Berliners said you knew which of the ’93-’94 exodus were the cops because they were the ones at the head of the throng. Five years later the few police still left were guarding the German government holed up in the old KaDeWe department store, after the ministers of state had returned to the new capital only to find the Reichstag occupied by warring factions of the Neuwall Brigade on the one hand and the Pale Flame on the other. For weeks bureaucrats wandered homelessly the deserted boulevards off the Wittenbergplatz before winding up on the ransacked KaDeWe’s sixth floor. Once the most astonishing gourmet food emporium in the Western World, the sixth floor had been picked over thoroughly in the riots of ’95, leaving the government not even a roll to nibble or a bottle of wine to suck on while conducting the affairs of the newest reich, which held the dubious distinction of being an even bigger botch than the third one.
Now in Berlin, in the last spring of the second millennium, on X-257 as it was marked on the punk calendar the American writer had bought in Kreuzberg, every nineteen-year-old with a computer was a reich unto himself. He created his own German state and programmed it to last not a thousand years but ten thousand. He invaded weak peoples, wiped out impure races, torched effete cultures, claimed natural living space, and added seventeen new definitions to the term Final Solution. All he needed was the right software and a sector of the city where the juice hadn’t been shut off. If the horrific dimensions of his imagination didn’t quite have the baroque flamboyance of sixty years before, he made up for it with rudimentary technological acumen, blunt brutishness and a certain obliviousness of irony, since the thrashmetal that served up his anthems would be as unsavory to the Führer as it was passé to whatever decadents were alienated enough still to be here, most of them drifting naked in the sex arcade of the Reichstag basement in search of anyone with a vaccine tag around his or her neck. Berlin, once again and for the last time in this century, lay at the crosscoordinates of history’s indecision, the final decade of the final century characterized by dissolution in the East and a contrivance of unity in the West which barely lasted five minutes beyond the contriving, the gravity of authority versus the entropy of freedom, the human race’s opposing impulses devouring each other, order consumed by anarchy and then reordering itself. In the anarchy of each individual’s building his own reich, each reich imposed its own order, much like the last reich which supposed humanity could be recreated in its image. Humanity knew the attraction of it. It lied if it said it didn’t. It recognized the attraction not in its sense of self-perfection but rather in its imperfections which it so despised and so yearned to transcend, that longing for the fire that burned it clean of its humiliations. In the nihilism that was left, in the void of the obliterated conscience, where every rampart had been reduced to rubble, it longed to take care of God once and for all, the smug motherfucker.
Erickson had been in Berlin two months and was eating dinner one night in a restaurant off the Ku’damm, when a couple of Berliners sitting at his table told him about the Tunneler.
A beautiful young American Marxist student went to East Berlin one weekend in 1977 and fell in love with an East German professor. She wound up defecting, marrying the professor, bearing his son, and becoming an East German citizen. Over the years the professor began to suspect, much to his horror, that his wife was informing on him for the Stasi, the East German secret police. He came to believe, moreover, that she’d been informing on him for some time, certainly since she had become a citizen of East Germany and perhaps before that; in fact, as he thought about it more and more, he eventually concluded that she’d been spying on him from the very beginning, that their initial meeting and love affair had been part of a Stasi plan all along. He was convinced that he’d been seduced in the name of the state and that the young American woman had never loved him at all and that even their little boy was part of the political scheme.
Perhaps this was true and perhaps it wasn’t. But clandestinely, with the knowledge of only his closest and most trusted friends, the professor entered a plot to escape to the West by underground tunnel near the barren Potsdamerplatz. One morning in the early spring of 1989 he rose from bed, washed and dressed himself, prepared his class papers and packed his briefcase, kissed his wife goodbye and held his ten-year-old son especially close to him, and left his house as he’d done hundreds of mornings over the years, never to be seen again.
A number of high-placed friends who knew of the professor’s suspicions concerning his wife were convinced he’d been arrested, and filed a protest with the government. But the Stasi insisted he hadn’t been arrested, and that insistence took on some credibility when the Stasi began conducting a thorough search of the city. After some months passed, a new story began circulating. According to this story the professor himself had believed he was about to be arrested and left his wife and child that fateful morning to head straight for the house with the tunnel, where he conveyed his alarm to his co-conspirators. Convinced that the police were about to descend any moment, the professor’s accomplices buried him with food and water in what had been completed of the tunnel. No one knew that only seven months later the rest of them would be sauntering across the border from east to west, through the Wall, with tens of thousands of other Germans.
To this day, according to Erickson’s dinner companions, the professor still didn’t know. To this day, the story went, he was still down in the tunnel. Not understanding the first thing about digging a tunnel, with no map and apparently not much sense of direction, the professor continued digging until finally, after weeks or months, he made a breakthrough, hacking his way with a pick into what he hoped was the targeted destination, the cellar of a house off Potsdamerstrasse west of the Wall. What he found instead was that he had returned to an earlier point of the tunnel. Slowly and gradually he had circled back on himself. His despair and panic must have been unutterable. For ten years the Tunneler honeycombed the no-man’s-land of the ghost Wall; amid the new, unfinished Potsdam Plaza one could hear his echoes from underground in the plaza’s empty corridors.
The strange thing was that afterward Erickson began hearing this absurd story everywhere, from anyone still left in the city. Whenever he bumped into someone long enough to have more than a three-minute conversation, the tale of the Tunneler came up. He heard it not only in the drunken Teutonic slur of the bars but from other tourists and little old ladies in bookshops and stray bankers from Frankfurt on the U-Bahn, one of whom, standing on the train, pointed at a hole in the underground wall of Kochstrasse station and said to Erickson, out of the blue, “Tunneler.” Excuse me? the American answered, not even sure the German was speaking to him, and the Frankfurt banker told him the story of how the Tunneler had dug his way into the U-Bahn and then, terrified he was still in the East, retreated, scurrying back into the blackness. And as Erickson looked at the hole in the wall of the darkened subway he remembered the last time he had come to Berlin, two years after the fall of the Wall, and how he took the U-Bahn from west to east and could still feel the passage from what had once been one side to what had once been the other; the ghosts of division still lurked in the underground. In the case of the Tunneler, however, he’d simply been underground too long, because the fact was that even if there had still been a Wall, Kochstrasse would have placed him not back in the East but in the West, about half a block beyond what was once Checkpoint Charlie.