A decade later, in the aughts, that reserve was already depleted, only its rock-bottom gleamed glassily before us. Sometime around then, at the end of one decade and the beginning of another, something happened with time, something went off the rails, something snapped, sputtered, spun its wheels, and stopped.
8.
If Scandinavia couldn’t decide which one of its happy periods to choose, Romania was also wracked by doubt, but for the opposite reasons. The whole twentieth century—a time of historical staggering and terrible circumstances, bad choices about which horse to tie their wagon to—the German, English, or Russian one? Lost territories and battles, sieges, crises, internal coups. Even the revolution of 1989 was far from velvety. It was as if only in the late ’60s and early ’70s a window opened briefly (and it would be chosen for lack of any other option)—an attempt at independence in a divided world. Afterward the window would slam shut in the misery of the following decade of debt, empty stores, and Securitate.
All those happy, well-fed peoples, Frenchmen, Englishmen . . . Oh, I am not from here, I have centuries of constant misfortune behind me. I was born in a nation devoid of opportunities. Happiness ends in Vienna; beyond Vienna begins Damnation! The merciless Cioran.
This describes not only the Romanian case.
The vote in Austria seemed to be the most fragmented and unclear. Here we had the lowest rates of voter engagement, and among those who voted, several movements, which were themselves rather anemic, received equal percentages of the vote. The memory of that colorful and multilingual empire from the first decade of the twentieth century, served up above all in literature and Secession style, was slowly growing cold like a coffee forgotten out on the veranda with a dried-out slice of Sachertorte. And it didn’t end well at all—the assassination of an archduke, the Great War, disintegration, and all the rest of it . . . Austria of the Anschluss received a worrisome—but similarly insufficient—percentage of votes. Some public shame, perhaps more a habit than a conviction, still hung in the air. Austria of the ’70s and ’80s, that guilty pleasure of the East and West, which had turned its permanent neutrality into a permanent source of income, was the other preferred slice of the electoral pie. And in the end came the ’90s, when the secret from the preceding decades could finally be revealed—the briefcases were opened, the checks were cashed, double agents claimed what they were owed by the employers on both sides.
With these absolutely unclear and tied results, spread across several decades of the century, Austria risked annihilation, stuck between neighboring temporal empires, with Vienna left as nothing more than a museum-city, which is what it has always been. A border zone in the geography of happiness.
Nevertheless, in the end the ’80s scraped out a win by only a few percentage points. This victory, which most suspected was backed by a hidden nationalist vote from the successors of Jörg Haider, whose star had risen in that very decade. Watching reports from Vienna and Salzburg, I imagined how the winners from the ’80s would quickly pull together a new referendum, in which—now beyond the watchful eyes of Europe, in the privacy of their own home, as it were—the Anschluss of 1938 would come. Many buried things lay at the foot of 1939.
9.
Germany remained the major, decisive mystery. There, history danced the longest and Berlin was its stage, cabaret, place d’armes, shop window and wall, everything all at once. The first half of the century was amputated, despite attempts by the new ultra-right wing to place a prosthesis in that empty space. Germany would not go back there, not yet, despite the autobahns and Volkswagens that turned up on the black market during this race. But each of the following decades had a chance in its own way. Sociologists are forecasting a win for the 1980s, E. wrote to me from Berlin, horrified. Can you imagine? Not the economic miracle of the ’50s, not the ’60s because of ’68 and everything else, but the ’80s, what a disgrace. You know that I am for the ’90s, didn’t we always say those were our ’60s that never happened in Bulgaria: the Summer of Love, Prague Spring, all that. The ’90s were our ’68, okay, so maybe a little shabby, a little second-hand, but still ours. I feel like living in the early ’90s and if we win, come and meet me there, in Berlin or Sofia . . . Much love, E.
Sweet E. She and I passed through the first years of the ’90s together, it was a tumultuous relationship, as could only have happened then. All our waiting for the ’60s has finally paid off, she would say with a laugh back then, handing me her cigarette in bed.
E. and I even managed to get married, a major mistake. In the 1990s no one got married, they only got divorced. Okay, well, we also managed to correct that mistake in the very same decade. We split up, then she left for Germany. All Bulgarian students with straight-A’s in German left sooner or later. I had straight-A’s in Bulgarian and so I stayed.
Still, she wasn’t completely right about the ’80s, at least not the German ones. Something was brewing there on both sides. Wir sind das Volk!*—they screamed on Alexanderplatz and the squares of the East. Atomcraft? Nein danke,** they chanted in the West, human chains, peace marches, red balloons, Nena, HIV, and punk. In the end, it was interesting there on both sides. At the current time, however, few of those who wanted the ’80s imagined that they would have to go back to a divided Germany. But there was a way around that as well, they voted specifically for 1989, the very eve of it. Hoping to drag it out for a year or two or three. If one could remain forever on the eve of the celebration and keep the herring of enthusiasm fresh for a long time (contrary to Bismarck) in a drawn-out delay of the future, what more could you want? I imagined a permanent tearing-down of the Wall and its secret rebuilding afterward, only to be torn down again. Spinning your wheels in happiness.
Frankly, 1968 didn’t have much of a chance in Germany, either. With the exception of a hard-core yet negligible group of late Marxist and arthritic anarchists (anarchists age, too), the grand year of ’68 was not overwhelmed by supporters. Mostly because after it came the 1970s. And they were not an easy choice—what with Baader-Meinhof and all those murders, bombings, kidnappings, bank robberies. Between Mao and Dao, “Bandiera Rossa,” Che Guevara, Marcuse, Dutschke—the mess that was the ’70s in Europe. And the Second World War had ended only twenty- or thirty-odd years earlier.
Sometimes we don’t stop to think how some historical event only appears to be more distant than it actually is. When I was born, the Second World War was a mere twenty-three years in the past, but it has always seemed like a completely different epoch to me.
As Gaustine would say: Warning, history in the rearview mirror is always closer than it appears . . .
In the end the ’80s won out. No, it is more accurate to say that the West German ’80s won out. Except that Berlin once again became a divided city. Interestingly enough, both sides insisted on this.