Berlin Cantata (21 page)

Thus a certain ambivalence has crept into my feelings about the claims process taken as a whole. On the one hand stands the obvious justice supporting the vast majority of persons who have filed claims. They once owned property, the property was taken from them by coercive means without fair compensation, and now that the totalitarian regimes which supported such unjust takings are gone, why shouldn't they have their property back? Many such persons are less interested in the material gain to be had from their filing than in making some small gesture – small as against the murders and exiles that accompanied the loss of mere property – towards the reestablishment of justice. Here I speak not only of justice in the present tense, but justice that recognizes an historical past, that seeks continuity with it. Moreover, provided proofs are forthcoming and legitimacy is established, our laws provide for such claims. It cannot be said juridically that there is anything unjust in pursuing rights that are nothing more than what the law provides for.

On the other hand, there is the less refined justice supporting those who might be dispossessed or whose lives might otherwise be disrupted by the claims process. Their numbers in truth may be relatively small. But their crime, in such cases as exist, is of course typically no more than bad luck. They relied, just as the earlier dispossessed ones did, on discredited arrangements, on a supplanted regime.

Nor is it possible, as a general rule, for one to judge regarding the relative emotional and economic interests of both types of parties, the earlier dispossessed and the now-perhaps-to-be dispossessed.

Moreover it is a simple fact of history that property has regularly changed hands as the result of theft, warfare, and lies. Radical regime changes have everywhere been accompanied by changes in property ownership. “Just compensation”, historically speaking, is hardly a reliable thing. Thus trying to sort things out back to the Nazi time is rather like spitting into a sea wind. While we're at it, why not go back to the Thirty Years War? Then everyone would be uncertain of everything. Actually, I rather like this idea. It might be the final revenge of Karl Marx.

Finally, while properly speaking we ought pay it no mind whatever, nonetheless it is so that these property claims in the hands of the right demagogue have the potential to stir unwholesome sentiments in the citizenry, even as today we face already a rising tide of other social problems engendered by reunification. Some days I feel like I only have two hands.

Perhaps as a GDR schoolgirl, I read a definition of Greek tragedy which suggests that at its core is an irreconcilable clash between two competing social goods. In this regard, there may yet be a dollop of tragedy woven into the fabric of some of these property claims. One part tragedy, one part monkey business, one part justice.

I am not unmindful of the irony involved in a lawyer such as myself schooled in the Eastern ideology now making her living in defense of private property. Nonetheless, I am grateful for the honest work the claims process has provided me.

NILS SCHREIBER AND DAVID FÜRST

Comanches

Nils:

My favorite place in the city isn't there anymore. The Potsdamer Platz isn't what it used to be. It used to be a Cold War frontier. It used to be a weedy, bombed-out wasteland where kids lived in the back of trucks getting stoned all day waiting for the millennium and there was one ramshackle Turkish café out-of-doors with broken chairs to sit on and a construction crane from which for a few marks you could bungee-jump. I don't know what happened to that crane. It may have been used to build one of the corporate towers that stand there now. The kids were waiting for the millennium because according to the logic of their lives something miraculous was supposed to happen then.

My son Erich was one of those kids. He lived there from when he was seventeen. He was dark and mopey like his mother and he had soft eyes and, yes, I was proud enough of him, being out there, taking his chances. Every time I saw him I thought what a big, goofy question mark he was. Once again the world could be anything. His stoned mysticism gave way to stoned politics, and he became a Comanche, one of the anarchist groups that fought the police in Kreuzberg every weekend and half the time won. I got him his first job on the old Potsdamer Platz, eighty marks to jump off the crane and write it up for the paper. The angle being, as Erich put it, Mr. Average Degenerate Citizen Goes For It. He got the jump paid for too. It was another one of those half-breathless moments when it looked like the paper was about to go belly up and I thought if I didn't get him a chance soon, I'd never be able to give him one at all. But the paper is still around and Erich survived the jump and his article was pretty good, he got the rush and the fall and every bounce, though he never wrote another one. Of course he doesn't live on the Potsdamer Platz anymore.

David:

My dear friend Nils neglected to mention that there was also an old MiG fighter that lay among the trucks, ruined, scavenged, and graffitied by the kids. Personally that MiG was my favorite part, because you could climb in the cockpit and because of the mess the kids made of it. The Ozymandias of the no man's land, the Cold War's freakiest emblem.

My dear friend Nils also neglected to mention that it was his son Erich's Comanches who firebombed my car workshop. How did I know this? It wasn't so hard. They left a note that said, “We the Comanche faction of
Autonome
gives fair warning. By the destruction of the so-imagined ironic skin car project, we announce: fascists, beware, next time we set fire to your bodies, and you can burn in a hell on earth!” It was the end of the shop.

I never reported them to the police. What would have been the point? I was sick of the shop by then, and so were my charges, and we were sick of each other. Her Stuffiness Anja Mann had come to me to complain that two of my boys had been involved in an attack on an asylum-seekers' barracks. I preferred to deny this, because it was blatantly against all the rules I'd set up, but once again, as in the matter of the fire-bombing, the proof was not utterly dismissible: she had a dark but clear photograph of Johann and Hermann running off, even wearing the shirts with our shop's name on it. Wear the shirt to a pogrom, you shits! Some people never learn. I would include myself in this last statement.

So the Comanches did us a favor. The world works as it should. After a lively physical combat, in which one of them broke my nose and I managed to inflict a bit of damage myself, I duly wrote up the story of my boys and the final failure of my efforts to reform them in a more capitalistic mode, just as they predicted I would. As they would be quick to point out, only one of us got paid. I am not sorry that it was me. I was broke.

Self-disgust took its usual back seat.

Nils:

It was also where I met Holly for the last time, sitting on the least-broken folding chairs we could find, sipping our coffee, the crane hovering over us, under a long gray sky. She wasn't ready to leave Berlin yet, but she was getting closer. Thinking about jobs, thinking about places. No longer the real estate queen of Velden, no longer the plucky adventurer. Not that she was ever exactly either of those, but surely she feared that she was.

We talked about Franz Rosen, as we so often did, as if he were the secret cypher that linked us. I told her about my rage, how I'd been in a rage towards him for weeks after I interviewed him. She wanted to know why. Holly, my love, the eternal straight man. Because I felt seduced by him (I said), made a fool of, and the rage came when I realized I kind of liked it.

Then she took a small brown envelope out of her jacket pocket and pushed it my way. Inside was a pin with a sky blue background, a few Cyrillic letters, and an antique fighter plane manned by a tiny man in goggles. It was an old Soviet aviator's pin, she said, an airman first class pin, that she had bargained off a hustler near Checkpoint Charlie, near my office. She was quite proud of it and I loved her for being quite proud of it. Genuine, no counterfeit, yeah sure, she said. But she thought I might like the blue sky background. I did. It was like the sky in Oksana's paintings.

David:

Friendships need never be explained. But if I had to do it, if some dragon with claws and a tongue of fire stood over us and our lives depended on it, I would say the friendship of Nils and myself had to do with a shared understanding: that beneath the fine rebuilding of our city there was the whiff of unburied bodies, or improperly buried bodies. But what to do about it, morbidity not being an entirely acceptable option? A friendship arising from a quandary.

OKSANA KOSLOVA

Brushstrokes

Franz Rosen:
the coming of evening in dark blue – the name of a rose, Duchesse de Brabant or Souvenir de la Malmaison – a regrettable forgetfulness – a figure in a film, overweight and a little shabby from lack of sleep, lovestruck – fingers on a pocket watch

Herbert Kaminski:
a peacock that has lost its feathers, wandering around on a vast lawn

Mischa Lander:
beaks, birds of prey, men with hooded falcons, Horus – fluorescent lights, iron rooms – Eros in chains, screaming bloody murder – white sideburns, gaunt cheeks – a boy fallen in a well – rain in the afternoon

Holly Anholt:
a flying flag – a small boat, brightly painted – Chagall, the shtetl – the undeniability of luck displayed as allegory – freshly baked sweets – dark curls – forest animals in dreams

HOLLY ANHOLT

Mourning

THE DICTIONARY SAYS THAT MOURNING
is the expression of grief, and that grief is deep mental anguish, as for a loss. I know the dictionary definition because I looked it up once. I can't remember when I did this, but all my life I've looked up things in the dictionary that I didn't understand. My father died and my mother died, but I never really mourned. I remembered them fondly and went on, perhaps the dictionary definition like a placeholder to remind me of what was missing. I said this once to Nils, then added in my embarrassed fashion that I was probably being dramatic. He listened and said I wasn't. I didn't believe him then.

What brought me to Velden? A bit of black-and-white film, my mother's wariness, secrets. No. Something missing in myself, something unaccounted for, something which in the middle of my mostly normal life I couldn't say. It doesn't seem so different from the world as a whole, now that I put it in such bare, poor terms. And yet this would have been my wish, if I could have put it into words: to rejoin the human race.

Nor could I have told you if you'd asked me if there were more like me than not; more people in the world who feel they don't belong, or more who feel they do.

Out of touch, living in a fog, a little bit confused.

Having a boyfriend while in a fog, something that sounds like a misdemeanor, spelled out in a municipal code.

But you can live in a fog and not know it, you can blame it on the world, you can believe the world itself is hard to see, as it was yesterday, as it is today, as it will be the day you die.

I always felt at home in fog. I remember spending two weeks in Mendocino when the fog never went away and I never really wanted it to. I wore a raincoat and pretended I was many things. It was only on the day I was to leave that I woke up wishing for sunlight.

After making my grand gesture, giving the place to Karen, I wanted nothing but to leave Velden, yet I didn't. I had hoped that gesture would free me from all of it, the place, my mother's claim, my parents' silence, my failed affair. But grand gestures, I learned, don't always work the way they're supposed to. They can leave you feeling empty and theatrical, as if the very structures of your mind were sets to strike.

And once the sets are struck, what is left?

My bits of film, which I looked at every day. My sister in her baby carriage, the fadedness of the image, the ephemeral atmosphere it created. We leave such little traces of ourselves. A photograph seems to say,
our
lake,
our
sunlight,
our
happiness, as if the possessive pronoun would be there forever. A first, lovely mistake.

And my parents. How easily now I could see the distance between them which I had never seen before. Sitting within arm's length of the TV night after night, because the remote for the VCR was lost, running my bit of tape back and forth, stopping always at the moment of the two of them by the lakefront posing for the camera, together but not touching, so that you could see a jagged white slice of the lake between the outlines of their clothes. It seemed the largest thing in the frame now, that white slice of nothing.

This place of my parents' happiness, this Camelot, this idyll, this whatever it was in space and time, where they thought they were safe and assimilated and a little lazy and together, or
I
thought they were safe and assimilated and a little lazy and together…like normal people…like happy people…but history is there to be revised.

I decided to return to the bunker. There, I felt, would be something more like fact. How could it have been otherwise, with Ute, Karen's mother, coming around? The truths of their lives laid bare and then an heroic struggle for survival. Who could deny them that much? I wished only to touch it. I wished only to feel for one moment some true connection to the lives that were theirs before I was born. It had not been in this house in Velden, it had certainly not been in Auschwitz. Or anyway I hadn't found it. Maybe blame it all on me.