This anthology was made possible thanks to a charitable contribution from Amazon.com.
On the night of November 9, 1989, after months of unrest in Europe and East Germany, the checkpoints between East and West Berlin were suddenly, almost accidentally, opened, reuniting the two sides of the divided city, and bringing together a divided Europe and two worlds that had been apart for nearly thirty years. However, the fall of the Berlin Wall was just one of many signs of change that came with 1989; before long a spate of revolutions, the "Autumn of Nations," had spread across Europe, and by December, it appeared that the Cold War was over.
To mark the twentieth anniversary of this momentous collapse, and to shed some light on how it came to pass, Words without Borders presents The Wall in My Head, an exciting anthology that features fiction, essays, images, and original documents to pick up where most popular accounts of the Cold War end, and trace the path of the revolutionary spirit of 1989 from its origins to the present day.
The Wall in My Head combines work from the generation of writers and artists who witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain firsthand with the impressions and reflections of those who grew up in its wake and whose work, childhoods, and memories are all colored by the long shadow that it cast. The Wall in My Head provides a unique view into the change, optimism, and confusion that came with 1989 and examines how each of these has weathered the twenty years since that fateful year.
Highlights within include seminal excerpts from the work of Milan Kundera, Peter Schneider, Ryszard Kapuściński, Vladimir Sorokin and Victor Pelevin and new work from Péter Esterházy, Andrzej Stasiuk, Muharem Bazdulj, Maxim Trudolubov, Dorota Masłowska, Uwe Tellkamp, Dan Sociu, David Zábranský, Christhard Läpple, and a host of others.
Momentous events in history have a way of shrinking time so abruptly that the past suddenly seems no more than a blip. The events of late 1989 were no exception: for those in the midst of it, the previous forty years of totalitarian rule in Central Europe were swept away in the space of a few days like stale smoke in a freshening breeze. The fear that had kept those regimes in power for so long simply vanished, leaving in its wake euphoria, and an overwhelming question: if that fear was so fragile, so insubstantial, so evanescent, what kept the system in place for so long? What made it seem as though it might have lasted forever?
Of course, those regimes were shored up by the Soviet Union, which had the will and the power and the ruthlessness to keep its puppet governments in line. And the fear was reinforced by the secret police. But once they abandoned the terror tactics of the 1950s, those regimes, as Vaclav Havel saw more clearly than anyone else, depended more and more for their survival on the silent consent of the governed, however unfreely given. In the 1970s and 80s, that consent gradually eroded, as writers, musicians, and artists made their voices heard. This groundswell constitutes the hidden history of those years, the deep dark secret the regimes tried so hard to conceal. A Czech rock band, The Plastic People of the Universe, was the most visible example among many communities of people who withdrew their consent, suffered the consequences and then, in those miraculous days in 1989, triumphed.
To shed more light on the role that the Plastic People played in the events of 1989, we've included an excerpt from Paul Wilson's essay "Tower of Song: How the Plastic People Helped Shape the Velvet Revolution," which appears in The Wall in My Head :
***
Tower of Song: How the Plastic People Helped Shape the Velvet Revolution
"When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them."
—Plato, The Republic. Translated by Benjamin Jowett.
"When the mode of the music changes
The walls of the city shake."
—Tuli Kupferberg, The Fugs.
Washington, D.C., May 2005. We're in a night club called The Black Cat—a long, low basement room with a bar running along one side and a stage at the far end where a band is playing very loud, eccentric music. To all appearances, it's a conventional rock ensemble: two guitars, bass, sax, viola, keyboards, and an electric cello, but what they're playing is definitely not mainstream rock. It's a gloomy, rhythmic, throbbing, repetitive kind of music punctuated by wild, free-form solos, or by lyrics, half spoken, half sung in a strange, dissonant language, something perhaps best described as "rock noir." Some of the musicians seem grizzled and old—at least as old as Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones, without the benefit of fitness programs.
There's a cluster of tables at the back of the room and around one of them is an odd collection of people—let's call them The Formers. There's a former U.S. Secretary of State; a former Canadian diplomat, once stationed in Prague; a former Czech dissident who is now the Czech ambassador to the United States; a former Czech president, Václav Havel, nursing a Manhattan and trying to explain to a couple of guys in tuxedos, who work for the National Endowment for the Arts, what the band on the stage is all about. And there is one final "former," me, a former member of the band.
The band is the Plastic People of the Universe, and it's been around for almost thirty years, which automatically makes it a bona fide rock-and-roll cliché: the "living legend." They still rehearse every week, and regularly tour the Czech Republic, Europe, and occasionally, North America and Asia. They still have a large following at home, though some of the followers are the children of the band's original fans. You can buy their complete works on CD at discount stores in Prague for the equivalent of about twenty bucks. Apart from improvements in musicianship, some new blood, and vastly improved technology, the music they play sounds pretty much the way it did back in their heyday in the 1970s and 80s, when the Communist regime treated the band as a public enemy and they recorded their music clandestinely, on two-track, reel-to-reel machines. For the most part, their repertoire is the same too.
This fidelity to their roots moved a long-time fan, now living in New York, to dub their current appearances "musical archaeology," though with equal truth he could have said that their music still had the power to rise above its totalitarian origins. The fact is that different people see different things in The Plastic People. Before this concert in Washington, the/ New Yorker/ called them "a symbol of Eastern European dissidence." A blogger referred to them as "the greatest obscure rock band of all time." Most extravagantly of all, the publicity material for Joe's Pub in New York, where they played for a couple of nights before coming to Washington, said: "Their music demands that we re-examine the way we live our lives."
That night in the Black Cat, former president Havel was trying to explain The Plastic People's enduring appeal to the two NEA men in tuxedos, but it was hard over the din of the band, especially given his limited English and the frail state of his health. I could see him flagging, and knew what was coming next. In a pause between numbers, he turned to me and said: "But here is Paul. He can tell you how it was."
Like many rock'n'roll sagas, the story of the Plastic People began in the 'burbs, in this case a residential neighbourhood on the edge of Prague called Brevnov, where a young man had a dream. Milan "Mejla" Hlavsa, who died of cancer in 2001, was a teenager in 1968 when the Soviet tanks rumbled into Prague and put an end to the Prague Spring, but his head was so filled with visions of rock stardom that he barely noticed the invasion. He had already played in bands with names like "Glow-Worms," "Black Stockings," and "The Undertakers" when, sometime in the fall of 1968, someone lent him a copy of the Velvet Underground's first record. He took it home, and listened to it all night. From then on, his ambition was to put together a band that would play that kind of music and present it with a proper "psychedelic" flare.
He got together with two schoolmates, Jiří Števich and Michal Jernek, and formed a band. They tried out several names before settling on "Plastic People," a name they'd taken straight from one of Frank Zappa's early songs, but without really being aware of Zappa's withering sarcasm. But the name felt too short, so they added "of the Universe," and then set out to conquer Prague.
The reigning psychedelic band in Prague at the time was an art-rock ensemble called "The Primitives Group," who had a team of artists managing the visual side of their show. One of this team was a young art critic called Ivan Jirous. One night, Jirous saw the Plastic People perform, and, as rough as they were, he saw their potential to take the music further, so he left the Primitives—which were about to break up anyway—and joined forces with the new band.
Jirous was from a country town in the middle of Bohemia. He was a rebel in school, but despite his grades and his "bourgeois" background, he managed to get into university to study art history. His main passion at the time was renaissance music, but when he saw the first Beatles movie, A Hard Day's Night, he was an instant convert. He let his hair grow long, sought out like-minded souls in Prague and began looking for ways to make a contribution to the city's growing music scene, though he could scarcely carry a tune.
Many of Jirous's peers thought he was mad, or just plain wrong, to embrace "Big Beat," especially with the country now under military occupation. Sometime in June 1969, almost a year after the Soviets had invaded, Jirous and Hlavsa were walking through Prague, distributing tickets to an upcoming Plastic People concert when they ran into an acquaintance and tried to sell him a set. The acquaintance was aghast: "You can't be serious!" he said. "The whole nation is on its knees and you guys are going around strumming your guitars?"
"The nation may be on its knees," Jirous retorted, "but we're not."
A friend in London has posted YouTube videos to his Facebook page, documents of the riots in Tehran that took place on Saturday, June 13, 2009. In this one, amid choral shouts and the sounds of traffic, a troupe of police threads its way under and past the camera in the middle of the street; it's impossible to tell who the videographer is. The camera turns: men run and launch stones off screen, a bus and a car creep forward through the crowd, a young man wearing a green kerchief over his mouth kneels down to pick up a stone. Shouts. The clamor of traffic. Then the sound goes out. A fist raised in the air, literally tens of thousands of people in the street.
June 13, 1987 was also a Saturday.
I remember, because I took the subway that day from Alt-Mariendorf to Kurfürstendamm and found myself in the middle of a protest against the visit of Ronald Reagan to West Berlin (Reagan had delivered his famous ultimatum to Gorbachev the day before). Who knows how many thousands of people marched down that boutique-lined, capitalist thoroughfare that day? It was larger than the demonstrations following Chernobyl that I had attended the previous year, when I was an exchange student. Most of the protesters were young, though still older than I was (I had just graduated from high school the week before).
Security was tight: the protesters were escorted by a cordon of police. Later, the police reorganized and began corraling us. Here's something I regret: I was inside a corral. But I was supposed to meet Andrea and Jörg at 5 for something, dinner? And it was 3, and I needed, wanted, to get out, to get to the subway… And maybe because this was happening in front of KaDeWe, I felt as committed to this demonstration as I would have to a shopping excursion? But Reagan was certainly cause enough for me to protest, too, to stay there in solidarity with those others…. Nevertheless, when the cop refused to let me through the cordon, I showed him my Illinois driver's license, and he let me pass.
East Berlin, September 23, 1989. A record shop near the Leninallee (now Landsberger Allee) S-Bahn station. A woman in a white dress waits patiently and legitimately for the green walk sign. Nothing could possibly change here.
West Berlin, September 25, 1989. Kurfürstendamm. What could possibly change here? But: Wasn't it this very same day that Andrea and I, sitting in her apartment in Moabit, watched an interview on West German TV with Bärbel Bohley, a representative of the East German opposition? An East German opposition! Who had ever heard of such a thing? "It's not going to change anything," Andrea said matter-of-factly, "the Party controls everything there." Of course, nothing would change. This was a world of perfect stasis, without history, no future either. The Cold War dynamic was, for my 20-year-old self, for all of us maybe, an incontrovertible reality, as well-guarded and impervious to idealism as the Wall itself.
The following day, I took the night train from East Berlin's Lichtenrade Station to Krakow. Two bubbly sisters from Greifswald and a Dutch musicologist were my traveling companions—the three of them headed to a music festival, I to a year-long Polish language-immersion program. At some point late in the night and well beyond the Polish border, we began to talk about the political situation in East Germany. I expressed my doubts, adopted on the authority of my West-German friend, about the future of any possible East-German opposition. But the two sisters smiled secretively and looked at each other and said, "Who knows, who knows. . .?" And that was the truth: Who knew?
Brandenburger Tor, September 1989. A tourist destination.
Brandenburger Tor, September 1989. Tyrone and Jodi were here.
Potsdamer Platz, September 1989. An unreconstructable perspective.
Das rote Rathaus (Berlin City Hall), 29 October 1989. A group of us took the night train from Krakow, then the S-Bahn from Lichtenberg Station to Alexanderplatz. We decided to walk from Alexanderplatz to the checkpoint at Friedrichstrasse and happened upon this: Tens of thousands of people congregated in front of City Hall, listening to statements being made by a group of individuals seated or standing on a platform in front of the building. It sounded… I listened carefully to the megaphones, trying to translate for my American and Polish friends . . . like . . . Government officials and members of the opposition? Talking to one another? An unlikely scenario, but true—or rather: Municipal and Party officials on the one hand, and on the other, not so much an organized opposition as ordinary citizens simply airing their grievances. Really airing them, in a way that had never happened before in the GDR and that required unprecedented courage.
This was one of the so-called "Sunday Conversations" (Sonntagsgespräche) that took place that day, a last-ditch attempt by the Party to respond to the wave of protests that had been taking place all October in Leipzig. (The following Saturday, November 4, the largest demonstration Germany has ever known took place: 1 million people at least, 1/16th of the country's population, converged on Alexanderplatz.) The West German Trotskyite newspaper Neue Arbeiterpresse carried a detailed report on this Sunday Conversation in its November 3, 1989 issue, describing the numerous criticisms made by East-German citizens of the privileges enjoyed by Party bureaucrats and of harassment by the Stasi, and one worker's call for the Wall to be opened (Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter, Das Ende der DDR: eine politische Autopsie [1992], pp. 109–114). Evidently the 5-hour-long "conversation" became increasingly heated toward the end. But by that point, we—Americans and Poles, tourists, ostensibly uninvolved—had already long crossed over into West Berlin.
Two weeks later, the Wall had opened, spectacularly.
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July 1986: traveling down to the Czech-Austrian frontier we had six heavy green bottles of the Moravian sparkling wine clinking delinquently against each other under our front car seats. Legally we could only export two bottles each "for personal use". The atmosphere in the car was tense as we pulled up at the frontier barrier with careful, almost exaggerated slowness, so as not to seem too eager to cross from the Communist East to the Capitalist West, or worse, as if we were about the crash through the barrier and seek asylum on the Austrian side.
Only a few months before, two friends of ours had done just that at a border crossing between Austria and what was then Yugoslavia. Machine guns had been raised in their direction as they crashed through the barrier, their children crouching in the back of the car in case they were fired at. As they had screeched to a halt on the other side, they had been greeted with a seasoned, nonchalantly official raised Austrian eyebrow and the one-word question: "Asylum?" The family had then spent several months at a holding camp in Austria before being accepted by the United States and moving to the mid-west. Two decades on, they are still there.
On the Czech side of the border, my husband wound down the car window and presented our documents. An officer approached. "Taking anything out of the country?" he asked distractedly, his eyes downcast as he checked them. We were always nervous, running in our minds for the hundredth time through the checklist of things we always had to do before we could travel across the border to visit my family in England – British visitor's visa for my husband, Czech exit visa for my husband, written proof of my family's agreement to cover our costs while we were there, return visa for me as a British citizen so I would not lose my right of permanent residence on my return to Czechoslovakia, plus transit visas for Austria, Germany, Belgium and France. The paperwork alone had been a week's work, hoofing round the Prague embassies: experience had taught me that I could only get one of these transit visas a day – two if I was lucky. Invariably several hours of waiting in line on tired legs would be involved. Much worse than this was the sight of the sour apparatchik faces that would greet us once we made it to the front of the line.
After long years of practice in reading the moods and whims of officials closely, my husband was skilled at controlling the timbre of his voice to convey just the right tone of polite camaraderie. Communist officialdom was a minefield of potential hazards that could be detonated at any moment by perceived presumption, excessive crawling, or even something as trivial as mild indigestion brought on by an over-seasoned sausage. He was amenable without being obsequious, so as not to seem to have anything to hide. Specifically we had two illegal bottles of sparkling wine to hide, but we had already agreed fifty kilometers ago not to hide them. Somehow managing to sound convivial without overshadowing an implied plea for leniency, he launched his gambit:
"Well we do have six bottles of sparkling wine under the seats and there are only two of us, so . . .".
He trailed off deliberately, gently tapping the ball, or in this case bottle, into the officer's court, waiting quietly for the other man's official pronouncement on the matter.
The tried and tested approach elicited the desired effect. A magnanimously bored wave of the customs officer's hand indicated that an infringement of a mere two bottles was far too trivial for a man of his ranking to be bothered with. Silently, but still pent up, we drove a couple of hundred yards over to the Austrian side of the frontier, where my husband parked wordlessly on the side of the road, out of sight and sound of the border post, turned off the engine, got out of the car, lifted up his head and howled aloud like a wolf.
"I'm out! I'm free! I can breathe!" he shouted, over and over again. Then he got back into the car, started the engine and drove off towards Vienna, grinning from ear to ear. I was not surprised. He did this every time.
Easter 2009. Spring had finally arrived after a March of grey cold and snow flurries. It was a warm, fragrant, sunny noon as I boarded the yellow Student Agency bus to Vienna airport opposite the Grand Hotel in Brno, Czech Republic.
As we drove out of Brno and swept on to the new highway to Vienna, the apple trees were in blossom, the sun shone in clear, windless air, the mood on the bus was relaxed. We approached the border, and I took out my British passport and held it firmly in my hand, opened at the photo page, as I had always done before.
The bus was waved on through the frontier by a bored-looking Czech border guard. The Austrian guard didn't even bother to look at us.
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Twenty years ago yesterday, the Hungarian government agreed to open its border in the small town of Sopron for just three hours. Hungary had been gradually introducing greater social reforms for some time, making it a desirable place for East Germans to move to. When Hungarian officials announced a so-called Pan-European Picnic as a symbolic gesture, many East Germans living in Hungary set off for Sopron, hoping for a break to flee to the West. In just three hours, nearly 700 East Germans walked across the border from Hungary into Austria, while Hungarian border police, given orders to shoot, bravely stood by and let them pass. From there, they were taken to the West German embassy in Vienna, where they were granted asylum as refugees.
Although this may seem like a small event, it proved to be a significant turning point in the events leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Empowered by the picnic, East Germans sought out vulnerable, unguarded stretches of the Hungarian-Austrian border and continued to cross inconspicuously by night. West German chancellor Helmut Kohl spoke out, threatening to cut off economic support to the GDR. Remarkably, no action was taken, not by Erich Honecker nor Mikhail Gorbachev. Tens of thousands of East Germans started fleeing to Hungary, having heard news of the nocturnal border crossings and hoping that another such picnic might take place. On September 11, 1989, Hungary permanently opened its border, and another 60,000 East Germans crossed over into Austria—until November 9th, when the Berlin Wall came down.
Yesterday, Hungarians and Germans alike, including Angela Merkel, Germany's first chancellor from the former East Germany, gathered in Sopron to commemorate the picnic. Hungarian president Laszlo Solyom called the picnic "a step forward for all of Communist East Europe in its efforts to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain."
To see photos from the Pan-European Picnic in Sopron, follow this link: .
Annie Janusch is a translator in the forthcoming Wall in My Head anthology
As a follow-up to Annie Janusch's post on the picnic in Sopron in 1989, here are some fascinating pictures from a story from the Global Post, on the August 19, 1989 picnic that marked one of the first breaches in the Iron Curtain.
At midnight, the police and units of the East German army began to close the border and by Sunday morning, 13 August 1961, the border with West Berlin was closed. East German troops and workers had begun to tear up streets running alongside the border to make them impassable to most vehicles, and to install barbed wire entanglements and fences along the 156 km (97 miles) around the three western sectors and the 43 km (27 miles) which actually divided West and East Berlin.
The barrier was built slightly inside East Berlin or East German territory to ensure that it did not encroach on West Berlin at any point, and was later built up into the Wall proper, the first concrete elements and large blocks being put in place on August 15. During the construction of the Wall, NVA and KdA soldiers stood in front of it with orders to shoot anyone who attempted to defect. Additionally, chain fences, walls, minefields, and other obstacles were installed along the length of the inner-German border between East and West Germany. (Source)
[In The Wall in My Head, we feature an excerpt from David Zabransky's brilliant book Any Beach But This. The story opens with a scene in Madrid, at the Museo Nacional del Prado, with a meeting between a young Ukrainian woman who has fled to the West with her British boyfriend, and a new acquaintance; another young man from the West. The meeting unfolds according to our expectations: the man meeting the Ukrainian Polina, reacts with surprisingly convincing disdain for her odd mannerisms, her studied air, her general lack of "ease" in the free and democratic air of the liberated West. His characterizations of the fiery and carefree Spanish women, in contrast to the "watercolor" specimen before him, intrigue, even as they offend, and this is where Zabransky's true story begins to unfold, just as we think we have gained proper footing. The chapter we've included is a lovely contemplation of what freedom means, and what it truly means to "deserve it"; is the speaker of the beginning of the story right? Does it go only to those on whom it fits most becomingly? Or do those who enjoy it cautiously have equal claim to it? With a deft sleight of hand, Zabransky changes protagonists, and soon it is Polina who takes on the role of narrator, and the reader finds himself in the middle of a thoughtful and beautifully considered story on all of these issues, and on the complications of life after the fall of the Iron Curtain. We've provided a small advance look at the piece over here, do take a look, and I hope you'll enjoy it as much as we have.—Rohan Kamicheril, editor]
ANY BEACH BUT THIS
David Zábranský
(Translation by Robert Russell)
Democracy on the loose!—Here I am in the café of the Museo Nacional del Prado, thinking of Vienna.
Bartlett (the guy I flew to Madrid to see) warned me about Vienna. He said that's where Hitler learned to hate the Jews. "He was born in Austria, but to get his show on the road he had to move to Munich. Vienna couldn't stomach his paintings—those amateur daubs of his—or his Nazism. Vienna's way is different: in-depth destruction. Instead of attacking from the outside, it destroys from within."
Why go to a town where waltzes sound like marches and marches sound like waltzes? Why go to Vienna at all?
*
The moment I landed at Schwechat I realized Bartlett had got it wrong. I was surprised at how fresh the Viennese air was. If Vienna were Lagos or Delhi there would be two Viennas—the tourist one and the real one—and being a tourist I would naturally have seen only the former. But Vienna is not Lagos or Delhi. What I saw was Vienna.
Italians strolled around in shorts, with bits of clothing round their waists and cameras round their necks. Austrians stepped out of cars and walked past palaces, past the unchanging backdrop of the democratic West that is everywhere the same.
Of course you are surrounded by history (this is Vienna, after all!)—so much history it can be quite daunting. All those pictures in the galleries, all those plays in the Burgtheater, all that music in the concert halls—it can get quite scary. But here in Vienna they lay that vast weight of history and culture on you so gently you hardly feel a thing.
Waiting, credit card in hand, in the queue at the Albertina ticket desk (my pockets full of fliers of every description, behind me a group of Italians in shorts and sandals arguing about their flight home, all around me modern art and architecture, the laid-back lightness of the West), I recalled Bartlett's words and had to laugh out loud—then apologize to the Italians. Neither in Vienna, nor in Italy, could anyone learn to hate the Jews: Freud's house is now a museum, and so is Mussolini's birthplace in Predappio.
(As we stroll through Vienna or Madrid or an Italian village, do we ever pass houses and apartments that will one day be museums? Sure we do. But won't they be the houses and apartments of movie stars destined to play Mussolini or Freud in some yet-to-be-made film?) I ordered a fresh orange juice.
Madrid is awash with oranges—picked in Andalusia by Moroccans, Poles, Rumanians, Ukrainians, etc. The Moroccans stay on after the harvest, but the Poles, Rumanians, Ukrainians, etc. return home. So Madrid is more and more awash with oranges picked by Poles, Rumanians and Ukrainians, etc. and less and less with oranges picked by Moroccans. The Ukrainians pick oranges and go. The Moroccans pick oranges and want to stay. But what Spain wants is picked oranges, not Ukrainians, Moroccans, etc. Spain doesn't want any of them; it just wants the oranges they pick.
Da-da-da!
Dum-da-da-daa!
*
A couple of tables away I spot a young couple—honeymooners, lovers? I'm not sure about him, but she is certainly not Spanish. Her hair is too fair, her skin is too fair, her features too Slavic. Her manner lacks a certain type of femininity natural to women born under a scorching sun. Her body is incapable of that rapidity, that severity and simplicity that seems to relax every muscle under their skins. Unlike Spanish women she has no vestige of the animal about her, of the beast that seeks out the shade. Her cheekbones are not prominent, her lips are not half-parted in a constant sucking-in of air, nor does her body remind you of a sculpted wooden torso. Unlike Spanish women she does not look like an animal tormented by sun and thirst. Nothing about her suggests primal suffering or physical thirst or physical fatigue. Or, for that matter, physical passion.
Unlike Spanish women she seems fluid, washed-out—in fact she reminds me of a watercolor, an artist's attempt to express disillusionment with the present, nostalgia, or at any rate some feeling that feeds on the past, not like the feeling I get when I look at those boldly striding Spanish women, confident in their bodies and clothes and gestures.
She gets up and goes to look at a poster for an exhibition in the Prado. Then, left foot turned out, hips relaxed, she starts fiddling with the end of the scarf draped casually round her neck, first winding it onto her finger, then unwinding it until the scarf hangs once more against her blouse.
She does this several times, until the scarf slips off her shoulder and drops to the floor. Quickly, glancing around in furtive embarrassment, she stoops to pick it up.
She's out of place here—she'd be out of place even in Vienna. Here years of democracy have eliminated embarrassment from public life without a trace. Maybe it survives as an endangered species in private life, in intimate situations. Maybe there is still a place for embarrassment and coyness in the bedroom (possibly as the most effective form of titillation, since it's the only place you'll find it). But on the street, in cafés and museums, in planes, trains and offices, it has become extinct.
Just as History in the West entered its last lap after the Second World War (since History now only affected those on the other side of the Wall) and came to a final halt (waving cheerfully as it crossed the finishing line on the last stroke of historical time) when the Wall collapsed and the East ceased to exist—so, too, embarrassment has become a thing of the past. Instead we have absolute naturalness. Man is the measure of all things. In the post-war era Western man blossomed at an unthinkable pace. No democratic or humanist system in history has ever borne such luscious human fruits, so unselfconscious, so self-possessed, so natural. It was the naturalness of the Viennese, and of the tourists in Vienna, that transmuted the vast weight of culture and history into—dadada!—a bland amusement for tourists.
Watching her—she's still looking at the poster for a Tiepolo exhibition—I feel increasingly sure she's not from Madrid, she's not from the West, and she definitely doesn't belong in the West.
Where does she belong? In the Eastern reservation. On the other side of the fence that still separates the West from the East (although historically speaking the East has collapsed and the West is helping itself to more and more of it). She belongs on the other side of the fence, in that place where occasionally they bark, but otherwise just gaze in envy, at the West.
"Hey, there's Polina!" says Bartlett, reaching over the table with one hand to shake mine while waving to her with the other.
"Sam's a teacher. Where was he born? Bradford. And Polina's from Ukraine. She was born in Ukraine and most likely she'll die in Sam's arms in Madrid. What a wonderful fate, eh Polina?"
Again she's embarrassed. She says "they" don't want to disturb us.
"They met in Ukraine. She talked him into leaving Ukraine and taking her with him. Good-bye and good riddance! Said she couldn't lead a decent life in her native land, same as me in fact. Good-bye to all that. Grappa?"
*
"She's not very natural," I say, as he returns with two glasses. "I was watching her. She kept twiddling her scarf round her finger. Then she dropped it and looked awfully embarrassed. She's out of place here. She doesn't belong in the West."
"She doesn't belong in the West because she's not natural? Nonsense! She doesn't belong in the West because she's not original. Her main aim in life is to look the same as everyone else, but in her attempts to be the same she's never had to deal with the terrifying need to be different—which has now become absolutely suffocating, even here."
"But fancy making such a fuss about a scarf! I wonder what she'd do if she were naked? Imagine: her blouse falls apart at the seams, her skirt drops round her ankles, she steps out of it; maybe she's still holding her glass; maybe it slips out of her hand and shatters on the floor, but she pretends not to notice and carries on walking round the room. She's just the same as before, except now she's naked. Then and only then will nobody doubt she belongs here."
[. . .]
Martin M. Šimečka, primarily a journalist but known to most English speakers as author of the 1993 Pegasus Prize-winning novel The Year of the Frog, published a biting article last May on the Vienna-based site Eurozine titled "Still not free: Why post-'89 history must go beyond self-diagnosis." He begins:
"Some of you may recall the western hopes in the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution that central Europe could enrich the western political world with fresh new ideas, values or insights that it lacked; that perhaps central Europeans might come up with a vision of a 'third way' between capitalism and socialism. These hopes rested on the assumption that central Europeans' experience of suffering under communism had made us better human beings, more inquisitive, sensitive and intellectual. Today, that hope looks pathetic, and it has become clear that western perceptions of central Europe were truly naive."
Šimečka, a Slovak who lives in the Czech Republic, argues that what at the time looked to many in the West like the fall of communism in Central Europe—a liberating event; the apotheosis of, depending on your background and point of view, Reagan's arms buildup and Star Wars missile defense shield or Gorbachev's glasnost or the grass roots stick-to-itiveness of the citizens on the far side of the Curtain (underestimated in nearly every account I've ever read), who, rather than try to break through the wall of Commie officialdom, simply stopped, turned heel, and walked away from it to form their own civil society—was actually no fall at all but a rise: the rise of globalization cum laissez-faire capitalism.
By 1989, Šimečka writes, Adam Smith's invisible hand had "withered into a crippled stump." In Šimečka's homeland, Czechoslovakia (and its successors, Slovakia and the Czech Republic), the installation of capitalism through the 1990s—which is to say, the privatization of businesses, both large and small—was a frantic rush job, jury-rigged in such a way that it inevitably favored the powers that were, leaving most economic power in the hands of the nomenklatura, the "old structures," as they were colloquially known; or, hard to say for Slovaks and Czechs if this was worse or better, transferring it into the hands of foreigners, including the dreaded and envied Germans.
Meanwhile "the West" (whoever that means these days) had lost its moral mirror. No longer could opinion makers dwelling in democracy hold up the Havels and Michniks and Konráds as long-awaited proof of the kinder, gentler society that would necessarily bloom once intellectuals were finally lent the ear that they deserved.
Yet it is not Western naïveté that Šimečka is concerned with. It is the failure of Czechs and Slovaks and Poles and Hungarians themselves to be free, and to be free where it matters most: in their minds. As Šimečka puts it:
"All of us who lived at least part of our adult lives under communism have been marked by the past to the extent that we may never be able to discuss it in the language of a natural, free world. We may be able to distinguish between the courageous from the cowardly and victims from culprits, but not between those who are free and those who are not. The category of a free human being simply did not exist under the communist regime. Defiance, resistance or attempts to live a parallel life outside the system may have represented signs of longing for freedom but they did not represent freedom itself. This is why we can and we should bear witness and many deserve admiration and respect for their courage. Yet this does not entitle us to claim that we can interpret this part of history in a free and unbiased way. We are all like patients who self-diagnose and prescribe their own treatment."
And Šimečka believes that the first place freedom can happen (for it has not happened yet) will be in the rewriting of this part of Europe's history. It is up to the generations with no experience of communism to interpret the past free of personal anger, bitterness, and resentment, as well as of deserved if at times excessive respect and deference toward the members of the generations who swam in it—who sank or swam in it—from the day they were born. In other words, the first freedom will come from the ones with no Wall in their heads, the ones with their heads free of rubble.
I saw this for myself during the five years I lived in Prague, from 1990 to 1995. During a night of drinking with Czech friends my age or older (that is, born prior to, say, 1965) at some point the conversation would invariably come around to what things used to be like in the bad old days. Not that it necessarily turned into a bitch-and-moan session; sometimes it got heavy; some of them had, after all, done time in prison. But as often as not there were laughs to be had in the reminiscing, a welcome relief from the pressure cooker of keeping up with the neck-snapping pace of life after the explosion of time (as Jáchym Topol referred to it). Whereas spending time with Czech friends who were younger than I was (born, say, 1970 or later), I rarely heard any discussion of the old times, unless it was about TV shows or bad pop music. Not that they were any less informed or intelligent than my older friends; they just weren't nearly as influenced by the past, as weighted down by it, for obvious and understandable reasons.
Of course, unfreedom comes in many guises. Many in "the West," including probably most of the people I know, would say that consumerism, marketing, and advertising are the main threats to a free-thinking mind nowadays. I myself have come to believe that whether or not I'm "free"—by which I mean free to make decisions in my own best interest, unharmful to myself or to others, based in love, not in fear—is less a question of my rights, or my exposure to manipulation by advertisers, or the scaremongering of government propaganda, or the diminishment of public space as corporations assume the functions of government (not to dismiss the significance of these things) than of my willingness to take responsibility for myself.
In other words, maybe for us—at least those of us in the United States, a country with a long and, to put it mildly, checkered tradition of seeking to "bring freedom" to other parts of the world—the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is a good time for us to ask not how free or unfree are the people of Central Europe but how much freer or unfreer since then have we become?
In the latest recommendation for travelers eager to revisit the scenes of the impasse between East and West, the New York Times does a travel piece on biking along the former Iron Curtain.
The piece has some lovely pictures of the areas around the former boundary that are fascinating to look at, and show the effect that twenty years have had on these hotly contested lines of control.
Brian Rose, whose fantastic work is included in The Wall in My Head does a tremendous job of documenting the particular landscape and look of the Iron Curtain, and you can see many of the pictures on his Web site, at The Lost Border
It's startling to see the ways in which the handprint of the Cold War years is either pressed permanently into countrysides or cityscapes, or eerily removed altogether. The scenes of large swathes of land that have gone to seed as meadows visible from miles above ground have an uncanny quietness to them that is remarkable to look at in Brian's pictures.
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Implicit behind many of the voices, stories, accounts, etc. of The Wall in My Head is an almost blunt physicality. Serving as a visual reminder, this map displays the over-140-kilometer Berlin Wall (yellow) and border control checkpoints (orange) until 1989. Click to enlarge.
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