When I had first arrived in Berlin, about two months before this performance, a room had been rented for me near the Oranienburg Gate, in the first corner house on Chausseestrasse, a tiny sublet on the fifth floor of one of those hopelessly grim, gray, and ancient apartment buildings; of course there was no city gate anywhere near, the name alone remained from an old city map, the name of something that history quite literally swept away, knocked off the table and cast into the fire, and if I say grim and gray, I haven't said much, because in that part of the city, at least in the sections where the ravages of war had not destroyed reminders of things as they once had been, this was how all the houses looked, grim and gray, but not without style, provided we do not limit style to mean conventionally decorative but allow that every human construct carries in itself and absorbs into its image the material and spiritual circumstances of the act of building; that is the style of any structure, that and nothing more.
And style includes destruction as well — like building, destroying also forms a continual chain in human history, and wartime destruction, in this district at least, was not quite so complete as in others, where nothing remained standing and where between the brand-new buildings only winds of emptiness blew, since here the cracks could be filled, the skeletons of fire-gutted houses could be fleshed out with new walls, enough stones were standing to offer crude shelter and protection from inclement weather, so it made sense to pile new stones on them, enough remained of the pre-destruction foundations, which were familiar, reliable, and therefore most attractive, and though the walls raised on them, patched up and reinforced, could not duplicate the prewar look, the old streets and squares kept their spatial configurations, the city's former layout, its spirit, was somehow carried over, even if nothing but mere traces could be detected of its lively, ostentatious, at once frugal and lavish, frivolous and grave, energetic and voracious style.
The guts of the old style, the principles of yore, the dead visage of the old order showed through the new style of the façades.
The intersection of Hannoverstrasse, splendid Friedrichstrasse, Wilhelm Pieck Strasse (formerly Alsatian Strasse), and Chausseestrasse, which once had formed a pretty little square, was now in this sad resurrection more dead than alive, nearly always deserted and lifelessly silent, an empty hull of different times piled one on top of another, with only a streetcar rumbling through now and then, in the middle of which an advertising pillar stood, left over from the old days, its belly ripped out by shrapnel; in the filthy plate-glass shop windows, blinded by dust, you could see the clock on the pillar top reflected; its glass cover long smashed in, it defied time by not showing it, or more precisely, it showed time arrested, since it clung to the half past four of a long-ago day.
And down below, under the pavement's thin crust, subway cars rumbled past at regular intervals, their clatter heard and felt under our feet, roaring in and out, their rumble dying away in the deep tunnel, but one couldn't get to these trains, since the stations that had escaped destruction were walled off; in the first few days I didn't know what to make of these unused stations on the little traffic islands along Friedrichstrasse, until Frau Kühnert was kind enough to enlighten me: this particular line, she said, connected western sections of the city and didn't belong to us, that's how she put it, so there was no point looking for them on the new maps, they weren't there; I didn't understand, and Frau Kühnert offered to explain, if I'd be willing to listen: Suppose I lived in West Berlin, I was a westerner, all right? say I got on the train at the Kochstrasse station, the train would pass under here, there was a station right under us; it would slow down, but couldn't stop, and simply pass through this part of the city and wind up in the so-called western sector, where I could get off at the Reinickendorf Station — it was that simple, did I understand better now?
It's our own city that we truly understand; in a strange city, even with the finest sense of direction and a thorough topographical knowledge of the place, street names and locations like east and west remain abstract, the street names conjuring up no images or the images lacking lived experiences, but I did understand — for that I didn't have to be a native — that something was under the streets that really wasn't, or rather, we had to pretend it wasn't, there, something allowed to live only in memories of the city as it used to be, yet part of the entire city's lifeline even today, which meant that it did exist, but only for those on the other side, who couldn't get out at the heavily guarded walled-up stations, if only because phantom trains have no stations, and in this way these people were at least as nonexistent for us as we were for them.
I said I understood almost everything, but why did the trains have to slow down at these nonexistent or, rather, existing stations? why the guards? what sort of guards were these, anyway, from here or from there? and since these stations were sealed off, what were they guarding, and how did they get out at the end of their shift? yes, I did understand, more or less, only I found it less than logical, or the logic of it escaped me.
If I continued to use this sarcastic tone, Frau Kühnert said with a native's offended pride, she wouldn't answer any questions in the future, and that finally shut me up.
And somehow this was also the style of that fifth-floor apartment on Chausseestrasse: as you walked through its ornately carved massive brown doors into the entrance hall the size of a reception room, you could smell the aroma of that same style; the entrance hall was completely empty now, and the darkened parquet floor, its worn-out strips replaced with ordinary plywood, creaked at every step, yet you could easily imagine a lighter, finer creak, muffled by rich Oriental carpets, while under the bright light of chandeliers a buxom chambermaid hastened to the door to let in elegantly attired ladies and gentlemen; plain-floored, winding passageways connecting the kitchen, the servants' quarters, the pantry and lavatory led to the masters' living space — five spacious interconnecting rooms whose elegantly arched windows now looked out on one of those cheerless new façades; I was put up in what used to be the maid's room.
From my window I could see only a dividing wall blackened with soot, so close it kept my room almost completely dark even during the day, and my accommodations could be described as extremely modest: an iron bedstead, a creaking wardrobe, the usual table covered with a stained tablecloth, a chair, and on the wall at least twenty neatly framed diplomas that for some reason had ended up in this room.
If, reclining peacefully on my bed, I stared out the window long enough and let my imagination go, on the map of that black wall I could follow the path of huge flames as they must have swooped down from the burning roof, accompanied by thunderous sounds of crackling, crashing, crumbling, could almost feel the wind, or windstorm, of that day as it was stirred by the fire, the enormous conflagration that left these traces for posterity, for me: protruding, peaked stains, colored by soot, where darting tongues of flame had licked the wall, which survived it all and remained intact.