Frau Richter was on the phone yelling something to the effect of, “Tell I. M. Pei that Potsdamer Platz makes the architect, not the other way around!” when Herr Müller passed the proposal and the mysterious paper under her pug nose.
“Das ist eine geniale Idee,” she said, hanging up the phone. She fingered her pearl necklace for a moment and made another phone call.
For the next two hours we were shuttled up the chain of command, marched from building to building until we finally found ourselves in a Reichstag sitting room, waiting to be seen along with an elderly and very dapper gentleman. The antechamber of the elected federal official, whom I am legally barred from naming, was ornate. Interspersed between historical tapestries were exquisitely framed portraits of high-ranking politicians whom I’m also not allowed to identify, but as a hint of the echelon of portraiture facing us, think “unsinkable” World War II battleship.
Now that we had time to rest, we asked Stone to see his identification. He removed it from the protective sheath and flung the plastic into the barrel chest of a bespectacled leader whose German surname in English means “cabbage.”
The ID paper was written in that interlocking old-German script that looks like a wrought iron fence. I barely managed to decipher the letterhead, “Verfolgte des Naziregimes,” a bold declarative that had been embossed with the screaming red insignia of the German Democratic Republic.
“No, it’s not possible,” Klaudia said, absentmindedly slipping into the Saxony accent she always tried so hard to hide. “There’s no way.”
The nameless politician stepped through the tall, walnut doors accompanied by a man with a suitcase handcuffed to his wrist. If the Chinese had attacked Germany at that very moment I could tell you the color of the proverbial “panic button” that unleashes unholy hell.
But Germany doesn’t have nuclear arms.
Sure they don’t.
Anyway, since China didn’t attack, I can’t tell you what color the “button” is, but suffice it to say the suitcase is brown. Yeah, I would’ve thought black too.
“Herr Stone?”
The Schwa stood, hat in hand, except that he didn’t have a hat.
“Do you mind, Herr Gleibermann, if I see this gentleman first?” Our anonymous statesperson was smooth yet commanding. It was easy to see how he or possibly she carried North Rhine — Westphalia with 86 percent of the vote.
“Kein problem. .”
After the brass-handled doors clicked behind the Schwa, I asked a still-pale Klaudia what was the deal with his identity papers.
“What does Verfolgte des Naziregimes mean?”
Klaudia cupped her hands around my ear and whispered. Whenever she discussed matters referring to “the former East Germany,” she whispered. A survival instinct from the days when the walls had ears and best friends had microphones taped to their chests.
“Verfolgte des Naziregimes means ‘persecuted by the Nazi regime.’ It was an identity the DDR gave to Holocaust survivors as recompense. Of course, in the government’s eyes the war was West Germany’s fault.”
“How so?”
“We were good, innocent Communists, and don’t forget, the Nazis hated Communists. My history teacher used to say, ‘Re-member, class, they gassed Communists alongside the Jews, and if you were a Jewish Communist, forget about it, they gassed and burned you twice just to make sure.’
“Anyway,” Klaudia continued, “if you have this Verfolgte des Naziregimes, you got party favors. .”
I grinned, picturing a bunch of survivors in conical paper hats, tossing confetti and blowing paper whistles, celebrating life, but she meant special privileges. “They could start a little private business, sell food or umbrellas, open up a bicycle-repair shop, even though any kind of open capitalism was strictly forbidden. Maybe they got a little stipend. Maybe they only had to wait six years for a car, I don’t know. But anyone who carried this paper basically didn’t get fucked with.”
I never could figure out how the Schwa supported himself. Now I knew. I mean, so what if the guy basically defected to East Germany — what was the current German government going to do, leave an honorary Jewish black jazzman to die?
The Schwa exited the office with the politician’s arm around his shoulder, a substantial check, and written carte blanche to build his wall in any shape or form he saw fit so long as it didn’t obstruct traffic or violate any noise-pollution statutes.
Old Herr Gleibermann, clutching a paper certificate of victimization exactly like the Schwa’s, touched his hand and in a halting English asked, “What camp were you in, brother?”
“Camp?”
“Sachsenhausen? Buchenwald? Bergen-Belsen?”
“No. Never.”
“I thought maybe you were a survivor. Your eyes.”
“No, sorry.”
“No camp?”
“Stephen S. Wise Day Camp when I was a young’un, that’s about it.”
The old man took his joke in good humor and entered into the chancellor’s inner sanctum complaining that his neighbor’s dog was still barking at all hours of the night.
The East Side Gallery is a mural-covered remnant of the Berlin Wall that runs along the north bank of the river Spree between the Oberbaum Bridge and the Ostbahnhof train station. It’s a kilometer-long memorial that simultaneously tries to erase and preserve the Berlin Wall’s legacy. Knowing that in this case the art is the canvas, the best of the faded and peeling panels incorporate the Wall into their themes. Birgit Kinder’s three-dimensional Trabant sedan crashes the through the Wall to freedom. The artist Suku simply lists the Wall’s achievements on a concrete résumé.
Curriculum Vitae
1961 1962 1963 1964
1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971
1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979
1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987
1988 1989 1990
The last two entries are painted in a screaming red and caution-ary yellow, respectively.
It was here, nailed into the butt end of the Gallery, that the cornerstone of the new Berlin Wall, Fatima’s melted boom box, was laid. In many ways our wall was an extension of the Gallery — but one immune to the neglect and the countless coats of graffiti defacement that in recent years had rendered the original artwork almost invisible.
With the Schwa who knows where, Lars, Doris, and Klaudia gave me the honor of turning on the old radio, which had been hollowed out and stuffed with Fatima’s ashes and new electronic gadgetry. It buzzed with an antiphonary static that carried about thirty meters into the middle of the wide sidewalk.
The sound cut right through Klaudia.
“Was ist los?”
“This is freaking me out. I just realized what we’re doing.”
She removed a small radio from her satchel and fiddled with the power button. The red light flashed off and on.
“The sound makes the Wall more real.”
“More real than the gallery?”
“In a way, yeah. For you guys the murals are a kitschy tourist attraction, but for me, sometimes I walk past them and remember things.”
“You’re saying we’re trivializing the repression?”
I looked up and down Mühlenstrasse. It was getting harder to tell the differences between East and West. Back in the day it was easy. Border streets such as Mühlenstrasse were like the river Styx. Concrete tributaries not to be crossed because on the other side was Hades, a backward underworld where the living dead lived in prefab housing. I dashed across the six-lane street and tried to imagine what West Berlin looked like from an Eastern vantage point. People died attempting to cross that street, so I supposed it looked like the Elysian Fields: still part of the underworld, only the markets carried bananas.