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The government reacted forcefully to the commotion, but at least no shots were fired, thinks Katharina. Could it be because the so-called counterrevolutionaries reminded the ancients in power of themselves when they were young idealists? The passage of time. Strange, she thinks, that a crime is called a trespass.
THE PASSAGE OF TIME
Then she goes back into the kitchen to chop some herbs, Katharina leans on the doorjamb, can I help, no no, it’s fine. Rosa chops and talks and in between looks across at Katharina, then stops, Katharina sees the knife in Rosa’s hand, and Rosa looks at Katharina. Katharina takes a couple of steps to her friend, stops in front of her, looks at her expressionlessly, and Rosa looks at her, neither of them speaks, eye to eye, Katharina takes the knife from her friend’s hand and lays it aside, lowers her head into the hollow between neck and shoulder, blows out a little puff of breath, before she bites her friend, but her friend takes her by the hair, pulls her head up, and says: You know, I hate you sometimes for still being with Hans. Yes, says Katharina, I know. And then they fall down together. They sprawl in the corridor, then stagger into the bedroom, the referee counts to fifty thousand, but neither of them wants to end this fight which has no winner and no loser. All night, to breathe and to feel the other’s breath against her skin, or whose breath and whose skin is it? Running her tongue along the other’s teeth as against a friendly fence, feel out with her hands, her lips, her tongue what is dark and moist, listen all night to the sounds of the other, or are they her own? To know the other as herself. One being of flesh and blood joined to another, as by a key. To be one.
[...] Only when they’re drinking coffee does she notice that Hans is down. The radio station is being “restructured” as they’re calling it, but Hans doesn’t want to discuss it. He looks at her soberly, she looks soberly back. Are we finished as lovers, then? Why shouldn’t she look serious? When he told her lately, When I’m under pressure, I need tenderness from you, she shook her head at him in amusement, and that offended him. When all she meant to indicate was that she too had a right to independence and will. Are we finished as lovers? She looks at his ravaged face in January, in February, but she can’t help him. Sometimes he brushes the hair out of his eyes repeatedly in the wrong direction, without noticing. At the greengrocer’s he spends half an hour in search of frozen kale, they don’t have it here, don’t you see. But he absolutely must have his frozen kale now. He wanders around the tiny shop three more times. Are we finished as lovers?
She returns to Berlin with her sketchbook full. Welcome home, says her mother, who collects her at the station and has supper ready for her in Reinhardtstrasse. Home? Coca-Cola, she’s noticed, is now on sale in the eastern half of Friedrichstrasse station, also in Pankow in the little store where she always shops, Coca-Cola same as in New York or Munich. Coca-Cola has succeeded, where Marxist philosophy has failed, at uniting the proletarians of all nations under its banner. Is this home?
[...] Katharina and her friends drink it in the KDW department store and are mean enough to walk out without paying. Half their money and their parents’ money has been vaporized in the course of the historical reform, so are they expected on top of that to shell out as much for a piece of cake as they did once for Kant’s Eternal Peace? Do the Wessies really believe in money as a measure of worth? think the young things, and shake their heads, and their long, dangling hair worn loose shakes along, adding to the expression of their puzzlement. We’re young, let’s be beautiful too, they say, what’s the point of a lace bra when we’re old and wrinkled. Who knows if we’ll even live that long. The important thing is no sign of guilt on the face. Catch the eye of the salesperson, while the hands are busy elsewhere. And — because there is honor among thieves, and principles among shoplifters — don’t steal from small stores, where the goods and prices might mean something to the owner. But supermarkets, drugstores, chains, they’re all fair game.
If I leave my family, Hans says to Katharina, you have to promise you’ll always be with me.
If you want to be with me, then be with me. But it’s not a trade.
I don’t know what’ll happen.
You have to want it.
I can’t go into a void.
What void?
The silence lasts just one second in which at midnight between 1991 and 1992 the East German frequencies give up the ghost. Hans is sitting in front of the radio at Katharina’s and takes in the very short silence with which his past life is lopped off. It was a little like that moment in La bohème where Mimì dies, and none of her friends notices. It is his first time celebrating New Year’s with Katharina, because Ingrid has to keep company with her mother, who is poorly. Katharina is in jeans and slippers. But at least she’s sprinkled some confetti on the table and poured some Rotkäppchen. It just happens so casually, says Hans. Because dying isn’t much really. It’s just something ceasing to be.
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.
i want this
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.
god
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.