It seemed logical for me to write this week about a place
was long Ground Zero of the Cold War. No longer.
But, I’ve occasionally wondered, what the situation would be
if the Germans had kept their fourteen million forced refugees from WWII in
camps until they could return to their homes in the east.

ROADS TO BERLIN

By William Urban

This 2012 memoir by Cees Nooteboom reflects an almost forgotten form of literature, belles lettres. That is, his book is meant to read more for the beauty of its passages and its elegantly phrased thoughts than for any information in it. It is translated from Dutch, which means that some of that beauty is probably lost. Not that the translation is bad. The English reads well enough, but there are always nuances. Often the best translations are not word for word, but intended to convey a thought or a mood. The Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward FitzGerald is, supposedly, more FitzGerald than a translation, but it is still great poetry and philosophy, even though not read much today.

I got Roads to Berlin because the reviews were so good, but also because the bulk of these essays reflected his experiences in Berlin between 1989 and 1991, when I was following the collapse of the Wall closely. (Jackie and I were there at the very end of the process, so I have in my office some scraps from the Wall and a one-day visa from the last day the German Democratic Republic existed).

Cees Nooteboom was a well-known novelist who was invited to West Berlin for a period of study by the German Academic Exchange. I’ve had a couple of these grants myself, each resulting in a book that was translated into several languages (but not yet into Dutch). Such grants are good for reaching out to people who might otherwise be hostile or indifferent to your nation. A lot of people felt that way about Germany.

Nooteboom’s earliest memories were those of Nazi aircraft bombing his city, then of grey-clad soldiers riding through the streets. His father died in an Allied air attack that would not have happened if Holland had not been occupied by the Germans. Consequently, he had not spent much time in Germany and his command of the language was fairly weak.

His language ability and his understanding of the various peoples of Germany improved greatly in these two years. As the title indicates, he took more than one route to the city that became united Germany’s capital; it was not easy and never pleasant to go through the East German police state and almost impossible to travel in it, so he visited other, very different parts of Germany. His descriptions of Bavaria, Swabia, Saxony and even Hamburg (where I attended the university) probably affected me differently than they would other readers, since nostalgia has a power that no imagination can quite equal. Not to play down imagination, because to do so would be the equivalent of saying that reading is a waste of time. But to relive mentally former lifetimes.

Particularly evocative were his descriptions of the palaces of Frederick the Great in Potsdam. He must have gone there on a tourist bus, because until the summer of 1991 that was the only way to visit them. (Crossing the Glienicke Bridge with friends on the first day of free travel remains one of my favorite memories.) But Nooteboom was right in saying that the neglected structures and parks reflected not only the long-gone Prussian kingdom that nobody wanted back, but the inability of the Socialist state to do anything right. When I saw the mold on the paintings of the royal collection, my heart almost stopped.

A decade later, when I took students there, the pictures had been restored and there was work on all the buildings. My students were not all that impressed, I fear, but they might be when they look back on what they had seen and the nostalgia factor kicks in.

Equally poignant were his reflections on the now-vanished Palace of the Republic, the ultra-modern governing center for the communist government — the parliament, two auditoriums, a theater, art galleries, thirteen restaurants and a bowling alley. It had a multitude of problems, but the worst was asbestos. The building could have been saved, but architecturally it did not fit on Unter den Linden. But that had been the reason why the Communists built it, to illustrate their confidence in the future. Now its vacant lot may be filled by a reconstructed Crown Prince’s palace (suitably reconfigured internally as an up-to-date office building or something not yet defined). The Palace of the Republic was, whatever its short-comings, a part of the city’s past that is disappearing as quickly as the last traces of the Wall.

The last time I had students at the Museum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie it was difficult to make them imagine what the street had looked like twenty years before. I had crossed here and at Friedrichstrasse numerous times, and none of those experiences can be forgotten. (Jackie remembers the long stare by the border guard just before midnight that finally turned her exhaustion into a laugh, after which he handed back her passport with the half-laughing comment about the picture, “Ja, das bist Du.” The quote may not be fully accurate, but the memory is.) If the art historian on one trip had not confirmed what I was saying about the Wall, and added some memories of his own, the students might have thought I had made it all up.

Indeed, some post-modern scholars consider all history an invented narrative. Which is obviously true, since nobody can list everything that happens to even to one individual in day, much less what happens in a nation over years. But the historian’s narrative has to be based on fact.

A writer’s perspective is also limited by his sources, which may or may not be typical. Nooteboom described politics as seen on TV rather than close-up encounters, and his conversations with Berliners were random, but they corresponded to my experiences and reading.

A reunited Germany was not universally welcomed in 1991. Not in the East, not in the West, much less in all of Europe. Yet today one cannot imagine a united Europe without a strong Germany. Nooteboom concludes with a discouraging chapter on the failure of Europe to emulate the German miracle, and on the increasing reluctance of the German taxpayer to support European integration. It would have been interesting to hear his opinions as to what the German victory in World Cup will mean.

Review Atlas (July 24, 2014), 4.