The Song Before It Is Sung (20 page)
Read The Song Before It Is Sung Online
Authors: Justin Cartwright
CONRAD HAS BOOKED himself into a cheap hotel in Prenzlauer Berg. The old tenements of East Berlin stretch away on either side
of the road, some not yet renovated, others already gentrified. There is still plenty of scope for improvement, but there
are Cafés and bars everywhere and untended parks. In the streets and on the U-Bahn he sees young people with dyed Mohican
haircuts, chains attached to their waists, body piercing and tattoos. Some have curiously resigned dogs. There are also what
could be neo-Nazi youths with shaved heads and combat trousers. He has the impression that East Berlin is not completely won
over by the new world on offer: in fact a huge banner, in English, hangs from one of the tenements:
Fuck the Free World.
Forty-five years of communism followed by the Stasi may well have produced a truculent, suspicious people.
The hotel is simple: the rooms are cell-like, functional, with one mean, flat warehouse window. It gives a glimpse of the
tall, red-brick Zionskirche, where Protestant opposition groups gathered during the war. A square near by is named after Kathe
Koll-witz who lived and painted here, recording the lives of the poor, and here he starts his researches into Berlin's Cafés
and bars and chic sights. His editor has made it clear that this is the last time she subsidises his travel. He sits in a
Café reading guidebooks. Very quickly he has a list of places he must, at the very least, look at.
And so, here he is in Berlin, a little drunk from the three Bloody Marys he swallowed on the plane, strangely excited -nervous
— a man of thirty-five, largely unemployed, in an uncertain state of marriage, but somehow - he feels - about to be instructed
in what it is to be human. This, of course, has been the aim of philosophers and theologians, and even novelists, for many
years, but perhaps you can only have an insight into these matters, as Mendel said to him about his father, when you see humanity
under the greatest duress.
He spends the rest of the day visiting the top bars and Cafés and sights of Berlin, culled from a book called
Berlin Top.
He particularly likes a Café near the opera house on Unter den Linden. He sees some old men gathered in animated conversation
and writes in his notebook:
Historic Unter den Linden, after years of East German neglect, is once again the lively centre of this fascinating city. And
here, not far from Berlin's renowned Humboldt University, where Albert Einstein, its most famous faculty member, is commemorated,
is the Operncafé.
This is the sort of place Berliners would rather keep to themselves, but get here early on a sunny day and you will find Alt
Berlin pausing for a coffee and a
Himbeer
tart. It's as if they are paying their respects to the Berlin of Einstein and Brecht and Isherwood and Grosz. Here you can
see their ghostly shapes passing. This place is No 1 in my top ten of insider's Berlin.
What the readers of the travel pages don't need to know is that George Grosz, the satirist and Dadaist of that extraordinary
prewar period, wrote that it had come to him
that it was complete nonsense to believe that spirit or anything spiritual ruled the world.
His work, he said,
was a reaction to the cloud-wandering tendencies of the so-called sacred art that found meaning in cubes and gothic while
the commanders in the field painted in blood.
No, the readers don't want to know that Berlin - in this respect just like Jerusalem - has been in the grip of the terrible,
fatal, belief in spirit, what Mendel called vaporous clouds of nonsense. And it was Mendel's conviction that these vaporous
clouds of nonsense - how similar, Conrad suddenly sees, to Grosz's cloud-wandering tendencies — led to Hitler and even to
von Gottberg's sacrifice. And to the death of countless millions. The question of how many millions has not been fully agreed,
as if a final determination could in some way fix the wretched twentieth century for ever in the past. Grosz was pointing
to Mendel's deepest fears: when Hitler arrived it wasn't so much the commanders in the field who were painting in blood, but
the brown plague of the SS, and also the Gestapo, directed by their beloved Führer, who had himself forsaken his own modest
talents in watercolour for the new medium in which he was undoubtedly to become the modern master.
Conrad is in a hurry. He rushes around Berlin, walking the length of Unter den Linden, paying a quick visit to the Pergamon
Museum —
top for antiquity, don't miss the Pergamon altar
— a lightning visit to Checkpoint Charlie -
unmissable reminder of Le Carré's Berlin —
Gendarmenmarkt —
wonderfully evocative square, ringed by fine restaurants —
Reichstag —
Norman Foster's sensitive and glorious restoration, wonderful views, long queues
— Holocaust Memorial —
reminiscent of the Jewish Cemetery on the Mount of Olives —
Brandenburg Gate —
utterly iconic,
and finally he walks all the way through the Tiergarten -
one of Europe's most inspiring parks, don't miss the English Garden
— to the zoo —
one of Europe's greatest and longest established
— and closed; but he gazes at the giant elephants that form the gates and then he tries to find von Gottberg's house behind
the ruined Kaiser Wilhelm church -
soaring monument to Prussian dominance —
but it seems the Erotic Museum now stands on the site. It's late and he hurries to cover cocktails at the Adlon —
faithfully restored to former glory
- and Potsdamer Platz -
new hub of Berlin's sensation seekers
- a boutique hotel -
light, modern feel, low-carb food, which you might need after too much
Eisbein. He has never eaten an
Eisbein,
but he has seen it, reaching up from the plate like a cathedral spire in a bombed city, historic Teutonic cuisine.
When he finally gets back to his hotel he feels a certain resentment rising from the night porter who is watching television
in a small office. He looks like a veteran rocker, with a ring in each ear, a ponytail tied back and a tattoo escaping underneath
his collar, perhaps something he regrets now in the new, cool, low-carb Berlin. He hands Conrad his key brusquely.
The bed is narrow and prescriptive:
Don't try anything fancy here.
He lies down exhausted. His walk through the English Garden brought Oxford to mind. When Conrad arrived in Oxford to explore
his destiny, he fell under the thrall of the place. The gardens, the glories of Christ Church Meadow, the endless surprises
of the quads and fellows' gardens and the climbing roses on crumbling stone walls, even the tall cow parsley growing outside
St Michael's Church in Carfax, all these whispered to him in a language he seemed already to have learned in another life.
He saw that every cobblestone and every path and every carved ceiling and every inch of lawn in Oxford had been willed. Until
that first year he had seen mountains and sea - landscape — as something created by accidents in geological time, but at Oxford
he saw what hundreds of years of human tending can achieve, a harmony of place and ideas.
As Conrad wandered through the English Garden and darkness was closing, he saw that whoever laid out this place had captured
an ideal perfectly, with small enclosed gardens of roses, arbours, gates, framed views to water through trees and a sense
of a landscape that had been tended and controlled. For von Gottberg, as for Conrad's father, Oxford was seductive. In the
English Garden, did he think of his excursions on Addison's Walk with Mendel or their brisk forays into The Parks and Christ
Church Meadow? He has a profound fellow-feeling for von Gottberg, walking through the English Garden on his way to work, through
the ruins of Berlin in those last days of his life. This garden must have whispered to him too, of his loss of the love of
his life, and of Elya Mendel, his friend and mentor, and above all of his blithe youth. As he walked to work on that awful
day, July the 20th, he must have known that he would almost certainly lose his life and family. But by then he had made up
his mind. He was prepared, even eager, to sacrifice himself. Perhaps he decided the time had come to disperse the clouds of
nonsense for ever.
Conrad is nervous. What does Fritsch have in store for him? His mind is teetering out of control. This condition is often
described as racing, but it is not racing so much as an inability to settle. He feels clammy and cold by turns. The English
Garden, the Sony Centre in Potsdamer Platz, the Holocaust Memorial, the martyrs' memorial outside Balliol, Francine's unborn
baby, von Gottberg standing calmly in front of Freisler, Emily rolling a joint and blowing smoke into his mouth, they are
all becoming scrambled as though they have lost any hierarchy of meaning. This is what it must have been like for his father.
His father's doctor, who knew how distressed Conrad was to be sent away by his own angry father, wrote to him saying that
he had early-onset dementia and had lost control of his emotions.
At last he sleeps and he dreams of Francine's baby, of a tiny foetus; and he dreams of minute, perfectly formed organs and
then he dreams that the foetus is crying. He wakes up horrified, sweating. He calms himself by reading a guidebook. At random
he reads that the zoo contains one thousand, four hundred species ranging from jellyfish to Indian elephants -
good-natured pachyderms.
The top attraction at the moment is a young gorilla called Sagha. He makes a mental note. He reads that the Huguenots brought
culture to Berlin in 1688 after the Edict of Potsdam. There were one hundred and sixty thousand Jews in Berlin in 1933. He
drinks some water.
By morning he has the impression that he has hardly slept, yet his wake-up call finds him profoundly asleep. He sets off to
capture as many of the sights on his list as he can before his appointment. He loathes shopping, but he knows that shopping
is important, so he visits, briefly, two centres -
lively Kaufhaus,
the biggest in Europe, sensational selection of electronics;
pubs —
don't miss Berlin's famous bars; the Kneipen;
gay and lesbian scene —
lively, Christopher Street Day Parade in July is a fixture on the gay calendar;
the lakes -
Wannsee, infamous for the final solution. Visit Wannsee Haus, Nikolassee for bathing;
River Spree —
forty-six kilometres are within city limits: Athens on the Spree;
Nazi architecture —
Olympic Stadium, Air Ministry, creepy.
He emerges from the U-Bahn at Senfelder Platz and walks up Schonhauser Allee, away from Kollwitz Platz —
lively, dotted with Cafés,
he notes - and looks for number 23. Across the way is a park with a Café promising barbecues and vegetarian food. Perhaps
this is where Mr Fritsch wishes to meet. But the numbers on the right-hand side of the street are all odd numbers and sequential
so he follows them until he comes to a cemetery, No 23-25. It is a Jewish cemetery. This is the appointed place. He waits
at the gate. After about five minutes he sees, standing stooped, almost hunched, a man looking at him. He waves. The man walks
over. He is elderly, dressed in a brown suit without a tie and he wears a small brown hat. He carries a Lufthansa bag of the
sort that used to be given away to passengers many years ago.
'Herr Senior?'
Jawohl. Sind Sie Herr Fritsch?
They shake hands. Fritsch is about eighty-five, Conrad guesses. His eyes are yellowish, perhaps caused by liver problems.
(Conrad thinks of himself as having medical knowledge by proxy.) His hand is very soft with the feel and instability of a
gel; his face is minutely lined with surface-dwelling blood vessels. His back is curving forward, forcing his head lower than
it wants to go. He leads Conrad into the cemetery and points to a box of kippas, exactly like the disposable kippas at the
Western Wall in Jerusalem; Conrad places one on his head and Fritsch leads him away from the entrance into the overgrown cemetery
itself where most of the tombstones lie on the ground or are tilted at an angle. It is a vast cemetery and Conrad for the
first time has the feeling that Berlin's Jews were real rather than symbolic beings.
'Jewish cemetery,' says Frisch, although this is already rather old information. 'Here Max Liebermann is buried and many important
Jewish families also.'
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of stones. A workman in a kippa passes with a barrow. Conrad catches sight of some
of the names: Rosenblum, Goldfarb, Katz, Kaplan: he wants to know how Jewish names differed from German names. What was it
that distinguished these names from those of their Aryan neighbours?
Fritsch has thought this meeting through. He leads Conrad deeper into the cemetery and points to a stone bench that looks
directly at a fallen mausoleum of the Nathansohn family. Conrad feels as they sit that they are in the middle of Jewish Berlin.
He has the strange sensation that he has been here before. This is the true Berlin, crowded with the dead. Fritsch takes from
his flight bag a small, lined exercise book. It becomes clear that he has prepared some questions and answers and has written
some English words down. There is nothing in the bag that could be the film whose existence hangs over Conrad now.
'You are a historical researcher?'
Conrad recognises his own word,
Forscher.
'Yes. I am interested in the life of Axel von Gottberg. I have the letters Count von Gottberg wrote to my teacher, Professor
Elya Mendel, at Oxford University. I was told that a film was produced by the Deutsche Wochenschau of the execution of members
of the resistance, and I wished to see it. That is the reason I asked the Bundesarchiv, film section, to make enquiries.'
Conrad believes that the introduction of the word Oxford into the conversation early on is a good tactic.
'Who is Mr Elya Mendel from Oxford?'
'He was - he died seven years ago - a friend of Count von Gottberg at Oxford and they were separated by the war.'
