Now that hardly anyone actually reads Lewis Carroll, it is perhaps once again possible to speak of the old East Germany as a country which was “Through the Looking Glass.” Half a century ago, this was a terrible cliché, though anyone who passed from one side of Berlin to the other quickly found that (as so often) it was a cliché because it was true. Every feature of life at first appeared the same as on the other side. But then it turned out to be wholly, profoundly different. There simply was no such thing as ordinary life in the East. Every simple task had to be achieved in spite of the rules, not within them. As for getting out, that was a conundrum beyond most. The most poignant sight in old East Berlin was the view west through the Brandenburg Gate. It looked as if you could sprint across, through and over before anyone noticed. It was of course the portal of death.
Does anyone still say “looking glass,” by the way? Even I rarely bother, though I believe it to be the correct form and rather a handsome phrase. My snobbish mother was brought up on the contested, fiercely patrolled frontiers between the lower middle class and the middle middle class. She knew which side of the line she wanted to be on, aimed always to attain the upper middle class in the end, and would never use any other term. Calling it a mirror was almost as bad as referring to the lavatory as the toilet, a sin so profound that I wince inwardly if any of my children now commits it. It will be beer for breakfast next.
What if my mother could see and hear this defeat of all her careful nurture? From “toilet” to “toilet” in three generations, as the wiseacres almost used to say about doomed attempts to climb the ladder of class. There is some biblical authority in play here, about looking glasses rather than lavatories. In the lyrical thirty-seventh chapter of the Book of Job, we are asked “Hast thou with him spread out the sky, which is strong, and as a molten looking glass?” No, I have not, any more than I was there when He laid the foundations of the earth, and stretched the line upon them. The glass referred to in Paul’s second Epistle to the Corinthians is presumably a looking glass, as is the one in the Epistle of James.
But, quickly, before it is wholly forgotten, let us haste back to the German Democratic Republic, as the undemocratic bit of Germany was officially known for forty years. I have to confess now that once I had seen it, I could not keep away from it. I was amazed that others did not also long to shuffle through the subterranean plywood corridors of Friedrichstrasse Station in Berlin to sample its puzzles and joys. Here as in a political fairground, you could slip away from the normal. Here was money which looked at first like normal cash, but was not. Here was air which, only a few hundred yards away from western cleanliness and anti-pollution regulations, smelled and tasted pungent and was a sort of yellowy brown. Here was the loathsome opposite of all we respected—Soviet troops, red flags, censored newspapers. There were consumer goods, but obviously not made in response to demand, or in alliance with advertisers. There was comfortingly stodgy food and quite good beer which came from a brewery where they did not seem to know how to stick labels on straight. There were cakes made of baked dust and coffee which had never seen a bean. Yet a captivating shop on the Schoenhauser Allee sold some of the most beautifully crafted toy trains I have ever seen.
Even the pedestrian crossing lights were strange. You had to obey them most especially when there were no cars in sight on the vast bare avenues. If you madly tried to cross the deserted highway against the light, the well-trained people would hiss at you like geese. The little man on the sign, who changed from green to red, wore a large hat, surprisingly petty-bourgeois for a Marxist state. Go to Berlin now and you will find he is still there, for he became the ultimate symbol of Ostalgia, the surprisingly strong feeling of loss which exists among those who endured that world and now find they quite liked it, especially in preference to what they got when it ended.
The really odd thing is that I, even though I never lived there and loathed its regime, wish it had not vanished. Would it have been cruel for the Disney company to maintain it as a theme park, staffed by men and women who wish to carry on living in the strangest country in human history? After all, few under the age of fifty have any idea of what a communist regime was like in an advanced economy, and now will never see one. So they are not armored against such ideas as I was. The great thing about tiny East Germany was that it made you think, every waking minute, just as Carroll’s Looking Glass World makes you think. Take, for instance, one of the most peculiar facts in modern history, recounted by the left-wing academic Tony Judt in his book Postwar. For decades, East Germany struggled to stop its citizens watching West German television, which pulsed powerfully through its barbed-wire and concrete borders. Squads of communist youths would be unleashed in East German towns and cities, with instructions to identify aerials positioned to receive capitalist transmissions from the west. They would then report their owners, and climb up onto roofs to turn them round to face east. Teachers in elementary schools would ask innocent children to describe the clock shown on their T.V. at home. The Western clock was round, and the eastern one was square, so these tiny infants, all unknowing, helped to denounce their own parents for anti-state behavior—for which they would be sternly spoken to.
And yet, some years before communism fell, the Marxist-Leninist leadership gave this struggle up so completely that it takes the breath away. In some parts of the G.D.R., notably around the lovely city of Dresden, the West German signal did not penetrate. There was a similar blank area in the far northeast, around Ruegen. These regions were known as “The Valley of the Clueless” (Tal der Ahnungslosen). As a result, many people did not want to live there, as they would be cut off from their only reliable source of truth, and from all the wider culture of the world. Officials, academics, and all kinds of skilled workers would refuse promotions which required them to move there. In a demonstration that they did not really believe their own propaganda, the communist authorities, in the 1980s, actually laid a cable down to Dresden to relay the Western broadcasts they had tried so hard to keep out of their country. By this time, logic and politics in East Germany were both running backwards. The East Berlin authorities started to restrict access to the reading rooms at the Soviet Embassy on Unter den Linden, for many years the very heart of Bolshevik darkness. They were afraid that visitors, who had been incessantly taught Russian from their earliest youth, would read about Mikhail Gorbachev’s new democratic freedoms in the U.S.S.R., and demand the same thing for themselves.
They had reason to do so. At the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the communist republic in October 1989, Berlin crowds greeted Mikhail Gorbachev by shouting “Gorby! Help us!” I can still recall listening to the infuriated East German leader, Erich Honecker, making a strangled, shouty speech on that raw gray day, as a grim Gorbachev sat close by. I thought the tiny Honecker a rather pathetic figure, as I did not then know that his zealot wife, Margot, actively stole the children of dissidents to be brought up by loyal communists, with horrible consequences which in some cases continue to this day. Thanks to this and to her strangely tinted lilac hair, she was known as “The Purple Witch,” and might have come out of Alice’s adventures, or out of Grimm’s fairy tales. Whenever East Germany appeared at first sight to be merely ludicrous (as when its secret police stole dissenters’ socks to make it easier to track them with bloodhounds) there was always something else that was just starkly horrible.
The events of 1989 took place a few hundred yards from the Karl-Marx-Allee, where in 1953 Soviet tanks had bloodily crushed a workers’ uprising against communist rule. Now, in a paradox of extraordinary power, Berliners were appealing directly to the leader of the Soviet Communist Party to rescue them from the skeletal grip of their own home-grown communists.
We all know how that ended, and even those who know nothing of the place or the era remember the Berlin Wall and its fall a few weeks later. It was a solid symbol of despotism, ideological rigidity, and ruthlessness, imprisoning people more or less like us in a place many of them would leave if they were free to do so. It made debate on the rival qualities of communism and capitalism unnecessary for nearly thirty blazingly simple years. One side was dark, the other sparkled. One side was prosperous, the other side was dingy. On one side thought was free, on the other it was patrolled by secret police informers. What more did you need to know? Alas, you needed to know a lot, and hardly anyone did, and once the wall was down, the dogmas of the Left, harder to recognize than in the era of the Wall, began to stir and germinate again.
Yet there was another even stranger wall inside East Germany, which few know of. It surrounded a small woodland settlement, a few miles north of Berlin, called Wandlitz. While the Berlin Wall kept East Germans from crossing into the West, the Wandlitz Wall prevented East Germany getting into the comfortable private lives of the communist leadership, who awarded themselves living standards they could not provide for their citizens. These grand comrades dwelt in substantial detached villas, with a fine-dining restaurant, tennis courts, a nuclear bunker, a cinema, and a special shop where Western luxuries could be fraudulently “bought” with worthless Eastern money. Everywhere else in East Germany you needed dollars or Western cash to buy such things. The local currency was contemptuously rejected. There was of course no church. Neutral Sweden provided Volvo cars for the G.D.R.’s car-conscious senior ministers, causing the place to be known by ordinary citizens as “Volvograd.”
Its existence was well known but it was risky to approach it. The Palace Guard of the G.D.R., the Felix Dzerzhinsky Regiment, protected the inhabitants of this crazy exclave from their subjects. This now-disbanded body, better armed and better dressed than the rest of the People’s Army, and open only to loyal communists, deserves some study. The name itself is interesting. Dzerzhinsky, a devastatingly handsome Pole, was the ruthless founder of what eventually became the K.G.B. His funeral wreath, which I once saw in a secret Moscow museum, was made out of bayonets. A friend of mine much versed in communist peculiarities claims to have heard them sing their regimental song, which culminated in the words “Felix! Dzerzhinsky! You have taught us how to hate!” The final word (Hasst in German) was, he says, fiercely hissed. I have never heard it, though a gloomy short film exists of them goose-stepping through central Berlin in 1987. Nobody is laughing.
All these things now fading out of memory swam into my mind as I re-read, only the other day, one of the best books ever written about this odd place. In a reference to the Valley of the Clueless, it is called The Valley of Unknowing. I was brought back to it because its author, Philip Sington, has recently published another, similarly original and thoughtful novel called The House with Nine Locks. Both are witty, and distressing, and lots of things happen. You are not compelled to admire his style, though it is pleasing, because he is an actual storyteller. Both books are cunning mysteries about people who do dreadful things without really meaning to, to survive in harsh circumstances. I really do not know why Mr. Sington’s work is not better known, though it would help if he stuck with one name. As author of The House with Nine Locks, he calls himself Philip Gray. Elsewhere he collaborates with another writer as Patrick Lynch. (Perhaps this camouflage has something to do with the fact that his mother was once a deep cover illegal British intelligence agent in Eastern Europe.)
If I tell you that the hero, if such a thing could exist in East Germany, is a state-caressed G.D.R. novelist who now makes a second living as a Dresden plumber, then you will pretty quickly know whether this sort of thing is for you. The unhinged, back-to-front, barely functioning society in which he dwells is repeatedly referred to as “Actually Existing Socialism,” as its government and media used to call it. The secret police and the Communist Party come into his life, sometimes comical, sometimes terrifying. The sheer ludicrousness of communist attempts at consumerism is beautifully portrayed. One of the secret policemen smokes a socialist brand of cigarillos sold under the name of “Sprachlos.” German experts will know that this means “speechless” and will conclude that the name is a joke about free speech under communism. But it is not. There really were such things, and no doubt many former East Germans still yearn for their distinctive taste. I have yet to find out why they had this strange name. Marketing under Marxism-Leninism was a complex art. And of course the unavailability of Western T.V. in Dresden (the events long precede the laying of the cable) plays its grim part in driving the story to its avoidably tragic end. I do not know how certain books become vastly successful and universally known. But I wish this one would. It is as startling and memorable as Alice once was.
