Dreams that fade and die

The Dutch writer, Cees Nooteboom, was living in West Berlin in 1989 when the gates opened and the Wall finally came down. At the time he wrote a series of essays about what was happening around him, which were published to great acclaim in Germany and form the first part of Roads to Berlin.

He describes a revolution taking place on his doorstep, but there is no shooting in the streets. He goes to the theatre and museums as normal, but his German friends feel at every instant that they are making history, as though all actions and words have become denser and more lasting. It’s an apposite feeling in a city where, as he says, the past feels at home.

Most strikingly, the placards held up by demonstrators are loaned to a museum even while the demonstrations are in progress, so that people can immediately view how their present might become their future. There is a concomitant in the Eastern museum of the GDR, where the spectacles, keys and wallets of former leaders are on display as relics, and the exhibits detail capitalist exploitation in the other, West Germany.

Nooteboom reports not only going to the Brandenburger Tor on that first night of ecstatic release, but also the scares then felt about the future that have not, in fact, come to pass. The most alarmist foreboding is that some inherent grain of militarism might resurface, and that a united Germany would again try to impose its destiny on the rest of Europe.

There is also the undefined hostility between the two Germanies to life with each other: a Western journalist talks about how everyone in the East walks oddly in trainers, because ‘they’ve been wearing army boots all their lives’, and an Eastern bookseller complains that ‘now everything’s allowed, but nothing’s possible, because my shop’s been bought by a chain.