Throughout my life I have dreamed of leaving Germany. And yet now, as I grow old, I have a feeling of resignation, even of mild satisfaction at the idea of ending my days here in Berlin, where I'm writing these words. I have been reconciled to my Germanness and can reflect on it in a calm mood.
Strictly speaking, I am only half-German and for most of my adult life I have been a political dissenter (albeit a quiet one) against the German state in which I lived. My mother was not German in a 20th century sense: She was born in the Habsburg empire, to an ethnically German family, and became a citizen of Czechoslovakia as a child, after the first world war. She became German against her will after the occupation of northern Bohemia-the result of the Munich conference in 1938. She had been against her fellow Austrian Adolf Hitler from the start, although inactively and then powerlessly so. One of my earliest memories comes from the war years. We lay in our beds while mother crouched under hers, trying to listen to the news from the BBC, with its unmistakeable signal of the first bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. I will never forget the feeling of anxiety and excitement mingled. Listening to London could result in denunciation to the Gestapo. But mother wanted to know the truth, especially about the eastern front, where my father was serving as a medical officer. My mother's behaviour was a lesson for us children in silent dissent; how one could withhold legitimacy from a tyranny in a very private manner.
My mother and we children spent the war years in the house of my grandfather, a chemist who owned a textile factory in Warnsdorf, close to the border between Germany and Bohemia. In Warnsdorf we were beyond the reach of the Allied bombs. Life was quiet there, and I was brought up in a German environment with that admixture of Czech servants, housemaids, chauffeurs and workmen which was so characteristic of bourgeois German life in Habsburg Bohemia. It made a deep impression on me to discover that there were two different languages to say the same thing. For the same reason, it was no big shock to later learn the opposite-that one may say fundamentally different things in exactly the same words, using double-speak. I have also retained from these years a lifelong attachment to the Slavic idiom.
Towards the end of the war we were expelled, and fled to Germany. We then had to escape from Plauen, Dresden and Halberstadt, one after the other, as each was bombed. I was then six. There were corpses in the streets. A town full of flames is a dramatic thing, unforgettable to a child. I remember standing on the staircase of a house which had been hit by a bomb. My mother was crying: "Jump! I'll catch you in my arms!" Behind me the house was burning and cracking, and in front of me was a bomb crater, going right down to the basement. I was afraid of falling into it, not daring to jump. Finally a man picked me up and jumped over the hole with me in his arms.
Another scene etched into my memory is of being attacked in a field by a low-flying Allied aircraft, as we fled from Halberstadt to the nearby mountains. The pilot amused himself by strafing the refugees with his machine gun. Flying over us, shooting, turning, coming back, attacking again, while we crouched in the roadside ditch.
Later on, life became quieter. Our family settled in Halberstadt, which was in East Germany, but close to the border with what became the Federal Republic. In fact, it was occupied first by the US army and later on handed over, to our lifelong regret, to the Soviet army. My father was a doctor of internal medicine who worked in the municipal hospital. My mother stayed at home and stubbornly defended her bourgeois origins, surrounded by what remained of the old furniture, paintings and books. We had hung on to these things because grandfather had been allowed by the Czech authorities to serve as technical director in his own factory, after 1945, until a Czech engineer got to know the ropes. He was exiled in 1948, with a furniture van containing some of his belongings.
Mother ensured, with dogged persistence, that we became "contras" in the GDR. "Contra" was not only a political stance, it meant opposition to the whole petty-bourgeois/proletarian culture of the early GDR. Mother saw to it that we were instructed as Catholics, which was a clear disadvantage at school and university at the time. Father did not interfere much in family education. He was a bit pink; he had some socialist ideals. Our family attitude may be best described as one of "internal resistance" without open opposition. We thought that the system could not last for long, but that we had to endure it as a punishment for Nazism, Hitler, mass murder, the war, and all that.
As I grew up, literature added to the influence of my family experiences. Somebody lent me Koestler's Darkness at Noon, with its theme of idealism perverted by dictatorship. I also read accounts of Hitler and why he was never overthrown. I remember a fierce argument with my father after reading John Wheeler-Bennett's The Nemesis of Power, which condemned the hesitant high-ranking German army officers. Father defended the honour of his army. Generational conflicts of this type were fought and settled in our family in the 1950s, so we felt that West Germany was catching up with us when the 1968 movement fought the same battles. Even now the Goldhagen debate about German antisemitism-innate or not-seems to me to be oddly out of date.
I often asked my parents why they did not emigrate before the war, and how all those atrocities could happen in a civilised country. Mother's answer was: "How? With father a doctor and only a few high school words of English and French?" And later on they were simply scared of the Gestapo. One may denounce all this, but it is a natural reaction of self-protection in a cruel system. At any rate, I adopted the same attitude of internal resistance in the GDR. I learned to live a split life. At school we had to memorise the dogma of Marxism-Leninism; at home mother denounced it. My decision to become a doctor and, later on, a scientist, was an attempt to find a non-political niche in this environment. It was a sort of camouflage. Given a free choice, I would have preferred to pursue the liberal arts or literature, but they were pervaded by the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. My father advised me: "Go into science or medicine. This is where you can survive as an independent-minded person." So I studied medicine at Berlin's Humboldt University. It was a happy time; we students spent much of our leisure in west Berlin and led a life between the two superpowers. The option to go west remained open. But I was attached to my family, to my friends, to the homeland where I lived, so that I did not decide before 1961, and afterwards the Berlin wall made up my mind for me.
After 1961, behind the wall, we were very, very depressed. I vividly remember seeing (during my first conference visit to Prague) a film about the Californian student movement in 1969: I watched it with envy. I thought that here, locked up in East Germany, we were condemned to live in the dullest period in history. Nearly every conversation ended up lamenting our situation. Men used to wait eagerly to become 65, women 60, the age when passports for travel were first issued to all those who did not belong to the nomenklatura.
But we also realised that in spite of all our complaints we had to make something out of life. By now I was married with children. We found new friends with young children. We all suffered from the same claustrophobic feeling about life in the GDR, and tried to help our children cope with their fractured lives-complying with the official doctrine at school, while living with different beliefs at home. Our "counter-life" took place during the weekends in a tiny peasant's house 30 miles from Berlin. Here the children could do whatever they wanted, while the adults convened a more formal intellectual life. In our circle were people of many professions and views, which compensated for the limited access to knowledge outside one's own work. We formed a kind of secret university, called the "Friday evening club," with lectures, seminars, and even performances.
During the 1970s we remained strictly private and silent, with no intention of leaving our closed circle. We hoped that conditions would become better with political liberalisation, which to a limited extent they did. But towards the end of the 1970s, under Erich Honecker, the reins were pulled in, and we lost hope again. This time we did not stay inactive. Some people went into open opposition and suffered persecution, others began to work actively for emigration, still others tried to join the system in order to change it. I remember being advised often by friends from the west to do the latter. Luckily I did not take their advice-after 1990 the same people would have stoned me for collaboration with the system. All these contradictory attitudes produced tension among us. Legal emigration became possible after the Helsinki convention of 1975, although only after a period of discrimination, unemployment and sometimes arrest which, in the case of one friend, lasted seven years. Illegal emigration over the mined border zone or via some western "tugboat" organisation was dangerous and could end in prison or even death. We were particularly concerned for our children, because quite naturally young people preferred the quick and dangerous way to the agonising wait.
My "coming out" into open political dissent came in the late 1970s, and was triggered neither by the material hardship of everyday life (which, compared to the Soviet Union, was still tolerable) nor by the block in my professional career (I had not joined the communist party and was therefore ineligible for the top posts). My motivation had two sources. One was the fear of leading the same secluded silent life as my parents, in circumstances much less harsh than theirs. They feared the Gestapo and concentration camps, whereas we were afraid of being discriminated against and at worst being driven out of the country into the Federal Republic. The second reason in my case was observation and experience: I had spent, together with my wife and children, several long-term working stays in the Soviet Union; far from Moscow, in a research institute in the back of beyond. The material conditions were harsh, but it provided us with experience of everyday life in another country. It was also a source of anxiety. The Soviet Union was the master country of the communist bloc and hence the model for the social and political trends of the future. These trends were ominous. We lived in Russia, in a country with a talented and decent population, which nevertheless was clearly heading for political disaster-a disaster which could end in world war. In those pre-Gorbachev days we could not imagine a peaceful transition from decaying socialism to a better society. We were convinced that the elite would defend their position to the end, as almost every ruling class had done in history.
By the 1980s, the Friday circle was no longer sufficient. Some of us joined church-based groups and began circulating forbidden literature. I contributed to the samizdat literature with articles on the Soviet Union and Poland, and translations from their clandestine literature. There were consequences. I lost my position as a scientific group leader. My house was bugged. Our flat was searched. I was summoned by the police on the pretext of a security leak in our institute. We received open and coded threats. All this was clear at the time, but we received full confirmation in 1993 when the Stasi files became available.
Our Friday club finally joined the open opposition when the New Forum movement was founded in September 1989. Many of us became activists in the autumn movement which toppled the regime. I was elected to the first and last freely-elected parliament of the GDR and served as an MP from March to October 1990. With reunification, I resigned and returned to my job. There was a short interlude in 1994 when I was persuaded to run for the presidency of the unified country as an independent candidate, but this was largely symbolic. I continued to work and did not fight a real campaign.
I have described my political life in order to explain my ambiguous position towards "my" country. German is the culture and language that I understand to the roots. My command of Russian is good, that of English and French not bad, yet I am a stranger in these realms. I am German if nothing else. And yet I lived in the eastern half of the country for 45 years and longed to escape. My country, East Germany, made me homesick for a better one.
Unlike, say, the Estonians or Lithuanians, there was no simple national struggle against a former ruler for us. Gradually I began to understand that my task was not to just to exist in my Germany, but to build it up, to make it better, to contribute to a reform that would make it acceptable to our children. This led to my political activism of the 1980s and produced a paradoxical outcome: I became a convinced citizen and active supporter of my country, the GDR, during its very last year of existence. With the implementation of the political goals of the American and French revolutions, I felt obliged to participate in the reconstruction of a society that had experienced two dictatorships over three generations. I did not imagine the future in terms of a unified Germany, although all my life I had considered the divided Germany as a scandal and personal offence. But reunifying Germany appeared both unnecessary and impossible. I could not believe that the Soviet Union would be prepared to give up its east European empire. And it was not clear that a united Germany would create a more stable Europe. In a more positive vein, I thought that a second democratic Germany could make a contribution to unifying Europe.
We know now that this was an illusion. The Russians ceded the Tehran/Yalta/Potsdam/Helsinki construction that they had defended so stubbornly over decades. I still do not really understand why this happened when passive resistance to change would have sufficed to stop it-I guess it was lucky that Gorbachev's rule lasted just long enough to confirm the peaceful ending of post-war Europe.
Another paradox was that my commitment to our post-communist reform state met with the opposition of the overwhelming majority of the people. They made it clear that they wanted unification at once, not reform experiments with unclear results. In 1990 they withdrew support from the autumn movement. We faced the choice between battling against the popular will and withdrawal from politics.
I chose not to fight for three reasons. One was that in 1990 there was a unique opportunity to end the division of Germany. The second factor was that life would become easier after unification. My salary is now paid in a hard currency. I can order any book from England, America or France at a cost affordable to me. After decades spent like a bird in a cage, I can travel to almost any country. I longed for this. A third factor was my frustration with my role as a politician. In 1989, when it required some courage to speak up publicly, you felt the support and solidarity of normal, decent people. But in 1990, when many careerists rushed into office, the population began quickly to become cynical about politicians and their attendance allowances. The only role our own people would grant us was to agree to an immediate merger of the two countries and then quit the stage for the doers from the west. At that time the west German politicians enjoyed full confidence, although this trust was to dissolve quickly in the post-unification depression.
To this day I cannot disentangle whether it was profane consumerism or national idealism which contributed most to the surge of pressure in 1990 from east Germans for immediate unification. Helmut Kohl had tears in his eyes when the people of Dresden cheered him with German flags, while Otto Schily (now interior minister) raised a banana into the flashlights of television cameras in order to reveal what he considered to be the true motive. I admit: I had both aspirations. A visit to the Tate Gallery in London (my preferred object of consumption) is not inherently different to a visit to the Costa del Sol (preferred by more of my compatriots).
The new unified Germany is now 10 years old. It has been a much less powerful force than hoped for by some and feared by others. Germany did not become the superpower that Bismarck's Germany became after the 1871 unification. The internal conflicts within the country which Bismarck tried to crush were repeated in the 1990s as conflict between west and east. This friction weakened Germany and contributed to its reduced international dominance. We have not become a monolithic power, and this has been welcomed abroad with a mixture of relief and schadenfreude. Unified Germany turned out to be a rather immobile entity, not the modernist grenade it became after 1871. This may soothe some of the neighbours, but to me it is a matter of concern. I am not qualified to describe the state of economic and political blockage in detail, but I feel it intensely. We seem to lack innovative spirit. My son, who studied medicine and became interested in basic research, did not find a suitable position and now works in Boston. My elder daughter says Germany is boring and went first to London, then to New York, and is now living in Africa. My younger daughter is still in Berlin working as a physicist at the Technical University. She says that the university system is much less creative than comparable institutions elsewhere.
I am happy that my children can travel, but I am concerned that our country is no longer an attractive place for young people from abroad. Those who do come are repelled by all kinds of bureaucratic impediments and even by the threat of the mob. I do not want to exaggerate this factor. Violent youths are a very small minority and exist in other countries too.
Where now? The conflicts of our first decade were perhaps inevitable after two generations of life in antagonistic political systems, but they should now recede. The challenges that Germany now faces are not the internal differences of mentality but those of the global economy and global ecological crisis. They concern us as a whole, not east and west separately. To tackle them we need to renew the spirit of public commitment of the "normal" citizen that made the 1989 revolt so irresistible. But this cannot easily be done by our existing political parties, which are good at balancing out material interests, but do not seem up to the task of building a democratic civic society. n
