long, the Western half had been a forbidden zone. Did you know that sex shops have taken the place of churches and chapels? They cater for every taste. In Wedding, where Gertrude and David lived when they ran away from Munich, and which was a Communist working-class stronghold, the new entrepreneurs are trading in exotica. Rare tropical birds, powder from the horn of a rhinoceros, dried pigs’ ears and a lot else.
Berlin is a shamelessly consumerist city. Art consists of the chassis of an old Cadillac fixed to slabs of concrete and wooden benches with carved breasts and penises.
To my own amazement, Karl, I began to miss the drab, dingy, prudish Berlin where both you and I grew up.
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*The Communist (Third) International (Comintern) was launched with great fanfare in Moscow in 1919. Its aim was a World Revolution of which it was the General Staff. It laid down a set of twenty-one conditions for membership, the principal function of which was to split the existing Socialist Parties of the Second International and form new Communist parties. For the first four years, the heroic period of the Comintern, this aim was pursued vigorously. Later, the Comintern became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. It was dissolved unilaterally by Stalin in 1943 to convince Churchill and Roosevelt that he was a reliable ally.
KARL MEYER stood at the window of his second-floor apartment on the Fritz-Tillman-Strasse in Bonn. He sometimes regretted his escape to this strange city. At first he had wanted to forget everything about Berlin. The Wall. The Fall. His parents. Gerhard. A beautiful teacher named Marianne. Grandma Gertrude. Everything. He loved them all, but when he looked back and remembered his father’s petulance and blindness to reality or his mother’s insistence on a monotone reading of the rich complexities of European politics, his anger returned. His parents were always delirious in their irrationality. The protective wall they had built around themselves and their friends had fallen at the same time as that other Wall. Now they complained bitterly of the miseries and lunacies of the new order. Karl held them responsible for their own failure.
Now, close to the centres of power in this dying capital, he was afraid of being forgotten by them. His mother was happy in New York, but Karl was often anxious about the state of his father’s mind and health. He put on his dark-blue suit, found a matching bow-tie, and inspected himself in the mirror. He saw a very self-contained, slender, square-jawed young man. He nodded in approval, locked his flat and descended via the lift to street level. The cafe where he breakfasted was in the same block. As he sipped his espresso, Karl quickly flicked through that morning’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Much speculation as to whether Kohl would last the course as Chancellor this time; reports of a dissident Muslim-Serb alliance in Bosnia; another crisis for the British Conservatives.
Karl was indifferent to the Balkans. Britain, in his eyes, was a laboratory experiment that had gone badly wrong, and the guinea pigs were on the verge of an electoral revolt. Perhaps, under a new government, it might be of some interest to Germany. Perhaps.
The fact was that Karl was interested only in the minutae of German politics. He knew, of course, that the United States, Japan and China were the major planetary players, but even this knowledge did not excite any real interest in the last two countries. Karl was a new German. He wanted Germany to play its part in the world. He did not believe that the crimes of the Third Reich annulled Germany’s traditional position in the centre of Europe.
A few weeks ago, Karl, on the instructions of his leader, had spent a whole afternoon in concentrated talks with two pivotal Free Democrat members of parliament, one of whom had defied his party’s instructions and failed to vote for the Christian Democrats’ choice of Chancellor.
Karl’s mission was as straightforward as his demeanour. He wanted Kohl dethroned, and the SPD leader crowned Chancellor in his place. His hosts plied him with questions about the future. How many posts in the Cabinet? What were SPD intentions on Europe? Could the young man assure them that Scharping was more than a creature of the apparatus?
Karl hid nothing. He told his astonished interlocutors that German stability required a Chancellor controlled by the apparatus. Better a weak-kneed provincial than a loud-mouthed populist who excited hopes that could never be fulfilled. Only under the SPD could Germany use its economic muscle and exert a political pressure commensurate with its new-found status in the post-Communist world. He added, for good measure, that only a politically assertive Germany could rebuild middle Europe. The two men from the Bundestag were impressed by the zeal and self-confidence exhibited by the young SPD apparatchik. Like them, he was interested only in power. They could certainly do business with him. They asked him to come and meet their colleagues in a few days’ time.
The same evening Karl went to an early evening drinks party hosted by the local boss of CNN in honour of a visiting dignitary from Atlanta. At least three government ministers, numerous ambassadors, the SPD High Command and other denizens of the videosphere. A senior colleague introduced Karl to Monika Minnerup, a young woman who could not have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five years old. She smiled and her almond-shaped eyes lit up like oil lamps. Karl shook hands and looked at her. She had a wide, sensuous face framed by short, curly black hair, thin lips and was dressed in a loose grey silk suit, which made any speculation on the shape of the body that lay underneath a bit difficult. She was a systems analyst at a big bank and she earned a small fortune. Karl was impressed. If it had been any other occasion he would have stuck with her, but his eyes began to wander above her head, trying to glimpse the famous and the powerful. He wanted to go and join the group listening to the Foreign Minister.
‘If you want to go and kiss arse, why don’t you piss off? I loathe making polite talk with small town careerists. Goodbye.’
Monika walked away leaving him in a state of shock. His first instinct was to run after her, but she was already near the exit and, anyway, he told himself as he recovered from her impact, he really did want to hear what the Foreign Minister was telling the Americans.
After graduating, Karl had wanted only one thing: to run away, to get out of Berlin as quickly as possible. Helge’s dash to New York had initially upset him. Bitterness had set in soon afterwards. He was angry with her for deserting him. She could have moved and set up a practice in Frankfurt. Why leave the country at such a time? Karl was genuinely puzzled by her choice of New York. Ultimately he’d convinced himself that it must be a lover. Fine, but why hadn’t she told him?
He knew she wasn’t pleased when, in one of her letters, she referred to him as an ‘apparatchik on the make in Bonn, and working for an apparatus full of shit’. Her letter had made him laugh, but his sharp reply had led first to a ceasefire and then a total cessation on her part. She no longer wrote. Instead they exchanged greetings and indulged in small talk on the phone, once, sometimes twice a week.
Karl sighed when he thought of his father. He was beyond redemption. Vlady was no bloody use at all. He lived in his own world, cocooned from reality. He had achieved nothing in his own life, apart from a few jargon-filled books on Marxist aesthetics which were no longer fashionable. In previous years, even though very few students had understood what he was trying to say, his books had been obligatory bookshelf decoration for left-wing intellectuals on both sides of the Wall. Nobody bought Vlady’s books any more. Karl felt completely alienated from his father. Vlady’s lifestyle – he still refused to dress properly – was a disgrace. His politics just left Karl speechless and angry. Why couldn’t the old fool understand it was all over? Karl had stopped arguing, but Vlady still had enough intellectual power to provoke and irritate his son. On the last occasion Karl had struck back, his voice uncharacteristically high.
‘It’s
