Ingo Schulze - New Lives

When I got back, Kurt — who normally doesn’t say a word — asked if I’d had a nice time at Ilona’s and gave me a nod, a thoroughly approving nod.

I first noticed Kurt wearing one of the bombastic watches that the baron had brought a whole boxful of. They say an authentic original costs hundreds if not thousands of dollars, but the baron gets them for just nine marks apiece. They’re intended as an incentive for new subscribers. Anyone who subscribes to the Altenburg Weekly prior to July 1st and pays 45.90 marks in advance gets a watch — while the supply lasts.

The problem is we need to provide ourselves with a little buffer so we can get past July. If just a thousand people respond to the offer that would come to 45,900 marks, minus nine thousand for the watches.

By evening the locksmith had got all the doors more or less back to normal. We had him repair the old folks’ door at the same time.

Hugs, Your Enrico

PS: I spent two hours running the figures yesterday and put together a paper with my ten theses that I want to hand out tomorrow. We have to act. If we just keep on going as we have up till now, we’re done for. Marion — who reproaches me for having accepted an ad from South Africa

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— thinks that polishing doorknobs to get ads is demeaning, yes, humanly degrading for anyone, especially women. It borders on prostitution. I of all people should be able to sense the discrepancy between what is of importance to us — which is why we put out a newspaper at all — and what it is I’m planning. When I said nothing, she kept at it: Could I imagine that kind of door-to-door promoter on a stage or in a novel as anything but a wretched character. I don’t know if she noticed her mistake

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as she said it or if she now fell silent because Manuela

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had appeared in the door, beaming.

Ascension Day, May 24, ’90

Dear Nicoletta,

I do so hope that my ruminations about my need to write aren’t boring you. But my weal and woe depended on my writing. For if writing was a blunder, then I was a blunder.

By writing one reassures oneself of the world — it’s a platitude, but I filled it with life. As long as there are blasphemers, we needn’t worry about God. In my case that meant: as long as I succeeded in raging with a pure heart, something out there must exist — big game, monstrosities, socialism as it really exists, the Other, or whatever you want to call it.

You can see what thin ice I was already moving across. Security was reduced to a pure heart. Call it, if you like, a sense of style, or a regard for what was appropriate.

Michaela found my grotesque brain children amusing, but didn’t take them all that seriously and continued to torment me with suggestions for my Paulini piece. Geronimo never mentioned them. Vera, on the other hand, sent me a congratulatory telegram. She thought that precisely by abandoning my self, my ego, I would find my way to a unique position. I had, she said, discovered a shortcut on the road to fame and eternity. I’m afraid she still believes that. Just early last January she assured me that I am a player in an “immortal game.” My art, and it alone, was worth living and suffering for — she had long since staked her own life on just that, on her brother’s talent. 271

Despair alternated with euphoria. Eureka! I cried jubilantly, convinced that I had developed and radicalized my method. (Sitting on the john I discovered too late that there was no toilet paper and reached for a newspaper close at hand. As I departed, I noticed that one article had been torn on an angle and was missing its conclusion. What was left was a series of lines, each shorter than the previous and concluding in mutilated words that yielded a throttled stammer I found touching. The penultimate line ended with a “hear,” the last line with a “t.” I would never have been able consciously to achieve so convincing a linguistic disintegration of persons, things, and ideas as had inadvertently emerged here. When I typed it out, maintaining the same length of lines, what I finally pulled from my typewriter was a page that looked like a poem.) But no sooner did I have my effort in hand than I sank back into melancholy. What would such reductionism get me?

That was two days before the Hungarians opened their borders. 272Until that point I had ignored the Hungarian vacationers as best I could. I don’t know what I had expected, maybe a compromise that would allow them to return, but never that the borders would be opened. A permanent gap in the wall was unimaginable. Michaela said we had to toast the event. And so Robert drank his first glass of wine to the health of the Hungarians. “Maybe,” Michaela said, “something will come of West Berlin after all.”

I didn’t correct her, because her failure to understand seemed too fundamental to me.

Norbert Maria Richter, the director of Nestroy’s Freedom in Gotham, was trying at the time to have me replaced as dramaturge. Our differences were, he said, unbridgeable.

As far back as June, Norbert Maria Richter had wanted to turn the play into a kind Knights of the Roundtable, 273 a farce about a betrayed revolution, about revolutionaries turned nabobs, about history and how they prettify it by remembering lies. And all of it with lots of glitter and show.

And now, in September, Norbert Maria Richter thought he could see in the piece the spirit of revolution.

Precisely because it was this Norbert Maria Richter who told me about the founding of the New Forum — calling it “a significant step in the direction of democratizing our society”—I wanted nothing to do with it.

Nevertheless that same day Ramona, one of my colleagues, laid a couple of filled-out applications for membership in the New Forum on my desk. Michaela had promised her to take them along to a contact address in Halle.

I had no choice; I likewise had to fill out a form with my name and address. I knew what a stupid move it was, what childishness. Now I was playing “opposition” too. And sooner or later I would be shown this same form during an interrogation.

Michaela, on the other hand, wasn’t acting like someone risking her own existence and the future happiness of her child, but more like someone who had finally found the right role in the right theater.

The last Monday in September, the day on which we were supposed to drive to Halle, I couldn’t find the applications in my pocket. I ransacked my desk at the theater — but didn’t dare let my colleagues notice what I was up to. The idea that in my negligence I might have put Michaela and the others in jeopardy was unbearable.

I drove home, I could barely speak. “Gone,” I panted, “the applications are gone.”

Michaela had taken them out of my pocket to write down the addresses of the others.

As we drove along we saw several police cars, but even the highly unlikely possibility that we — Robert was with us — could have been waved out of the car and searched had lost all its terror.

Michaela was glad to make the acquaintance of someone named Bohley, evidently a relative of Bärbel Bohley. 274Except for a functioning doorbell and a nameplate on the mailbox, nothing suggested that the house was still occupied. The whole block looked as if it had been designated for demolition. Michaela was disappointed. We decided to come back later and drove to the center of town. We ran up and down the market square and ordered the most expensive ice-cream concoctions at a milk bar. We tried to describe for Robert what Feininger’s painting of the cathedral looks like; we extended our walk to the Moritzburg and then down to the Saale River. Michaela didn’t want to visit the Albert Ebert 275house or buy shoes, although she saw some she liked. She didn’t want to appear on the Bohley doorstep with a shopping parcel. 276