The politics of gemiitlichkeit:

...What about the other countries of Europe...

...This was polemically put, but it caught the essence of the situation...

...Nicholas where Bach used to perform his works...

...The building is old and intimate, designed under Frederick the Great and rebuilt after the war in its original splendor...

...The American I met on the plane coming back to the U.S...

...I don't feel at home here...

...The people are angry, and they want what the Germans in the West have...

...I asked him if he was going to declare the Wall at customs, but he said no...

...It was a break in dimensions, more part of science fiction than political science or geography...

...Was it even possible to get there from here...

...Not ordinary nationalism or solidarity with the West-just the sense that once reunification has officially occurred there will be a Mercedes in every driveway and a driveway for every family...

...We wonder if there will now be a hyperreal Berlin Wall somewhere in the Arizona desert...

...Now it seems like the most normal thing in the world to be meeting East Germans in West Berlin...

...The euphoria of the fall has long since worn off...

...I pass the time harmlessly enough talking to a French engineer about Umberto Eco, poststructuralism, and the hyperreality of the Hearst Castle in California, which he has just gotten back from...

...Instead I found fear and uncertainty, the foreboding sense of impending disaster...

...I find that East German television is no longer recognizable...

...One graffito I saw declared in Czech: "We are happy...

...Most were calling for unification, and almost all were directed against the Communist party and fears of a restoration of power by the old regime...

...The next day was my last in East Berlin...

...It is the New Year's Eve equivalent of People Power...

...The opposition had refused to take part in the demonstration on this Monday night because it was afraid of the responsibility, and so there was no speaker and no rally: just a formless mass of marchers around the Leipzig ring and in Karl Marx Square, from many different parties and with many different perspectives...

...Either it is the set of all contingencies, or it is itself merely contingency...

...I had not thought such a thing was possible those four long years ago...

...A few slabs of the Wall may be kept standing for historical purposes, but they will mean nothing, because either the Wall is everything or it is nothing...

...No talk of socialism or a just society here...

...Wagner had written it as a glorification of German art and reconciliation between the nobility and the burghers...

...I remember Brecht's saying: "After the struggles of the mountain come the struggles of the plain...

...But now it was as if all the vast masses, the majority who had been silent before, had finally gotten the courage to announce that what they really wanted was-personal comfort...

...The opposition in East Germany tended to be more receptive to the idea of German division and to some kind of socialism with a human face...

...The only consistent opposition had come from within the church, but the church was not about to abandon its role in the other world for an exclusive role in this one...

...In October and November the opposition in East Germany had been talking about democratic socialism, East German sovereignty and independence, and solidarity with the other peoples of Europe...

...As Hans Sachs, the poet-cobbler at the heart of the opera, began to sing about German art and honesty, there was an electric tension in the concert hall...

...Of course the problems in Czechoslovakia were also enormous...

...Yet the celebratory atmosphere of New Year's Eve in Leipzig is not typical...

...Back then, the ride from Friedrichstrasse to the Berlin Zoo was a trip from one station to another in the same city, but in different worlds...

...The first thing East Germany would have to do if it were to become a decent society, I thought, was to come to terms with its only the Stalinist past but the Nazi past...

...Hence there is a sense of vertigo, of staring into a vacuum in the heart of Europe...

...Once again I am surprised by my own lack of surprise at meeting old friends here, where I had never hoped to see them...

...My friends and I watch, transfixed...

...But there was a sense of unity in opposition...

...East Germans were still continuing to leave the country at a rate of well over a thousand a day, and everywhere there were signs of gaps and failures in the economy: closed stores and restaurants, insufficient hospital personnel, long lines...

...owned no movie theater and had no Camcorder, but he was carrying pieces of Germany with him: several suitcases full of the Wall, which he intended to sell in malls and curiosity shops in the U.S...

...The guards want to make sure I'm not smuggling in bundles of East German currency to further destabilize the faltering economy...

...It was on Monday, October 9, 1989, that the real break had occurred in East German history...

...All the celebrations seem to say: this year will be different from any year that has ever been-but how...

...The Czech people and the Czech opposition were one...

...Most of the days there are gray, wet, and full of uncertainty...

...Along with the frustration went the growth of xenophobia and racism, especially anti-Polish feeling because of the Poles who bought goods cheaply in the East and sold them for higher prices in the West...

...At midnight we break out the champagne and go up onto the roof of the house...

...It was, for the twenty-eight years of its significant existence, like the end of the universe, and who can describe that...

...I had to make the journey alone, as my friends stood waving and crying on the other side...

...This is my home...

...And finally Leipzig itself, my alma mater, the dirty, disintegrating "second" city in the heart of East Germany, the city its citizens like to call the "heimliehe Hauptstadt" or secret capital, and which Christoph Hein, one of East Germany's most important writers, has renamed "city of "heroes" because of its role in the recent "October Revolution...

...Politics in East Germany had been legal for a little over two months now, and already people were sick of it...

...and kiwis and oranges in every mouth...

...But we finally came away with some adequate pieces, covered with graffiti and dirt...

...What about currency reform...

...The future is open as it has never been in my or their lifetime-for better or for worse.etime-for better or for worse...

...Because it is more than a wall...

...He had made $5,500 in December selling to the Christmas crowd, and he figured he would make at least as much this time...

...How to achieve a market economy but maintain social justice...

...Reunification as the coming of Santa Claus: that is the spirit I feel in those dark solstice days in Leipzig...

...And then, getting into the heart of industrial East Germany, smoggy Bitterfeld, center of the chemical industry-and, for a brief moment in the early 1960s, of an East German literary movement which brought writers and intellectuals into the factories to experience the life of an ordinary worker: the idealism of the early days...

...It's Germany...

...How ironic that now this vanishing point is simply being chipped away and sold in supermarkets and department stores, as if it were a physical object like any other...

...The change had been brought about originally by small groups of dedicated people, but it had quickly grown beyond them and their abilities to steer it...

...To this day no one really knows why...

...After the greetings and hugs are over, my first question to the East Germans is: Does this feel like home to you, West Berlin...

...Now the child who had not yet been born as my pregnant friend waved to me so long ago is a smart little girl in Kindergarten, and she and her mother can travel wherever and whenever they want to...

...I had returned from Prague and attended...

...There was something peculiar about the whole thing: in October and November no one had called for reunification...

...How do they feel about reunification...

...Now the moment we have a bit of freedom we want to surrender it again to Helmut Kohl...

...At the Tegel Civilian Airport three friends were waiting for me, a pan-German reception committee: an East German man, an East German woman, and a West German man-the latter two a couple...

...The West German remains silent...

...Vaclav Havel's face was everywhere: he was a superstar...

...The government had opened up the Wall in the expectation that once people were free to travel they would no longer turn their backs on East Germany for good...

...clean air above the cities...

...At this point it is an open question whether they will arrive here as East German friends, or simply as Germans...

...I wondered how long it would be before someone volunteered to give them a direction to march in...

...The opposition had put their necks on the line, bravely calling for a new and free East Germany...

...Das wiirde ich nicht so saqen...

...The troops had not done this...

...What if there is a coup in the Soviet Union and Gorbachev is overthrown...

...One person I spoke with characterized the new mood as euphoric depression...

...I am expecting my first East German guests in the summer, with or without the Wall...

...There are no Vaclav Havels or Lech Walesas to take over the reigns of power...

...The acoustics were marvelous and the music beautiful, and the second part of the third act was electrifying...

...As I had felt on the airplane the day of my arrival, I got the sense of being in a historical echo chamber...

...The three hundred thousand Soviet troops still stationed here...

...After a hearty lunch I crossed what was still the border with two East German friends, and we spent part of that evening using hammer and chisel trying to chip away bits of the Wall from the western side...

...I wouldn't quite put it that way, says the man...

...At the end of the last strains the applause was overwhelming...

...A brief trip to Prague to visit a Czech friend who had defected five years earlier and only recently returned for his first visit back illus-trated the many differences between the two countries...

...Now, in the first days of the new year, there is a growing sense of impatience and frustration, even of despair...

...at a big profit...

...The East German people and the East German opposition were separate...

...The sky all over town is lit up for more than thirty minutes by thousands of private fireworks displays...

...It would be a worthy subject for a drawing by Escher...

...We want the opposite of what we have now, and we want it right away: that is the mood...

...The East German people wanted nothing so abstract: they wanted material goods...

...Unemployment...

...With my friends I toured the old city center, taking a look once again at the monuments and markers that remain after wars and revolutions of Berlin's 753 years of evolution from a barren marsh to a divided city...

...no sense of how to get there...

...As it melted, all sorts of nasty creatures that had been frozen began to come alive again in changed circumstances, strange and ugly reminders of a more brutal, primitive time...

...The problems are enormous and of a very technical, complex nature: What does unification or reunification really mean...

...Ten days later Erich Honecker was out and the slippery slide into a new kind of society had begun...

...Why should they have had to pay for Hitler's crimes for the last forty years just because they were born on the wrong side of the Elbe...

...good, expensive clothing on every body...

...Back in New York, I did not wait to see what happened...

...It was damp and foggy and flying out of the sunshine above the clouds into the misty imprecision below, I could not help but think of the opening scene of Triumph of the Will, with Hitler's plane flying out of the clouds into Nuremberg...

...The mass was directionless, formless: almost as if they were waiting for someone to tell them what to do and where to go...

...Or was it, rather, the geography of the human soul-the closing up of all human horizons and possibilities...

...It was not a terribly uplifting experience...

...He planned to be with the multitudes that evening at the Brandenburg Gate, ringing out the old decade and ushering in the new age of freedom, uncertainty, and progress, not missing a single historic moment with his video equipment...

...The audience got to its feet and cheered wildly...

...No more than you or I would think about the break in space-time or the point at which the universe ceases and nothingness begins...

...No one ever did, and in the end the crowd disintegrated and drifted off into the night...

...Then comes "Lutherstadt Wittenberg," with its beautiful towers coming into profile just before the train crosses over the Elbe River...

...After the performance I asked a friend if that kind of response would have been possible before the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9. "No," he said quite simply...

...On this Monday, there were one hundred and fifty thousand demonstrators on the Leipzig ring...

...I had expected to find a people overjoyed that the authoritarian regime under which they lived for forty years had collapsed overnight...

...In the news that evening there are images from the last three months that have changed the face of Europe: the Leipzig demonstrations, the Gorbachev visit, the Honecker resignation, the short and unhappy reign of Egon Krenz, the opening of the Wall-not to mention the other, equally breathtaking, events in neighboring countries: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania...

...The train ride to Leipzig is so familiar that I know it with my eyes closed...

...There is a large crush of people at Friedrichstrasse, all waiting to get into East Berlin to celebrate the New Year under the Brandenburg Gate and in the dead zone around the Wall where the mines used to be...

...Now that they have seen the wealth of West German society for themselves, East Germans want to own it right away...

...Trains leave from the Lichtenberg station, pass through the Schonefeld Air Field and then the devastated moonscape of the Soviet army base at Forst Zinna, with its dead trees, its firing ranges, its landscape gouged and dug up by tank tracks and explosions...

...The moment I get out of the train my nose is struck with the familiar mix of brown coal and sulphur fumes that characterize most of industrial East Germany...

...I felt during my stay that I was witnessing the melting of a forty-year-old glacier...

...It was easier said than done, because the Wall is a well-built structure...

...East Germany is long on goals and short on means...

...When I get to customs I have to open up my suitcase...

...Over the last four months these demonstrations had become the real source of power in East Germany...

...On January 8, the first Monday night demonstration of the new year was held in Leipzig...

...It is full of pageantry and poetry...

...No sense of the dangers and difficulties inherent in reunification...

...I flew into Berlin on the last day of the old year...

...It takes an hour to get to the front of the line...

...Despise the dishonest and the non-German, Sachs says, and be reconciled to what is real and true and German...

...On that Monday, two days after the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the founding of the republic, Erich Honecker had ordered troops to carry out a "Chinese Solution" in Leipzig and shoot the demonstrators...

...I could not imagine such a slogan in East Germany...

...Finally, finally, one had the sense that they were proud to be Germans again...

...We have never been able to take matters into our own hands," a friend of mine said...

...That gamble had failed...

...Crossing the border this time is only marginally easier than crossing the border other times...

...The Monday night demonstrations had actually evolved out of peace services held every Monday night at one of Leipzig's most beautiful old churches, the church of St...

...Four years earlier a different reception committee had taken me as far as the Friedrichstrasse train station and stood waving as I crossed into the no man's land of the border area...

...The environment...

...In a way, the demonstration was typical of the situation in East Germany as a whole...

...The American movie theater owner sitting next to me was busy recording the entire approach on his Camcorder...

...There is impatience and bitterness in the air...

...All of Leipzig is lit up with fireworks, the sky red, green, blue, and yellow, with smoke in the air and the sound of yelling and noisemakers...

...First it was the Nazis, and then it was the Stalinists...

...In spite of an invitation to stay in Berlin and celebrate New Year's Eve at the Brandenburg Gate along with everyone else, I decide to head down to Leipzig, where other friends have organized a quieter New Year's party...

...a dishwasher in every kitchen...

...I returned to East Berlin and at the Deutsche Staatsoper in East Berlin Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Niirnberg was playing...

...During my recent visit to West and East Germany, a friend admitted to me that he had never really thought about the Wall, even though he lived only a couple blocks from it...

...Aufalle " By all means, says the woman...

...I had made so many journeys through the Wall that I was not particularly eager to find out what it would be like to travel with the Wall, undeclared...

...It was a heavy, somber, entirely Germanic day...

...As the fireworks and noise begin to subside, we hear the ambulances around town begin to do their work...