A shot of adrenaline into the chest can sometimes resurrect a stopped heart. Unfortunately, the camp doctor had no adrenaline. Each corpse turned olive-green like an American troop carrier.
Those of us whose eagles hadn’t yet been stripped from our breast-pockets were already laying plans for Operation Volund. One very cold night, one of us began to sing in a stunning tenor: Wälse! Wälse! Where’s your sword, the strong sword I’ll swing against fate? Will it break out from my breast, where my angry heart hides it?
And so we denazified them, making possible the following triumphant entry in our Great Soviet Encyclopedia:
Germany—A state in Europe (capital, Berlin) which existed up to the end of World War II (1933-45).
Germany was gone forever. The two lapdog states which remained could be tricked into fighting each other eternally, just as we and Germany used to do. As for the old Germany, she reminded us of the bygone days when Moscow was nothing but churches, river-curves and droshkys…
Then we returned to our own concerns. We constructed an arc vacuum furnace to smelt titanium ingots. ‣
AIRLIFT IDYLLS
For three whole days, during which time did not exist for him, he struggled in that black sack into which he was being forced by an unseen, invincible power.
It’s nearly impossible to convince my grandchildren that at the beginning the Iron Curtain was just that—although now that I think of it, the material might not have been iron at all. If you’ve ever inspected one of those pouches of lead foil which protects film from X-rays at airport security checkpoints, you can well imagine the abnormal heaviness, not to mention limp pendulousness (as opposed to flexibility) of that Iron Curtain: grasp a fresh corpse by the knee and raise it; the calf will swing inwards, compelling the foot to describe the same unfailing arc as a grandfather clock’s weighted pendulum; but it’s a one-way affair; heel strikes buttock or thigh, and that’s the end. When we stood our turn in the exit queue of the border station, I sometimes used to bend down and raise the hem of the Iron Curtain, just to peek out at the capitalist side where I was going; nobody was very strict in those days, and obviously I wasn’t trying to “escape.” Anyhow, the “iron” or whatever it was must have been fifteen centimeters thick; I could only lift it up to ankle height before its weight and the white light blazing in overwhelmed me, so I’d let go, and it would sink silently back into place, momentum so perfectly dampened by deadness that there could never have been the tiniest after-swing. According to an American lecturer, the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich (Opus 110) is supposed to represent the Curtain’s darkness, but (speaking only for myself), I’d have to say that my sensation on the Communist side was something quite different from melancholy; everything was dark, that’s true, but it was the darkness of a circus tent, where anything could happen. I’ll tell you just how it felt. Drawing the heavy passport from my pocket, already anticipating the treat of winning a new stamp (at that time the visa pictography of Europe Central changed almost monthly, in part as a result of the political situation—any symbol might get infected with enemy connotations—but mainly for security reasons: black marketeers duplicated those stamps easily, so the only recourse of nascent people’s power was to change the red star to a blue sickle, or enclose it in a square rectangle), first I’d hear breathing all around me; next, a hand would take my passport; after a long while I’d hear the angry thud of the stamp, and that pallid, hairy hand returned to view, spewing the document back into my possession. I stepped forward. In a sudden dazzle of flashbulbs, secret policemen would photograph me from the side, after which I’d pass beween two soldiers whose fixed bayonets tickled my ears; finally I’d round the last bend where two flaps of the Curtain (try to visualize a woman’s slit skirt) had been pulled apart and secured by ceiling-chains to admit a very narrow triangle of breathtakingly beautiful light through which each of us had to struggle, usually not without griming our shoulders with graphite, lead or whatever was actually the substance of the Iron Curtain; now I was free; but what I’ll never be able to explain is that at that exact instant my head invariably became heavy; I tasted metal and my lips swelled; a drunken nausea robbed me of my balance; and when I stood up again I thought I’d faint. It happened to all of us. Perhaps some mind-altering chemical had been released by one side against or in collusion with the other. We lurched to the West German checkpoint (Bornholmer Strasse), and the sun scorched our pale skins. If somebody had poured sand inside my head I couldn’t have felt any stranger. We’d forgotten everything! It was the taste of sleep that we were all licking off our lips. Here again stood the policeman with the long handlebar moustache; he greeted me by name now, and stamped my passport with extra crispness, because he liked me; the eagle of capitalist Germany was his alter ego. I’d never lost sight of him; the sunlight was harshly perfect on his metal buttons; but what had those two sentries on the other side looked like? Maybe their bayonets had annoyed me sufficiently to distract me from their faces. Behind them there’d been the border guard who’d stamped my passport, this time with the representation of a sledgehammer standing on end and bearing three sharp-pointed stars within its head; the East German official, counterpart to this moustached gentleman of Bornholmer Strasse, had scrutinized me most searchingly from his booth; it was incorrect that I’d glimpsed his hand; I now recollected an angled spotlight just below that window-slit through which documents were given and received; this glaring luminescence, which I’d somehow mistakenly associated with the flashbulbs of secret police, had struck me full in the chin, in order for the border guard behind his wall of dark glass to better compare me to my photograph; actually the glass couldn’t have been dark, because I remembered a pale, blurry sort of face, perhaps with more than two eyes; there might have also been an eye in the brim of his cap, because… But prior to him there was nothing. I might as well have never visited the world behind the Iron Curtain!
In the onion fields of Europe, translucent-lipped wombs grow concentrically within wombs; and within them grows what? I could definitely remember lifting up the Iron Curtain from within, just to see the brightness; I longed to ask the policeman with the handlebar moustache whether he’d allow me to do the same from this side, but then his expression would have altered; he’d realize that his friendly trust should never have touched me; it would be awkward between the two of us forever, because West Germans, who are the only Germans left, follow the rules. What should I do? For I so much wanted to see! Berlin, which in medieval times had resembled a heart carved out of a human carcass, subdivided into seventeen lobes—Wedding, Moabit, Königsviertel and all the rest (no matter that they were each as cramped as a Messerschmitt-109)—Berlin was now a quartered heart, its chambers sealed off from one another by walls of sandbags; and now this Iron Curtain was already in the dreams of Stalinists getting elaborated into the raked sand of slaughter chutes within the complex of the Berlin Wall. (I brought that about; you’ll see.) German blood must clot henceforth; it could no longer flow free. In the French sector they sing a little song about something that happens, some pretty little thing, I forget what, my French was never all that perfect anyway, when a blonde dancer from Stalingrad shows leg in the Soviet sector; I think maybe there comes a flash of sunlight in the Communist darkness or something like that. The real issue is: How can the conscious mind know what the unconscious is up to? Chancellor Adenauer in one of his speeches proclaimed that in this scientific (meaning nuclear) age, the metaphor of a heart has become outmoded; it’s better to consider Berlin as a brain; and in his, Adenauer’s view, what’s behind the Iron Curtain is the reptilian brain, the primordial, amoral system of involuntary control which, located at the very base of the skull, can and must be dispatched by NATO in a surgical, missile-based Nackenschuss; only thus may Germany, which is Europe and therefore all of us,39 become whole again. (This is also what the Führer used to say.)
39
Here once again let’s quote Count Hermann Keyserling’s