Ingo Schulze - New Lives

Then he froze in place. The only sound came from the cows and the very distant tolling of a village church bell. The wolf sniffed at the wristwatch, skirted the boots and pieces of uniform lying in the grass, and trotted off soundlessly, thirsty, hungry, voracious.

I WISH TO THANK THE BERLIN VERLAG, and especially my publisher, Elisabeth Ruge, together with Julia Graf and Fridolin Schley, for all their suggestions and corrections.

Special thanks as well to Silvia Bovenschen for cordial conversations and advice that accompanied the book in its initial and final stages.

I received encouragement and criticism from: Ursula Bode, Christoph Brumme, Jörg Fessmann, Ulf Fischer, Matthias Flügge, Robert Fürst, Ulrike Gärtner, Thomas Geiger, Martin Jankowski, Reinhard John, Simone Kollmorgen, Katja Lange-Müller, Carsten Ludwig, Elena Nährlich, Jutta Penndorf, Sarah Schumann, Lutz Seiler, Elisabeth Türmer, Vera Türmer, Frank Witzel, John Woods, Johann Ziehlke.

I also owe thanks to Mario Gädtke for allowing me to use his personal report, and to Jens Löffler for typesetting the book.

The Joseph Breitbach Prize made it possible for me to work without financial worries. I likewise received generous support from the Berlin Senate Office for Science, Research, and Culture; Deutsches Haus in New York; and the Kulturfonds Foundation.

Above all, however, I want to thank Natalia Bensch and Christa Schulze, to whom this book is dedicated.

Ingo Schulze, born in Dresden in 1962, studied classical philology at the University of Jena. His first book,

33 Moments of Happiness,

won two German literary awards, the prestigious Alfred Döblin Prize, and the Ernst Willner Prize for Literature. In 2007 he was awarded both the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and the Thuringia Literature Prize. He is a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature. He lives in Berlin.

John E. Woods is the distinguished translator of many books — most notably Arno Schmidt’s

Evening Edged in Gold,

for which he won both the American Book Award for translation and the PEN Translation Prize in 1981; Patrick Süskind’s

Perfume,

for which he again won the PEN Translation Prize in 1987; Christoph Ransmayr’s

Terrors of Ice and Darkness, The Last World

(for which he was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 1991), and

The Dog King;

Thomas Mann’s

Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain

(for which, together with his translation of Arno Schmidt’s

Nobodaddy’s Children,

he was awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 1996),

Doctor Faustus,

and

Joseph and His Brothers;

and Ingo Schulze’s

33 Moments of Happiness

and

Simple Stories.

In 2008 he was awarded the Goethe Medallion of the Goethe Institut. He lives in Berlin.

1. Two pages are missing; this page is numbered “3” at the top. It was possible to reconstruct the date.

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2. Enrico always called himself Heinrich when dealing with his sister.

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3. The nickname both brother and sister called their mother.

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4. There was no phone either in T.’s and Michaela’s apartment or at his mother’s home in Dresden. His mother could be reached only at Friedrichstadt Hospital, where she worked as a surgical nurse.

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5. T. had quit his job at the theater in early January.

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6. This same cryptic statement is repeated in later letters in different versions and in greater detail.

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7. Altenburg’s hallmark. All that is left of the convent founded during the reign of Kaiser Friedrich Barbarossa are two brick steeples that are said to symbolize the tips of the kaiser’s red beard.

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8. Their original idea was for the paper to be the New Forum’s weekly and for it to be financed by the Citizens’ Movement.

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9. Neues Deutschland.

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10. Václav Havel’s first foreign trip as president of Czechoslovakia took him to the GDR, then to Munich.

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11. U.S. troops took over Panama on Dec. 24, 1989. President Noriega, a former CIA agent, sought asylum in the Vatican embassy, which he then left on Jan. 3, 1990. He was later tried on charges of drug smuggling.

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12. Gleina, south of Altenburg, had a large radar station for the National People’s Army.

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13. Nicola Barakat, Vera Türmer’s husband since January 1989, a Lebanese. He ran a fabric shop in West Berlin where V. T. worked part-time. Toward the end of 1989 he visited his mother in Beirut. He came up with the idea of reopening his parents’ business in Beirut. V. T. followed him then in late January.

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14. T. apparently failed to realize that within the foreseeable future he would have to report on such events as this.

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15. Drunkard, “stewbum.”

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16. Colonel in the State Security, after 1966 head of “KoKo” (Commercial Coordination), which was supposed to keep the GDR solvent by means of covert business transactions.

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17. Soviet-German joint-stock company that mined uranium at various sites in Thuringia and Saxony.

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18. The only hotel in town at the time.

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19. The paper was set in linotype.

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20. T. had bet his mother that he would see Paris before his thirtieth birthday — information provided by Elisabeth Türmer.

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21. Jan Steen.

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22. He means his car, a Wartburg Deluxe.

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23. This letter presumes that some information about the trip to Offenburg, including T.’s impressions, had already been shared with his sister, evidently in phone calls from there.

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24. Skat and a factory for skat playing cards has been Altenburg’s claim to fame. During this same period the Offenburg town hall was inundated with packages filled with decks of skat cards. The backs were often female nudes. Most senders wanted to establish contact with families in their new sister city.

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25. Figure in a Russian fairy tale in which the youngest, and presumed dumbest, carries the day.

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26. The newsletter of the Altenburg New Forum, published by Michaela Fürst. Its five issues were considered the precursor of the Altenburg Weekly.

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27. Tiramisu.

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28. Until the end of 1989 Elisabeth Türmer had believed that, after V. T.’s departure for West Berlin in the summer of 1987, she had at last begun a career as an actor there.

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29. A coalition made up of the Christian Democratic Union, the German Social Union, and the “Democratic Awakening.”

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30. Herrmann Türmer died in 1968.

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31. There are just a few places where a strongly homoerotically tinged relationship between T. and Johann is suggested, and rarely is the implication as overt as it is here. Without knowledge of this fact, however, several passages would be incomprehensible.

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32. Candidate of the Socialist Unity Party.

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33. Between October 2nd and 8th there was a massive police deployment in Dresden. The initial cause was a fracas outside the Central Station, where trains carrying refugees from the German embassy in Prague had been passing through. Hundreds of people hoped to find a place on one of the trains. Cf. also the letter of May 25, ’90.