Something gained-& lost

...I used to quarrel with Horst about this...

...We don't have to worry about him...

...We quit after four days, and left Berlin four days later...

...What all the Wende myths have in common is their sense of personal helplessness: somebody did something, and now we have to pay...

...A. had a lovely flat in the center of town and a prestigious job as editor of Berlin's best arts and letters weekly...

...Gerlinde is forty-five, a devoted socialist, with the soul of a lotus blossom and the mind of a steel trap, and one of the very few people I have met to whom the word, "lovely," properly applies...

...My parteilich friends-Party members-seemed seriously devoted to socialism, to working for a vision of universal good will (and we make Donald Trump a media icon...

...And when we saw her this August she explained that "we wanted some changes, you know...

...And I took a last drag on my Players, and I tossed that, too...

...Our teaching gig was supposed to be for three weeks...

...A wise kid, is my stepson...

...It was about cigarettes...

...One afternoon my stepson, Eric, and I were walking from our flat to the neighborhood grocery to get ol' stepdad some beer...

...The currently unfashionable name for this is "Original Sin," and that's all it means, really...

...is what I got...

...I thought it was a pretty silly question at the time...

...Is there such a concept as kitchen colonialism...

...One wanted to shout, sometimes, "But don't you see One didn't...

...That horror, the horror implicit in all moral choice (you can fall) was, besides VCR's and Marlboros, what the Wall kept out...

...So when my wife and I were invited to return to Humboldt this August to teach a crash course in "American Speech and Culture," it was-for me at least-a little like planning a date with the girl you took to the prom in '68...

...The last day we stood in the hall and chatted...

...In what used to be no man's land were stalls selling sausage, beer-all West German-and discarded Party pins, army decorations, and other GDR memorabilia...

...We know about what will happen, nothing," he said...

...Die Wende is the way the East Germans refer to November '89: "the turning...

...Auden's phrase keeps coming back to me: "Children afraid of the dark/Who have never been happy or good...

...And as we went through the pedestrian underpass we read the graffiti: swastikas, Auslaender Scheisse, and of course the ever-popular Juden Raus\ One graffito broke me up: a big spray-painted swastika with the slogan, Sieg Heiell "Dumb bastard can't even spell his own language," I laughed...

...But now the Wall was down, reunification was, as the Stones say, just a kiss away, and we were driving through West Berlin's Kurfursteindam-Vegas with sausages-into the grey buildings and tiny shops that we, too, had thought of as a city...

...But on the third day of our class Bonn announced that in February 1991 it would be sending 1,000 teachers of English to East Berlin to "fill the need...

...But we also wanted to keep so many of our own traditions, our own socialism...

...That was the first question a friend asked me when I got back, in 1988, from six months teaching at Humboldt University in East Berlin...

...Well, yeah...

...And, "No," she said, looking at the remaining shards of the Wall...

...Some of the drunken celebrators of die Wende, it seems, had decided it would be a really keen idea to smash them...

...I don't know...

...And then I got it...

...Some-and this is the really ugly part, and I'll get to it in a minute-will tell you it was the Jews...

...Then came November 1989, and suddenly the Wall wasn't thick at all...

...These folks were frightened and confused-because their wish came true...

...Four days after that the coalition government collapsed, but I fear we can't take credit...

...And that's how thick the Wall was...

...When Celeste suggested to A. that, if she got sacked, she could find work as a teacher of English, A.'s response, no kidding, was: "Well, maybe...

...Our first lesson in the thickness of the Wall was the drive from Tegel Airport in the West to our apartment in the East...

...people who are not kind or gentle at all...

...All that, of course, has to change now...

...This is not-repeat not-one of those "German reunification means the fascist beast will rise from the ashes" pieces...

...It can kill you because it tells you, at some deep level, that people never screw up...

...The day my wife, Celeste, and I told them we were quitting, and why, half were angry and half, worse, were in tears...

...not because we were the Fred and Ginger of teaching, but because they knew this was it...

...When I jokingly told a Berlin colleague of mine, Horst, that my Catholic background would probably keep me out of the Party, he said gravely-Horst is a grave fellow-"Oh, no, Frank...

...We quit because we, and our students, were being scammed...

...frank McCONNELL Frank McConnell teaches English at the University of California, Santa Barbara...

...Every junkie kntows the routine: hey, wouldn't you like to try it oncel And every junkie knows that "once" is not a real word...

...Some will tell you that it was a vicious, suicidal last gesture by Honecker-or Egon Krenze-to destroy a failed socialism by flooding the land with Deutschmarks, all very Wagnerian...

...Sure, Berlin felt like a Haupstadt...

...The Wall was still there but it had been chipped away for souvenirs and was about as noticeable as an umpire at a ballgame...

...And telling yourself...

...A small illustration...

...The difference between Marx and Jesus, I'd insist, was that Marx was much the more trusting, innocent man...

...Act as if you have faith, says Augustine, and faith will come...

...There are about 6,000 teachers of high school English...

...The fact is, we missed the party, but we got there for the hangover...

...Still, Frank, I can't help feeling that one of mankind's dreams has died...

...But in the GDR, until die Wende, that poison in the soul was denied, repressed by a system that, though partly corrupt and hopelessly artificial, nevertheless thought it could enforce a society where horror was no longer possible...

...with the new Germany...

...These, and many more, were among the dicta I was all set to launch at the drop of an obiter...

...It's already part of the language, and already becoming encrusted with mythology...

...Now she will very likely lose both...

...He really believed that if you set up the kinder, gentler society-and just enforced it for a while-people would just naturally get kind and gentle...

...Our high-falutin' course in American Culture (tapes, videos, etc...

...Gloria Steinem called it the first feminine revolution, because there was no bloodshed and then everybody went shopping...

...And it can kill you...

...And like: Despite this, some things about the system were-well, dammit, good...

...It's Montessori metaphysics, and it's sweet...

...We knew that problems had already set in: epidemic unemployment, a nightmare of currency regularization, the massive failure of GDR industry to compete...

...But sure, too, just across the Wall, was West Berlin, brimming with stuff and seductive as all hell...

...The garbage cans were overflowing and the flies were having the time of their lives, and there were even carriage rides available, at DM 5, around the old border...

...I had become pretty friendly with one guy named Klaus...

...I feel like I'm in a prison...

...But it wasn't a Haupstadt or even a Stadt anymore...

...My wife is sacked, my son is sacked, and-maybe I sell insurance, ja...

...Some will tell you that in those last months concentration camps were being planned for liberals in case the GDR survived...

...But there are always people who will make plans once the monitor has left the playground...

...So in the GDR the sons and daughters of the revolution-one of mankind's dreams-have been granted their wish for escape, but with the condition that, the wish once granted, they can never, never have it back like it was...

...The noble horses at the top of the Gate were gone...

...His detective novel, The Frog King, was published this summer by Walker & Company...

...They were forty, middle-aged teachers of high-school Russian...

...George Will, on national TV, intoned that "the spirit of Thomas Jefferson is abroad in the world"-ever see a conservative on speed...

...After half-a-year living and working in one of the most rigorously monitored of socialist states, I was, like all half-cocked travelers, brimming with insights to amaze and impress my stay-at-home pals...

...They tell us, and what can we say...

...There are about 160,000 of them in the GDR...

...And what did I get...

...For one thing, the fascist beast is everywhere...

...Celeste and A. and Heike all lined up in front of the Wall-on the Western side, of course-and I, Pentax at the ready, told Gerlinde to join them for a group photo...

...So unless our students, whose English was not rusty but rusted, could pass, by September, a competency exam in English, they would be-to use the one English word everybody in the GDR knows these days-sacked...

...I quote: "We are of course glad that many corruptions, like the Stasi, are gone...

...I did not think it was a joke...

...brownshirts...

...People managed to live as happily and warmly, it seemed to us, as they did in the States...

...Not in the junk lexicon...

...And on the Kurfursteindam they were buying cigarettes and smoking them halfway and didn't know what that meant to people who were, for the sake of the revolution, dragging it all the way down to the filter...

...America certainly has enough lunatic Aryan-supremacy headbangers to get up a scratch basketball game (skinheads vs...

...There, Celeste, Eric, and I met A., Heike Schneider, a GDR journalist, Epi, his adopted black African son, and Gerlinde...

...It's just too-terrible...

...Berlin Haupstadt der GDR, Berlin the Capital City of the GDR-that was how every map, roadsign, and even matchbox referred to the place, and it was silly and brave...

...I know better now...

...In '88, when I'd first crossed over to the West after two months in the Haupstadt, I'd been shocked to see cigarettes thrown away only half smoked...

...So Gerlinde said, "No-it's just too terrible," and I looked at the pavement and I saw hundreds of Marlboros and Kents and Dunhills half-smoked and tossed away...

...I think the central fact about Berlin, of all cities, is that nothing to do with it is ever simple...

...Like: The GDR ran on a systematized paranoia- the infamous Stasi, or Secret Police-that would have made Orwell or Kafka look for another line of work...

...But we're not used to making such plans for ourselves, you know...

...But they do...

...Perhaps one should have...

...I did get a Christmas card from Horst...

...had been sold to them as a last chance to learn enough about irregular verbs to keep off the street...

...And, as they sing in Carousel, it was a real nice clambake, and we all had a real good time...

...We just didn't do that in the East: not because there was a shortage, and not because we couldn't afford more, but because, weirdly enough, the silly system we lived under taught us not to waste...

...It was just the poor part of town...

...The last day in Berlin, Celeste, Eric and I went to the Wall, at the Brandenburg Gate-once the center of this most melancholy of cities...

...Until very recently, all of Freud's work was forbidden in the GDR, which is both tragic and appropriate, since no one understood better than he the urge to deny the shadow in the self, and the terrible price of that denial...

...We wouldn't admit you because you think everything's a joke...

...had exclaimed our friend, A., about the Wall in '88...

...You keep telling yourself how great it'll be, after all this time...

...And, "I think maybe we do," said Eric-as gravely as Horst himself could have done it...

...But there's knowing, and then there's knowing...

...We do...

...The sadness gets more complicated, though...

...Despite its shab-biness, its exploitation by the USSR, and its annual fight against bankruptcy, it kept insisting that it was the Haupstadt and, somehow, people believed: that it was a city, not "East Berlin" but Berlin Haupstadt...