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Letter from Berlin (1981)

Only in Berlin was there so much hunger for the new, so fierce a rejection of the old, and so much intellectual and artistic freedom to translate the new ideas into reality.

--Suzanne Everett, Lost Berlin (1979)

Many Americans have images of Berlin, whether of the glorious 1920s or the brutal 1930s; but few know it first-hand mostly because it no longer lies on American tourists' path through European cities that lead to each other. Berlin is not Paris, Amsterdam, or Milan. Berlin is more like Jerusalem or Helsinki, necessarily the furthermost point of a trip (unless one is proceeding into esoteric, perhaps dangerous territory). To the Germans, by contrast, Berlin is very familiar, initially as the former political capital and still perhaps the de facto capital--the city that every German visits at least once, much as Washington, DC, is visited: out of continuing respect for its role in the history of the nation. (Bonn, the current capital, no one visits, except to do political business.) Here in Berlin, as nowhere else, are the visible relics of modem German history: the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, the Olympia Stadium, the Wall, many houses where the great artists and writers once lived. Berlin of the 1920s is remembered by modem Germans much as Paris of the 1930s is memorialized by Frenchmen or New York of the 1960s is coming to be perceived by Americans--not only as a center of indisputable cultural achievement but an exciting place to have been. For these reasons, nearly all the tourists here are German; whenever sightseeing companies run sets of buses for Germans and for others, the former are invariably more populated.

• • •

Even after the destruction of the War and the present division into two zones, East and West, Berlin is in many ways a beautiful city and in other ways an especially civilized one. Its signature is greenery: the plants on the porches that grace most apartments, the little gardens in front or in back of houses, the trees in nearly all the streets, a large zoo in the center of town (adjacent to the main railway station), the numerous little parks that dot the city and sometimes surround lakes; also, the Schrebergartens, government-owned plots within the city for Berliners to lease at their leisure to build their rustic shacks (Schreberhütte) and plant their greens. To this verdure, add, in West Berlin, the great wooded parks of the Tiergarten and the Grunewald, one perhaps the size of Manhattan's Central Park and the other several times larger. The rest of West Berlin resembles a garden suburb whose apartment houses are rarely more than four stories high. In spite of the mostly cloudy weather, this is an outdoor town with benches in the parks and patios before the cafés--a sprawling city that, in spite of a few million people, has many songbirds and little air pollution.

The lakes are as characteristic of Berlin as the two rivers that run through it, for a large percentage of the city's area is water. Of the thirty or so lakes, the smaller ponds are for watching, the medium-sized for swimming, and the larger ones for boating. To no surprise, one of every three sporting boats in West Germany is registered in Berlin. The huge Wannsee on a summer Sunday afternoon is comparable to the Kurfürstendamm at night--crowded with West Berliners abundantly enjoying themselves. Nowhere else, to my recollection, has so many public snack-stands offering "imbiss"--not only a selection of "wursts" but beer and sometimes hard liquor too. In no other place known to me do people eat and drink so much in public.

• • •

Across a few roads from my apartment is the Halensee, a medium-sized lake with two beaches. The one with floating pontoons and a lifeguard charges nominal admission. The other, in an expansive meadow, is free. The major difference between them is that the latter is unsupervised, which means that bathers can go bottomless as well as topless; and many of them do, both young and ancient, male and female, nude bathing being an old respectable tradition in northern Germany. What is as impressive as the number of wholly nude bathers is the fact that this beach is located near the center of the city in full view of passing traffic from the nearby autobahn and the double-decker buses and thus feasibly accessible to voyeurs. The Halensee spectacle is awesome; where else in the world is anything like this so close to the center of town? It reminded me of Sybyl Moholy-Nagy dismissing the American 1960s. "We had it all in Berlin in the 1920s," she told me, "cocaine and drugs and skirts up to there"--pointing to the middle of her thigh. It is not for nothing that advanced social notions from feminism to the acceptance of homosexuality, from the counter-culture to house-squatting, have invariably emanated from Berlin.

To my mind, one mark of a civilized city is that everyone can live there comfortably without owning a car. By this standard, New York is civilized as Los Angeles is not; Boston is civilized as Chicago is not. Similarly, West Berlin is civilized in ways that other European cities are not. There are three separate public transportation systems here, two of them complementary, the other autonomous. The last and least popular is the historic surface rail system that the East German government inherited in the division of Berlin. However, since the West Berliners have been reluctant to contribute to the East German economy, they have avoided the S-Bahn, as it is called. Both the rolling stock and the stations deteriorated. In 1980, its Western employees went on strike, demanding salaries closer to those of their counterparts on the West Berlin-owned underground system. The East German "socialist" bosses retaliated with a response more characteristic of traditional capitalism--a lockout that shut down nearly the entire system. (The exception is the most populated main route that runs directly from the Wannsee to East Berlin.) Native Berliners pretend that they hardly miss the S-Bahn; but as a newcomer I know that, were it operative, I could go by rail directly from an abandoned station near my home to important places that are now less accessible. Otherwise, Berlin's comfortable double-decker buses run frequently and efficiently, customarily matching the schedules that are posted at every bus stop.

With a single ticket, one can ride for ninety minutes, changing as often as necessary. (That is a civilized privilege unknown in New York, where transfers are rare and usable only once.) Better yet, the same bus ticket is good in the West Berlin U-Bahn, or underground subway, which is considerably cleaner and quieter (and safer) than New York's. This subway is run on an honor system. One should have a ticket stamped within the past ninety minutes, either by a machine at the entrance to the subway or by another carrier. Theoretically, a squad of inspectors will, from time to time, hit a train and ask to see everyone's ticket, the penalty for failure being a modest fine. In perhaps a hundred rides, I have never seen them. Nonetheless, both myself and everyone with me always had a valid ticket.

• • •

The post-War Reconstruction of West Berlin has created a mostly persuasive artifice. Out of sight of the Wall that separates East Berlin from West, one could scarcely perceive that West Berlin is presently an oasis deep in the heart of East Germany--over one hundred miles away from the closest point in West Germany, a vulnerable island whose survival has depended upon continuing detente in Europe and, behind that, upon American omnipotence. West Berlin has been, and still is, a principal pawn in the front line of the Cold War--a highly protected pawn that America bolstered in the wake of the recognition that West Germany would inevitably be America's ally in any confrontation with Russia.

There must be considerable weaponry here, to be sure, but it is hidden behind the verdure. Perhaps the only unusual sight distinguishing Berlin from another peaceful city is the number of helicopters in the sky. The few soldiers who are visible look as though they are on permanent vacation; indeed, most of them have never fought in a battle and may not know how. Nonetheless, they are here for a good reason. Quite clearly, East Germany knows that if it invaded West Berlin, it would soon encounter soldiers from not only the U.S. but Britain and France as well. All those countries would need to declare war initially to protect their armies here. Thus, no one expects either the East Germans or their backers, the Russians, to invade. (Similarly, no one expects the parts of Berlin to be reunited soon.) Indeed, there is no historical precedent for a mostly closed border within a city and no precedent either for an enclave surviving two generations in hostile territory and showing every sign of surviving into the foreseeable future. Among the foreign soldiers here now, someone told me, are some grandchildren of those who liberated it in 1945. (Conversely, so dependent are the Berliners upon the myth of American military omnipotence that, in the wake of the 1980 American helicopter debacle in Iran, money rapidly flowed out of West Berlin banks.)

The photos of 1946 Berlin show a devastated city where one-fifth of all dwellings were destroyed, and one-half more were damaged; less than one-third remained unscathed. In the Berlin I know thirty-five years later there are remarkably few mementos of the War; rather, one would scarcely know what had happened here less than four decades ago. Indeed, what is most striking is the pervasive detachment from the recent past. The immense Olympic Stadium is typically characterized as “that Nazi building" as though it were built by foreign invaders. An American who took over an office here tells me that his elder employees remember the War only at office parties when, after a few drinks, they speak less of the destruction of their city than of the hardships they personally endured during that time. Berliners do not voluntarily speak of the War, much as professors at the University of Texas at Austin (where I once spent a semester) do not talk about Charles Whitman and his murderous spree from the library tower.

Perhaps the most prominent memento of the War is the scant shell of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Memorial Church, once the main cathedral, now typically surrounded by fresh tall buildings that continue its ecclesiastical functions. The areas south of Potsdamer Platz, along the Wall, are barren in a seedy fashion that indicates earlier devastation, as well as marking West Berliners’ reluctance to rebuild so close to the Wall. Nearby are three genuine ruins: the surviving entranceway of the Anhalter Bahnhof (once a major railroad station) and the former embassies of Italy and Japan, still in ruins because the buildings are owned not by locals but by then respective governments (whose embassies are now in Bonn). Otherwise, Berlin architecture that survived the War was repaired and rebuilt, new facades often masking antique interiors. Open spaces were filled with fresh structures that reveal the Berliners' traditional appreciation of sophisticated architectural design. A whole new community of high rises was built in the north. Perhaps the only visible signs of the War are the irregular indentations on the outside walls of a few buildings—bullet holes that at first strike the unthinking eye as clumsy architectural decoration.

• • •

Berlin in the nineteenth century was a world city, hospitable to the stranger; it was so welcoming not only because it gave its residents conspicuousness, but also because it allowed them to disappear.

--Peter Gay, "The Berlin-Jewish Spirit" (1978)

I came to Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Künstlerprogramm, the acronym standing for the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst or German Academic Exchange Service, which annually bestows a singular sort of beneficence upon roughly two dozen artists from around the world. Guests are invited to live in Berlin, for either six months or a year, and given an apartment, free round-trip transportation (once), and a stipend. The DAAD administrators are predisposed to making calls on a guest's behalf, introducing him or her to theater producers, book publishers, media officials, or anyone else who can make happen in Berlin things that would not otherwise happen. They put the guest's name on the mailing list for a bi-weekly packet of invitations to poetry readings, concerts, art openings and even DAAD's own parties. Two years ago I spent a month at Mishkenot Sha'ananim, a somewhat comparable Jerusalem operation that did little more than give the invited artist an apartment and clean its floors.

The reason why DAAD is so solicitous is that the program exists precisely to make a current contribution to the culture of West Berlin. Historically this Künstlerprogramm grew out of a Ford Foundation scheme from the early sixties, perhaps with some encouragement from our CIA. Originated by Shepherd Stone, an American-born Ford executive, the program initially sought to bolster West Berlin culture--to make it more attractive to German writers and artists, as well as lay lovers of art and writing, by inviting a stream of distinguished foreigners to reside here for a while.

In this respect, it was a minor element in a comprehensive Western effort to persuade Germans to reside in Berlin. The mechanics of the latter include blanket reduction in taxes, higher salaries for comparable government jobs, rent control that keeps housing cheap, and much else, all to make the city residentially attractive. The DAAD Künstlerprogramm also sends select Berlin artists on cultural exchange junkets around the world--to Los Angeles in 1980, to Nice in 1981.

The composition of the program is at once intelligent and amusing. Consider the current "Gästeliste" for late 1981. Under "Komponisten" are a Swiss, an American, a mulatto South African who lives in Holland, a Japanese, a recently expatriated Estonian who lived for the past two years in Vienna, and two Moslem brothers from New Delhi. Under "Schriftsteller" are two middle-aged avant-gardists from the U.S. (Dick Higgins and myself), a Swiss, a Russian who likewise recently resided in Vienna, an African who presently lives in Montreal, a Hungarian, a Turk and a Pole. The list of writers also contains two Cubans, a Bulgarian, a Lithuanian, two Russians, and yet another Hungarian, who are all identified as "Ankunft Ungewiss," which is to say arrival uncertain (or doubtful), as they have not been able to get exit visas from their respective "democratic" countries. There are also eight visual artists, five filmmakers and five architects.

However, these names hardly exhaust the beneficence of the program. Under each category is another set of names of “former guests resident in Berlin,” which is to say program alumni who are assigned inexpensive furnished apartments, largely donated by academics teaching abroad. These alumni represent the success of the program--the foreign artists now populating Berlin largely at their own expense, rather than DAAD's. Among the most prominent are the American visual artists George Rickey, who also lives in upstate New York; Edward Kienholz, who also has a studio in Idaho; and Dorothy Iannone, who keeps additional apartments in Copenhagen and the south of France.

Geographically isolated, with a disproportionate population of young people and old people, Berlin’s economy could not possibly survive without outside help. It has been estimated that this Cold-War welfare city costs the Federal Republic (West Germany) between one billion and four billion dollars a year in subsidies and other benefits, while the government budget for cultural activities alone is said to exceed one hundred million dollars. In this context, a half million bucks for two dozen prominent foreign artists and their administrators is scarcely a drop in the Wannsee. (Mention West Berlin to a cab driver in Munich, and he will solemnly propose that it be "sold" to East Germany, eliminating not only the financial burden but the young radicals.)

Until recently DAAD had a reputation for almost unlimited generosity. Whatever the artist wanted in order to do his or her own work or to bring publicity to the program was made available. Assistants could be found and paid for; so could studios apart from one's residence. A book could be published and the DAAD author given as many copies as he could feasibly take away. Money could be requisitioned to make a film, to subsidize a translation, to reimburse for travel expenses. However, this munificence came to an end in May, 1981, just as I arrived, alas, for the Helmut Schmidt administration in Bonn has followed Ronald Reagan's lead in cutting down government expenditures, especially in areas outside the military. The funds of the DAAD Künstlerprogramm were cut severely, notwithstanding its implicit Cold-War purposes. (If it falls into deeper financial trouble, perhaps the program can be sold back to the Ford Foundation!)

The apartment assigned to me is on the outskirts of the center of Berlin, at the quiet end of its magnificent main drag, the Kurfürstendamm. Within two hundred yards of my door are two grocery stores and two Kneipen, the German equivalent of British pubs. The grocery stores are small by American standards; people here have not yet discovered the usefulness of grocery carts or large refrigerators. Nearly every time I come home I must pick up something or other; and since all stores are required by law to close at 6:00 p.m. in a clear example of legally eliminating competition; so that one cannot catch up by shopping after dinner. Two stocks that distinguish these grocery stores from their American counterparts are the overwhelming variety of cold meats--it must take a lifetime to comprehend the differences among them--and an abundance not just of wines but of hard liquors as well.

The larger of the two neighborhood Kneipen is lively all the time, its door customarily open to the street; but its clientele and pinball machines look too hard-hat for my tastes. (So do the kids, who are underage by American laws and probably by German laws as well; but one measure of freedom here is a certain reluctance to forbid alcoholic consumption.) The smaller Kneipen is a one-man operation with only two tables and six stools. It appears to open and close at the owner's whim; for in Berlin, unlike other German cities, bars are required to close for only one hour (that’s right—only one!) in the course of a full day.

The identifying landmark for my neighborhood is Rathenauplatz, a circular intersection that was named after the Jewish foreign minister who was assassinated nearby by proto-Nazi thugs in 1922. It is a relief to discover that streets here are named after Jews.

• • •

There is nothing normal about Berlin. Its raison d'etre is emergency--emergency is mainly what has made the queer arrangements of life in West Berlin tolerable-and without it the city seems to suffer from a kind of civic emptiness.

--Jane Kramer, "A Reporter in Europe: West Berlin" (1981)

For all of the facilities that the two Berlins share an electrical system, surface train transport, the airwaves for radio and television, garbage disposal, you can’t forget that these are two profoundly different places. If West Berlin is prosperous and lively, East Berlin is comparatively poor and depressed. (While West Berlin has been subsidized from the West, in part to taunt and to tempt the impoverished East, East Germany has been milked by the Russians, under a program of WW-II reparations.) Whereas West Berliners love costumes and hair-dye and colorful idiosyncratic dress, East Berlin is a swamp of drab anonymity. As West Berlin has too many automobiles, East Berlin has too few. If West Berlin is green and suburban, East Berlin is gray and proletarian. Much of East Berlin looks and feels pre-War; most of West Berlin is post-War. Whereas West Berlin has nearly totally eliminated the ruins of the Second World War, the East still keeps large gutted buildings smack in the middle of town. The few Eastern attempts at contemporary architecture are embarrassing, as the new tall apartment houses resemble American low-rent projects, and the immense lobby of the Palace of the People, patently designed to impress, resembles to my Western eye nothing as much as an airport lounge.

West Berlin is a democracy with several political parties; the German Democratic Republic, its name notwithstanding, is a dictatorship of the Communist Party. Whereas West Berliners are free to travel wherever they want, East Berliners are normally forbidden to visit not just West Berlin but the entire West and also have difficulty obtaining visas even to other Communist countries. Through most of 1981 they were forbidden even to visit neighboring Poland. As the long-distance passenger trains prepare to leave East Berlin's main Friedrichstrasse Station to pass through West Berlin before going on to western East Germany, dogs on a leash are marshaled to sniff under cars not for contraband drugs, like Western snouts, but for people.

The two parts of Berlin are separated of course by an awesomely impregnable wall that the East German government began to build on August 13, 1961, insisting that its purpose was preventing a military invasion from the West. West Berliners regard this rationalization as a cynical East German joke, just as no one believes the East German claim that the emigration prior to that August day was largely attributable to kidnappers and West German agents. (In fact, when the wall went up, under the supervision of the East German militia, in gross violation of the agreements that forbade all German troops from the occupied territory of Berlin, the three Western powers unanimously failed to provide the military response to which their treaties obliged them.)

West Germans also regard with equal skepticism the current East German policies, first, of letting citizens over sixty-five freely emigrate, thus getting them off the Communist pension rolls, and, second, of regarding a telephone call from East Berlin to West as "international" and thus expensive, while a call from West Berlin to East is "local" and thus as cheap as a call entirely within West Berlin. (It is reasonable to speculate: Were there to be a Communist island in the middle of West Germany, would it be comparably subsidized? How "Western" would the Russians then become in their strategies for competition?)

The wall--die Mauer--is actually not a single edifice but a complex of barriers with many forms. Near Potsdamer Platz, an open space that was once a thriving Piccadilly, there is on the Western side a solid concrete wall, perhaps twelve feet high, as continuous as continuous can be, with a top so round that it cannot be grasped by human hands. To the east of this wall is a field, perhaps a hundred yards wide, with rows of barbed wire and geometric tank traps purportedly covering minefields. On the other side of this field is a smaller fence that is topped with more barbed wire, initially to keep East Berliners out of the no-man's land. At strategic points in this space are guard towers, each with at least two uniformed men armed with binoculars and automatic machine guns. Elsewhere the wall and fences run through lakes and rivers, where barriers dive well below the water's surface, and even here are guard towers extending upward perhaps fifty feet from the waterwall. Die Mauer is broken by only seven checkpoints, each guarded by at least one tower, abetted by gates and a roadblock maze, and manned by police empowered to inspect, examine, and refuse. This wall must be seen and felt to be believed. As the novelist Fletcher Knebel put it, "The Wall storms the mind, strikes all but the indifferent traveler like blows to the belly."

The Wall was put up, needless to say, not to beat back the insurgent West but, in reality, to halt the emigration of East Germans, especially of younger industrial workers, engineers, and doctors, many of whom found Berlin the most congenial route of escape to the West. At least two million East Germans, perhaps nearly four million (of less than twenty million), left prior to the construction of the Wall; considerably fewer have departed since. The most pathetic stories tell of East Berliners who might have emigrated in 1961, because, say, they had spent Saturday night, August 12th, with relatives in the West, but who went back East the following week, usually out of devotion to close relatives who were aged, isolated, or politically vulnerable. Not until they were pensioners could these East Berliners visit West Berlin.

Since then the Wall has been the platform for courage and ingenuity. The most flamboyant examples are exhibited in a West Berlin museum adjacent to Checkpoint Charlie--the automobiles that were remodeled to accommodate human bodies under the chassis or in the trunks, the pair of large luggage-rack suitcases that bound together could encase a human being, the wire that was tossed from an East Berlin rooftop over the wall to the West which carried a child suspended in a sling from a pulley, etc., etc. (For every East German who escaped into West Berlin, several more were caught and imprisoned.)

The reason why East German officials are reluctant to let their citizens visit other Communist countries, such as Hungary, is their awareness that it is now more feasible to emigrate from them to the West, just as, before the Wall went up, it was more feasible for Hungarians, say, to emigrate from East Berlin. East Germany is securely satellite, as its Communist neighbors are not; only it and Rumania, indicatively another Eastern country never to have had a sustained internal rebellion, are presently hooked into international direct-dial telephoning. Just before the Wall went up, East Germany was losing population at the rate of 1,800 per day, which multiplies into 650,000 in a year or 13,000,000 people in twenty years. In fact, only 170,000 East Germans have departed since the wall went up, mostly through satellite countries--the populace of 95 days at the previous rate, now in over 7,000 days. These statistics indicate that no effort and expense can be too great for East Germany's maintaining the Wall and its guardians.

• • •

It is hard for Americans to comprehend West Berlin's position in the post-War division of Germany. Imagine that the United States was divided at the Mississippi, each part supervised by a different conquering power, but then that, because of a midwar agreement, Boston, likewise a classy city of a few million people, was divided so that most of Boston proper belonged to the Eastern U.S. and the remainder along with Cambridge and its suburbs to the Western U.S. Then imagine an impregnable wall running right through the middle of Boston, a wall supplemented by a mined no-man's land, barbed wire and guard towers, all forbidding proper Bostonians from visiting Cambridge--even to see their relatives! When West Bostonians want to visit the East, they must go through specific crossing points, observe slews of intimidating regulations and pass through guards empowered to inspect, examine and refuse. Imagine this and you have a better sense of not only what it is to live in Berlin but of what Germans perceive has happened to their beloved Berlin.

The rules of passage are these: East Berliners under retirement age cannot normally visit the West; the standard street map for the East has only white space to identify the other city—only white space! West Berliners can visit the East, providing that they observe certain encumbering rules. They must go through designated border crossings ("checkpoints"). West Germans from West Germany proper and foreigners must pay an additional five marks for a newsprint "visa." And everyone is required to exchange a certain amount of Deutsche Marks for the same amount of East German marks. This is, on its face, outright robbery, because on the open market, such as a West German bank, one Deutsche Mark can get at least three East German marks, if not more. To keep Westerners from getting their money's worth, while milking them of hard currency, the East Germans also rule that Westerners cannot import any East German currency and that they cannot take any out (and thus, you see, have no excuse for wanting to bring their own back in). The money must be spent, therefore, or as a last resort deposited in an interest-less border bank (that issues a small newsprint receipt that is easily lost). In late 1980, the East Germans, ever calculating, raised the currency exchange quotient from 6.5 Deutsche Marks to 25 per person, supposedly to discourage West Berliners from visiting their envious relatives. (And indeed the higher tariff does discourage. Whereas a West Berliner once had to exchange 26 D.M. for, say, his family of four [6.5 x 4 = 26], now he must pay 100 D.M., or nearly fifty dollars, which certainly puts a greater strain on his desire to display his family to his relatives stuck in the East.) From the Western point of view, it can be said that nowhere else is the Communist world so conveniently accessible-you can be sure to sleep in a Western bed at night; nowhere else are the contrasts between East and West so perceptually stark.

• • •

On a Friday evening in mid-June, while daylight survived, Unter den Linden, the fabled display street in Old Berlin, was absolutely deserted, except for an occasional police car. The scattered populace in Alexanderplatz, now an immense asphalt patio, looked mostly non-German to my eyes. Where is everyone, I wondered? They are home drinking beer, I was told, and watching West German television.

From East Berlin on this summer Friday night I moved to West Berlin, where thousands of people flooded the Kurfürstendamm, sitting in the well-lit outdoor cafes or simply milling about on the street. I moved from a main drag devoid of people to one filled with them, from a city dimly lit to one filled with illuminated signs of all sorts, from a world with scarce advertisements (either for the government or its wholly owned industries) to one with so many signs they resemble trees, from a town with nothing to buy to a city with everything to sell. It would seem that the two Berlins have been designed to epitomize two kinds of modem decadence--Eastern on one side of the Wall and Western on the other. Perhaps if one side were not so decadent neither would the other need to be. If World War II is hidden here, the Cold War is not; indeed, it is visceral in Berlin as nowhere else, constantly reminding Westerners how fortunate they are now (and behind that how fortunate they were in 1961) to be residing on their side of the Wall.

• • •

Each power system has established its own terminology which it was able to impose to some extent as a convention within its territory. For instance, each of the two Berlins calls itself free and the other not free, itself democratic and the other undemocratic, itself peace-loving and the other rocket-rattling, etc .... Each has taught its members different reactions. Attitudes toward official requirements, relations such as the job contract, a friendship, riding side by side in a train have different interpretations and seem therefore like different behavior.

--Uwe Johnson, "Berlin: Border of the Divided World" (1961)

Visiting East Berlin is comparable to visiting a prison. At the hole in the Wall, you can be searched, if not strip-searched, for East German currency. Your bags can be inspected for books inimical to the Communist state and for Western newspapers and magazines, all of which are wholly forbidden. Materials that the border guards dislike can be kept for your return, since another rule is that you are required to come back to the West by the same gate from whence you came and, furthermore, to do so before midnight (unless you obtain a special visa permitting a longer stay). The guards can also keep you waiting on line while they hold your passport or read your books or put you in a side room for interrogation or a strip search; and the lines of visiting Westerners can bulge simply from East German understaffing.

The procedure is Kafkaesque because the guardians are capricious. One never knows what might offend or how long the procedure will take or whether one will be inspected at all. At Friedrichstrasse, the sole checkpoint accessible by subway and train, I once waited for thirty minutes engulfed in a sweating, oddly docile crowd; I heard of others waiting here for as long as two hours. On the other side, the first question you are asked, by polite East Germans, is how long the border crossing took today.

Once inside East Berlin, one can visit the famed old German museums or attend the opera or the Berliner Ensemble (which is reportedly not what it was in Bertolt Brecht's time) or shop for those few items that, even at the false rate of exchange, are cheaper in the East than in the West: books, stationery, records, musical instruments. One is always apprehensive that severe-looking policemen will stop you for a trivial reason (such as crossing against the traffic light) or that the men offering to exchange more than three marks for your one or seven for your dollar are undercover cops who will haul you away merely for acknowledging their presence. Once outside East Berlin, the visitor exhales a sigh of relief. As Uwe Johnson put it, in a classic essay, "Real foreign countries are rarely so foreign.”

Thanks to previous contacts, I was able to visit East German artists who likewise resembled people in prison. Like prisoners, they regularly hear about an outside world that they cannot visit and see a world they cannot touch. Since art magazines are forbidden to them, they crave information--books about Western art, posters, brochures, anything that can give them a fuller sense of what is happening in a world that extends from only a few miles away. Sometimes they see contemporary art on their televisions, which can pick up West German stations along with Eastern; but since the dimensions of size and color are unclear, they will ask a visitor if he or she has seen such-and-such a work and can describe it to them in greater detail. I once brought a book about contemporary American art to an East German artist, and he gave me in return a print by East Germany's most famous visual poet, a print no doubt worth several times the price of my gift, so valuable to him was the book. Some of these deprived East Berlin artists happened to be students on summertime vacation from the West Berlin art college on the day the Wall went up in 1961--students stuck one night at home in their beds on the wrong side of Berlin. The fate and fortune of their art, as well as their lives, has been determined by that fact. To visit them is to know....

Perhaps I made a mistake in telephoning East Berlin before my arrival one Friday, because telephone calls from the West are often monitored. Soon after I arrived at an artist's studio, there was a knock on his door. In walked a mess of a man, smelly, disheveled, and evidently disturbed. He asked to play my host's piano in the adjacent room. He had occasionally done this before, my host explained; and since he had been a friend and an artist before he went insane, my host had always let him inside. We stayed for over an hour, while he tickled the keys behind a closed door. Just before we planned to leave, the crazy man got up from the piano and let himself out without saying goodbye. Once outside his house, in the ironic privacy of the street, my host suggested that this craziness was perhaps exploited by the police for information on artists who, such as himself, had contacts with the West. (How the police could respect this lunatic's "intelligence" is beyond my comprehension.)

We then went to a "Vernissage"--an opening--at an East Berlin gallery. Even though the gallery had officially closed, a few people were waiting, ostensibly to show the work to visiting Americans. After perfunctory responses, we were invited to an artists' party nearby. As we approached the restaurant, one man among us jumped out to take photographs of everyone together. In polite response, we likewise took photographs that I later discovered included everyone except the initial photographer. Later I realized that he had not joined us at the restaurant. One wonders what happened to his photographs? Who was exposed? We visitors? Our host(s)? His colleagues? Or was the photographer simply fabricating worthless "evidence" to peddle to desperate, overzealous authorities?

When I got back to Checkpoint Charlie, the female guard hassled me for half an hour because I had purchased a large amount of inexpensive stationery. Her initial charge was that I must have illegally imported excess currency. From my back pocket I produced a sheaf of receipts, including a long cash register ticket for the stationery, all of which cost much less than 25 Marks. She began to harangue me in German. As I looked puzzled, a Canadian behind me on line kindly told me that she insisted that I should have gotten an itemized receipt for the stationery. Surely she knew as well as everyone else that she was being obnoxious, because a teenager at a cash register could not do that easily. I became livid. What, I asked the Canadian to tell the guard, did she want me to do now--walk back to the store, find someone who understood English and get a new receipt? Instead, she demanded to know why I purchased so much stationery. "Schriftsteller," or writer, I continually repeated. The Canadian tried to calm me. Finally she waved me on to the West. Before she was done, however, she had put visions in my mind of spending the night in an East Berlin jail with gobs of cheap stationery on which to vent my anger. It would be more than two months before I could overcome my fear of returning to East Berlin.

• • •

What I like best about Berlin is that I can do works of art that cannot be done back home. Since 1975 I have worked sporadically in audio art, making tapes of language texts ideally for radio broadcast. Much of this work was produced with my own funds, on my own time.

I first arrived in Berlin on a Sunday. On Monday I telephoned the chief of "Hörspiel" at the local radio station, Hörspiel being, literally, hear play or, as we say, radio plays. Since he planned to depart on vacation on Friday, he asked that I visit him Thursday at 5:00 p.m. This I did, finding a translator also present. I explained to him (them) a piece that I have wanted to do for several years. He seemed very interested. I asked not for money or a contract, but for an assistant to help me record prayers in Berlin. He agreed--right there, on the spot, without having to consult anyone else. The following Tuesday I met Ludwig Schulze, and we spent the next three weeks recording prayers from over sixty ministers. I mixed this material on a 24-track machine in Sweden. Six weeks later I arrived back in Berlin with a finished 62-minute tape. The entire Hörspiel staff gathered in a single room to hear it. Hardly a word was said while it played. Just as the tape was ending, the chief turned to me and said "very good"; everyone else congratulated me on its acceptance for broadcast. The fee for the first performance was well in excess of the total of what I had previously earned for my audio art; the fee for all subsequent performances will be two-thirds of the original sum but likewise in excess ever earned in the USA.

One fact that distinguishes West Berlin from the other major cities of West Germany (and also shapes its economic life) is a population disproportionately weighted towards the elderly and the young. The elderly are here because they have always been here; the young are here mostly because of the large universities and a singular law, relating to the continuing post-War occupation, that makes West Berlin residents exempt from the German military draft. (Like Manhattan's East Village, where I once lived, West Berlin has more people in their twenties than in their teens, more thirties than forties, more sixties than fifties.) Since the conservative pensioners are outnumbered, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) wins almost every time. The recent exception came in the wake of scandals that would have sent most parties to oblivion, coupled with the rise of a new Alternative Party, a true heir to the radical 1960s, which contributed to a Christian Democratic (CDP) plurality by siphoning off SPD votes.

One result of this population peculiarity, abetted by the geographic isolation, is fewer resources for supporting commercial art. Successful galleries are few, as moneyed collectors are more plentiful in the West (precisely because they tend to be a kind of middle-aged people who are scarce in Berlin--those who have earned or inherited funds that they are now sure they will not need). The traditional Berlin book publishers have immigrated to Frankfurt, in part because of the expense and nuisance of shipping books through East Germany to the markets of the West. There are no major record companies here. Nonetheless, the city has a thriving cultural scene, mostly because of the Berlin subsidy mentioned before. As the industrial base of the city is evaporating, to be replaced by research institutes and other cultural industries (that require less investment in physical plant and thus risk less on Berlin's precarious political circumstances), the city fathers and their West German backers now feel obliged to provide an abundance of intellectual and artistic goodies, much as the city has always provided steam and sewage disposal.

Thus, the Deutsche Opera receives nearly 90% of its total budget from the government; the state subsidized theaters do nearly as well. (No American theater receives more than half that percentage from public sources.) The production of film is subsidized in several ways. So even are certain favored rock groups. There are several Berlin museums that from time to time show contemporary art, in addition to smaller spaces, such as the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, the Kulturhaus Bethanein and the U.S.-backed Amerikahaus, that mount regular exhibitions of new work. Even the DAAD itself has a modest gallery. There are also several continuing series of live readings, one of them sponsored by the Autorenbuchhandlung (a cooperatively owned authors' bookstore) and another by a subsidized organization called the Literarisches Colloquium that also publishes books and even has a professional film studio that it can rent or donate to favored projects. (There is nothing comparable to this in any American city.)

Berlin writers also benefit from the government-funded local radio stations, Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) and Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor (RIAS), producing "radio essays," usually about literature, or even writing the creative Hörspiel mentioned before. All these modes of support create the possibility, almost unknown in America, of having a viable professional life wholly devoted to non-commercial work. Thus, one reasonable fear is that the current budget-cutting will drive Berlin's writers and artists to the more commercial cities of West Germany and/or into other work (public relations, heavens forbid), thereby weakening considerably the cultural life of the city and, it follows, its role as a cultural showcase to the East.

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Alexander Haig, then our new secretary of state, visited here during my stay, in part to persuade German officials to support the neutron bomb (they won't) but also to persuade them not to reduce military expenditures along with everything else. The youth group of the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) announced a protest demonstration (opposed by the Party itself). Before long rumor spread that it would culminate with a violent protest in the tradition of spectacular German radical riots. Two local friends invited me, as a visiting American, to participate that Sunday afternoon. As it happened, there was no violence at the end of the demonstration. Instead, there were skirmishes someplace else. Cameramen were present to document both the overturning of cars and the vigorous arrest of the protestors. At the time, few Berliners knew what was happening, except the press (who were apparently tipped off where to go and when), because by Sunday evening everyone I saw was relieved (or disappointed) that there had been no violence within the demonstration. As a result, the violence "happened" in Berlin as it happened in the rest of the world: entirely on the nighttime television screen. However, it was perceived differently. The rest of the world saw Berlin engulfed in massive protest; the late sixties had returned. Natives scarcely knew that anything unusual had occurred.

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There is an anti-Americanism here that has something to do with resentments over the loss of World War II and its subsequent costs and something more to do with resentment over the continuing presence of the occupying powers. I found it more mute than blatant. The loudest complaint I heard was directed at the policy of allowing all soldiers in uniform to ride public transportation free. Germans and Berliners in particular also suffer from the genuine fear that the U.S. and Russia have both selected it to be the battleground of the next limited war--the next Vietnam; so that one hears echoes of the old prejudice of preferring Red to Dead (as if there were not alternatives between). Some of the anti-Americanism is based upon our support of reactionary regimes around the world, but Germans who fail to see any difference between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan are usually not too intelligent in their discriminations. Anti-Americanism is probably more complicated than my understanding of it. Few complain to me, perhaps because I am an artist and thus, ipso facto, regarded as someone apart from the government, just as we are prepared to regard current German artists as separate from the atrocities of Nazism.

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"Everyone speaks English" I was repeatedly told before I came here. That is not quite true. In my experience, nearly everyone understands some English, because they are required to study it for several years in school, but few speak it and even fewer enjoy speaking it. That last generalization applies to writers, artists, and publishers, among other educated folk. One German explained to me that his countrymen fear making the sort of mistakes for which their high-school teachers of English would have reprimanded them severely and this childhood fear of mistakes has persisted. That may well be. The only Germans who genuinely enjoy speaking English, in my observation, are those who, in addition to studying it in school, have spent some time in an English-speaking country. The only Berliners who speak it so flawlessly they made me wonder whether they were Americans were those who spent at least a year as an exchange student in an American high school.

The entertainer Liberace toured Berlin last summer. Back home in America, talking to Tom Snyder, he succinctly compared the German understanding of English with the Swedish. In Stockholm, he said, the audience was quietly appreciative; in Berlin, people were noisy, continually talking to each other, especially during his monologues. He initially thought the Berliners were rudely censorious. Only later he discovered that they were actually translating for one another. I heard the same whispering chatter the first time I read my fiction to a German audience. Misunderstanding, I needlessly cut myself short.

During my first week in Berlin, I noticed that the clerks in the neighborhood grocery store listened continuously to AFN (the Armed Forces Network), which plays American pop music punctuated by hourly newscasts directly from home. I addressed them in English, as I would back home. They looked anxiously at each other; none could speak English.

• • •

One difference between Berlin and other cities is that, except for a dozen years, Berlin has an almost continuous avant-garde tradition. From the end of the last century to the present, it has been hospitable to the advanced elements in the arts, in the sciences and in social thought. Thus, it is not surprising that several of Austria's most advanced writers--the so-called Vienna Group--moved here in the 1960s (and one of them, Oswald Wiener, still owns a restaurant-bar popular among artists). It is not surprising that Robert Wilson, whose theatrical work remains neglected in America, recently mounted a major new production here or that the American modular composers (Philip Glass, Terry Riley, et al.) have frequently toured here. It is similarly not surprising that the DAAD program favors avant-garde artists (while never excluding conservatives)--indeed, favors precisely those kinds of American artists who would never be invited to the American Academy in Rome, say, or awarded a national literary prize. Thus, certain Americans who have been intentionally excluded from the spoils back home discover themselves at the center of things here--regarded skeptically, to be sure, but nonetheless accepted in subtle ways that would be impossible in the U.S.

One reason why some DAAD alumni extend their stay here is that they can count on a level and consistency of support that does not exist at home. In truth, one fundamental difference between Berlin and New York is that here a major noncommercial artist--someone whose work is not remunerative and yet widely respected, even if often dismissed--can rely upon continuing aid from cultural agencies. At home, by contrast, a similarly positioned artist applies to institutions that take pride in funding more capriciously than consistently and thus may fund several applications or none. This difference reflects in turn a fundamental difference of attitude to art that is not instantly commercial. Here economic modesty is regarded as characteristic of mainstream art; back home, this is seen as a precondition of marginality--of something that must be required continually to prove its cultural worthiness.

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Berlin and Jews have long been linked in the minds of the informed and the ignorant alike…. The idea of a Berlin-Jewish symbiosis has become an article of faith, the only dogma that Jews, philo-Semites, and anti-Semites of all descriptions hold in common. Jews, it is said, making themselves at home in Berlin, transformed it and imprinted upon it something of their rootlessness, their restlessness, their alienation from soil and tradition, their pervasive disrespect for authority, their mordant wit.

--Peter Gay, "The Berlin-Jewish Spirit" (1978)

"Berlin" reminds some of us of anti-Semitism, and I remember two friends separately warning me that I'll be sitting in a cafe and suddenly imagine that blonde boys in uniform are taking me away. Others told me about the anti-Zionism--and, by extension, the anti-Semitism--of the New Left. However, I have yet to encounter either threat, although I continually expect to do so. More often, I come across aged men whose "Aryan" faces prompt me to wonder what they were doing forty years ago--which side they were on when the world was so sharply divided. I am also aware that the approximately 5,000 Jews residing now in West Berlin are less than 3% of the 200,000 here in 1930. Several synagogues remain, all orthodox, plus one community center that is used for services during the High Holy Days and an American military congregation that uses on Friday night the same chapel that the Christians use on Sunday.

The major relics of Berlin Judaism are not in the West but in the East. On Oranienburgerstrasse, scarcely a mile from Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, is the skeleton of the great old synagogue that was torched on Kristallnacht and then further destroyed during the War. Even as a ruin of its former hulk, the building is huge and imposing, large enough to have once seated 3,000 people, with balconies on both sides, and tall enough to have dominated over the neighboring buildings. Built in 1866, it remains a testament to the wealth and confidence of 19th century Berlin Jewry. My friend Aviva Ebstein noticed that East Germany allows the burned-out synagogue to stand as a reminder of Nazi atrocities (and behind that of the current regime's anti-Nazi traditions); the most conspicuous West Berlin shell--the remains of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church--was actually bombed by the Allies.

Its companion in testifying to pre-WWII Berlin Jewish unguarded optimism is the huge cemetery off Clement Gottwald Allee in Weissensee, a northeastern sector of East Berlin. Here one finds the imposing mausoleums of wealthy 19th century Jews-sometimes just couples, often entire families-who wished to be remembered with edifices that they thought would withstand the ages. (Gershom Scholem, who was likewise spending the year in Berlin under another subsidized cultural program, told me that his own parents were buried there.) These Berlin Jews were naïve in some respects, but lucky in others. This cemetery, unlike other Jewish burial places, escaped Nazi desecration precisely because during World War II it was used as the demonstration cemetery for the visiting Red Cross. Nowadays it suffers not from vandalism but neglect. Shiny stones have succumbed to dirt and dust or even fallen down, not to be restored until someone pays someone else explicitly to do it. Trees and vines have spread unchecked over the acreage. The principal attendant looks as though he does not care. In one comer of the cemetery is an open space that contains newer graves, some as recent as this year; for this remains the historic principal cemetery of Berlin's Jews.

In the fall of 1981, West Berlin mounted innumerable exhibitions devoted to Prussia and the Jewish contribution was not entirely forgotten. In the Staatsbibliothek, the State Library, was installed a small display, mostly of photographs and graphics mounted on large boards, with accompanying captions. To my senses, the slightness of the exhibition, especially in contrast to the others in this Prussian series, smacked of obligatory tokenism. Too little in one respect, it covered too much in another. Instead of being concerned only with the Jews of Prussia, which was just part of Germany, this was concerned with all German Jews. The exhibition opens with the image of Masada (!), which is well to the south of Prussia and is also insidious as an analogy for German Jews, because the Jews of Masada committed suicide sooner than surrender; it closes with photographs of the concentration camps, which happened well after Prussia was incorporated into modem Germany and have no connection other than mythic with Masada. By expanding the subject in time and in space and then by featuring the faces of famous Jews, the exhibition reminds Berliners of the Jews it had lost and, by extension, of the potential Jewish contribution that is lost to it today (to be replaced by West German money fueling culture as Jews once had).

That is true and worth repeating: in spite of the influx of funds to restore its cultural glories, Berlin suffers in more ways than it knows from the loss of Jews. However, this exhibition compounds this last problem by neglecting to include all sorts of radical Jews: Karl Marx and Erich Mühsam in politics, Herwarth Walden and Carl Einstein in the arts, among others. (Then, for some inscrutable reason, Marx and Walden are included in the thick paperback catalog that accompanies the exhibition, while Mühsam and Carl Einstein are not.) This observation suggests to me that perhaps certain Jews, or certain kinds of Jews, might still be unacceptable in Berlin.

• • •

Even though the great old Berlin of the 1920s was destroyed, the myth of it survives, first of all among those who believe that Berlin should now be what it had been--a magnet attracting the most talented and the most intelligent and the most adventurous. That is the reason why so much West German money is poured into its art and artists; that is one reason why the program such as the one supporting me was established here, rather than someplace else in Germany.

This is an artificial city, to be sure; yet it should be clear that its artifice I personally find likeable and comfortable. Berlin survives without the impatient commerce of Frankfurt, without the industrial sludge of the great cities of the German Ruhr, without the Bavarian Philistinism that echoes Nazism and continually seems on the verge of engulfing Munich; Berlin survives without the visible prosperity of West Germany precisely because so much of its populace is economically unproductive. As its industrial base was destroyed, intellectual endeavors remain the industry best suited to Berlin. The new humongous conference center was designed to attract conventions and trade shows abetted by the abundant presence of culture that the conferees cannot get back home.

Berlin is not only far away from West Germany; it is different. It is not for nothing that Berliners customarily say they are "traveling to West Germany," as though it were, like East Germany, a whole separate country. Historically, Berlin never gave Hitler a majority, as long as elections were freely competitive. It is a city where he never felt at home, in spite of all his designs for it, because its cosmopolitan spirit and love of wit were anathema to him. Living here is inevitably an education, not just in international macropolitics but in other subtleties of contemporary culture; it impresses itself upon a visitor in ways that other cities cannot. Berliners are sophisticated simply because they are Berliners, much as New Yorkers are. Berlin today also lacks the large redneck element typical of other German cities for no reason more than the countryside is another country whose trash is kept out! With such a small indigenous hard-hat class, the city must import laborers from Turkey and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, giving it proportionately more foreigners than the West German cities. (The most recent figure is 14%.) With its large population of radical students and draft-dodgers, many of whom are predisposed to mobilize on behalf of emotional causes, and with its artists and intellectuals, the city has a vanguard edge that cannot be blunted. Thus, Berlin of the 1980s is not Berlin of the 1920s, but it is still a singular, illuminating, excellent place.