hates, about culture and history, but also about vegetation, landscape, climate, the sense of time, and other elements of the writer’s surroundings, incorporating them into a single stream. Because literary writing is always, at the same time, an act of translation, condensing everything you know, everything you have experienced, into a few words — and the writer’s choice of words always depends upon all the countless other stories that have been poured into those words, on the charges the words carry, on the world that has called them forth.

[...] Berlin was a capital city, but those infernal terms like “desirable location” were still foreign to us, because all of East Berlin lay outside of the world in which desirable locations existed. Idyll. Innocence. Indecency. Inbreeding. My parents’ furniture was in the Biedermeier style, and our money was light like play money. So I could certainly talk about the fall of the wall — and if someone asked me about my feelings at the time, I would say something like: It dragged us into this big, wide world so quickly that there was no time to think. Did it drag us forward or backward? Backward, I felt. Only after several weeks of refusal did I set foot in that foreign land that spoke the same language, even the same Berlin dialect, only then did I cross the border for the first time. A door that only opens once a century had opened, but now that century was gone forever. Something was going too quickly, going wrong, I felt. If nothing else, the skeptical attitude that we had cultivated toward our own government had taught us once and for all to keep a critical distance, to maintain our independent thinking in light of the government’s flawed stewardship of our common goal. None of my friends believed that the world in which we had lived was the best of all possible worlds — but now, all of a sudden, we were supposed to believe that that best of all possible worlds had been found? There was a lot of talk of freedom now, but I couldn’t make much of this word freedom, which floated freely in all sorts of sentences. Freedom to travel? (But will we be able to afford it?) Or freedom of opinion? (What if no one cares about my opinion?) Freedom to shop? (But what happens when we’re finished shopping?)

Only at that moment did I experience a sort of virginal amazement at the fact that a book isn’t there until you write it. If I don’t make the girl appear, she doesn’t appear. If I don’t make her think, keep quiet, say something now and then, meet this or that person, then she doesn’t think, doesn’t keep quiet, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t meet anyone. Then there’s no girl, and no story.

And yet the story wasn’t even there in my head yet either, at least not in the sense that I could simply write it down.

Yes, there is a field there that is beckoning (indeed, many important scenes in the theater take place in an “open field”), but the story isn’t there yet. Woyzeck hunts for mushrooms at night in an open field, it’s more or less like that. So I make my way across the field, blind and seeing at the same time. Groping would probably be a better way to express it, the way that I try to conjure up something that isn’t even there yet, to make it materialize out of a blind spot; my search leads me out, that is, I lead myself — but the reverse is also true, as it is in every search, I’m led by the thing I’m searching for. So it’s a state in between the knowledge that something is there and the ignorance of what that something is. This, I think, is what makes the work of writing so much like love, makes it exert a pull on us like love. By the way, this process of groping is also the reason that sentences which may be false in their own right can still be true, because the field that I make my way across as I write can only be partly comprehended by the understanding.

All right. I want to hide behind the girl, she’s my mask, as you know, the mask I wear so that I can run naked across the playing field. So the girl can’t look like me. And she can’t act as I would act. While I turn a smiling face to the world, a face that always makes me look younger than I really am, while people give me friendly advice because they think I need it, while things come easily to me because people aren’t afraid of me — the girl has to be uncouth and unshapely, dirty where I’m clean, timid where I’m confident, uptight where I’m uninhibited, weak where I’m strong, but nevertheless this girl is my mask, nevertheless this girl still has to accept advice when someone thinks she needs it, she can’t make others afraid, she has to be able to be happy. And the reverse is true, too: I also have to be uncouth, unshapely, dirty, timid, uptight, and weak. Because otherwise I wouldn’t know this character well enough to wear her as a mask. The mask has to fit me but nevertheless hide me, the story has to be my story but still someone else’s, if I’m going to be able to tell it at all. That’s why Josef Winkler can write in his book Roppongi: “When my father died, we were staying in Japan . . . , we drove from Tokyo into the mountains of Nagano, past smoking volcanoes, to a literature symposium,” but the Josef Winkler in the book isn’t identical to the writer Josef Winkler; and Thomas Bernhard can write in his book A Child: “At the age of eight I rode my first few yards on a bicycle in the street below our apartment in the Taubenmarkt in Traunstein. It was midday, and the streets of the self-important little provincial town were empty.”1 And the eight-year-old child is not identical with the child that Thomas Bernhard, the author of the book, was, because of course it’s also possible to wear a mask that shows your own face.

How free can we actually be, as individuals, even when we are outwardly, politically free? Whose opinions are they really that we call our own? When can we say I and really mean I, and not the father, the mother, the teachers, the friends, whose convictions are reproduced in us? How much I is there really, beyond my upbringing? (Because even if I reject my upbringing, surely that can be seen as another consequence of my upbringing.) You probably know the famous Schopenhauer quote, it goes something like this: A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills.

Can we exchange our own history for another? Discard it? Retract it? Can we take the convictions and beliefs that we have developed over the course of years, and replace them with a blank slate? Can we unlearn what we have learned, unfeel what we have felt?

Fallada is not only the man who writes the forbidden postcards, he is also each person who finds them, who is too afraid to pass them on. He is not only the man who risks his life, but also the man who fails. Fallada clearly knows his way around the dreary apartments of the alcoholics he describes, and it is his own fear that expresses itself in his characters’ fears of denunciation and torture.

He never lacked the courage to reveal what he knew, even at his own expense.