Ingo Schulze - New Lives

The fall of the wall felt like stern but just punishment for my regression. I pulled the covers up over my head.

“Nobody will be coming to our demonstration now,” Michaela grumbled. Later I thought I heard her heels clacking on the sidewalk. Alone now, I was overcome with the sense of being personally responsible for the fall of the wall, because I had hesitated, because I had never managed to simply pull the trigger. I had never been in the vicinity of an actual deed. So this was the 6 to 3, the inconceivable fifth goal scored in the second half, the end, the knockout punch.

Michaela returned almost cheerful. She had phoned her mother, had got her out of bed, and said how strange it made her feel to tell someone about IT, about how odd the moment was, because the other person was blindly continuing to live in the old world.

At the dress rehearsal — and this is the only memory I have of it — I said in the presence of both Jonas and Norbert Maria Richter that I would advise against a premiere. Jonas agreed with me, but left it up to Norbert Maria Richter whether his production should open.

Whereupon Michaela called me a traitor. “I’m living with a traitor!” I was obviously trying to pick a fight, evidently all I wanted to do was destroy, everything, willfully destroy everything — family, work, everything.

Michaela and I said scarcely a word to each other until Sunday, and then only to discuss the demonstration. I asked her to plan at most two minutes for my speech on Market Square. She asked what I was going to talk about. “The future,” I said, a remark that in regard to myself sounded absurd, since I no longer saw any future whatever.

Only half as many people came to the demonstration as on November 4th. In front of the Stasi villa and Party headquarters there was the usual music of catcalls, but no one halted. There were traffic wardens everywhere — Michaela had distributed white armbands, was wearing one herself, and had offered both Robert and me one. I saw the fat policeman from the previous Sunday again — Blond and Black, however, didn’t show.

As the procession turned onto Market Square, I saw red flags and GDR flags being held high in front of the speaker’s platform by a group of a hundred or two hundred people, almost all of them women. They were also carrying old banners and signs: THE GDR — MY FATHERLAND or SOCIALISM AND FREEDOM.

A short, mustached man kept circling this bunch and shouting, “Keep together, keep together!” although not one of them had stirred from the spot. Surrounded now, the Red bunch was being pelted with a seemingly never-ending chorus of “Shame on you!” In response they waved their flags.

Standing on the speaker’s platform I could see the angry, but also frightened look in these women’s eyes. One of them, way at the front, was resting her head on her neighbor’s shoulder and sobbing. It may sound rather strange to you, my dear Nicoletta, but I can honestly say that these women were the first people I had ever met who championed the cause of the GDR of their own free will.

I had put together a note card with a list of my points. I didn’t want Michaela to think I was taking the matter too lightly.

While giving my short speech, I gazed steadily at those women. I spoke to them like a doctor trying to explain to his patients what therapeutic measures need to be taken. Basically I said what I had said in Berlin three weeks before when Thea had confronted me.

I was the only person that day to offer a few remarks about money. “In West Berlin the exchange rate for the D-mark to the East-mark is one to seven.” That’s what I claimed, I didn’t know exactly what it was, but Vera had mentioned it once. Plus I invented a minimum wage of eleven D-marks an hour and said anyone could figure out how many days a man would have to work in the West to earn what he earned here in a month. “For most of us,” I said, “it probably wouldn’t take two whole days.” This earned me some applause. But the woman whose shoulder had supported her weeping friend’s head shouted that money isn’t everything.

“We have only two alternatives: either we close the wall again, or we introduce a market economy here too, otherwise no one will stay.” I had to repeat my conclusion over the enraged howls of the Red bunch. They hurled curses you might have heard shouted at strikebreakers at the beginning of the century. “Capitalist lackey” was among them, and “reactionary” and “counterrevolutionary.” Someone — alluding evidently to my white armband — called out that I belonged in the White Army. The women had the upper hand until the large crowd whipped itself up again to a “Shame on you!” and drowned them out.

The sooner we understand, I shouted, that there is only an either-or, the better it will be for all of us. “Or do you want to go to Paris as beggars?” Unable to read my next point, I stepped back from the mike and turned to one side — with the result that the applause for my last statement continued to grow. As backup music to my departure, the women had struck up the “International,” and no sooner had I reached the pavement than their singing could be heard above the applause. At first there were some whistles; then, however, the majority of the crowd likewise began to sing the “International,” just as I had heard people do in Leipzig.

I planted myself on one of the concrete flower boxes and hoped the whole circus would be over soon.

You probably can’t suppress a suspicion that what I’m trying to do here is to put myself in the best light after the fact, to paint myself as the only person who knew so early on what lay down the road ahead.

But that’s not the case. Just as in a game of chess, I was merely trying to calculate a few moves in advance. I certainly didn’t see reunification coming, although even then there were a few already demanding it. And as I’ve said, I had no concept of any future. With the fall of the wall, my personal future had dissolved into nothingness. Had I not had to climb the orator’s pulpit for Michaela’s sake, such pronouncements would never have passed my lips. Of course I could have said something different, too. But what? What else was there to say? There wasn’t anything else to say.

Whenever Michaela took the podium to announce the next speaker and, as the Leipziger Volkszeitung put it, request that the crowd show “moderation and decorum,” she seemed so free and self-assured — and earned more applause for her quick wit than most of the others had for their speeches. But now that she had managed to extract herself from the cluster of people wanting to talk with her and came over to us, she seemed depressed. She didn’t deign to give me a single glance. On the drive home her mood toppled into total darkness. I took it to be stage fright before a premiere.

Once we were home and I was finally able to ask her what had happened, she said, “Nothing,” and vanished into our room. She was crying.

“Is this it?” she asked when I entered. She held the envelope up. “Is this why you’re the way you are?” I recognized Nadja’s handwriting on the envelope. “You don’t need to worry about us,” Michaela said, “we’ll manage all right.” She blew her nose.

It was one of the few moments in my life in which my conscience was pure, ready for any kind of interrogation.

I asked Michaela to open the envelope. She shook her head. “Please,” I said. “No,” she said. She wouldn’t subject herself to that.

I slit the envelope open with a nail file lying on her nightstand, unfolded the sheet of paper, and began to read aloud. Right at the start Nadja wrote that she was aware that I now had a family. She herself was living with Jaroslav, a Czech, and was expecting her first child at the end of February. She asked about how my manuscript was going and complained about her work.