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.It was us, after all, the East Germans, who had had to join the side of the eastern peoples after the war—the very people who had suffered the most under us, I said.I cannot forget how, at the banquet for a delegation from the GDR at a Soviet collective farm, around a table piled high with food, between high-spirited toasts repeated over and over again to your health and happiness and welfare, never accusatory, the conversation was about the son who had been shot as a partisan by the Germans, the brother who had died in the war, the family next door that had been wiped out.And how the leader of your delegation—an old Communist who had acquired his uncompromising loyalty in the class struggle of the twenties and proven it in illegal activities and in jail, and who had meanwhile become a high-ranking, irredeemably narrow-minded functionary—how he burst out in an uncontrollable fit of tears when it was his turn to respond to the toasts of the Russians.It was that scene which later made it hard for you to endure his rage and his opposition when it was time to speak out against him, sharply and thoroughly.Your petit-bourgeois upbringing has caught up to you, he allowed himself to shriek in your face; you were indulging in idiocy about humanity in place of the proper, class-struggle viewpoint, he was bitterly disappointed in you, you should expect no mercy from him.You thought about his time as a resistance fighter and your own time in the Hitler Youth and wished very much that your opposite views of what would be useful for “us” had not driven you farther and farther apart.You were standing in his enormous office, where you had been admitted with a permit and only after a thorough check by armed guards who followed you with alert eyes all the way to the paternoster elevator and whose comrades, likewise armed, were already waiting for you upstairs, so that they could check your ID against the permit yet again and then point the way through the endless, empty hallways and a series of anterooms that had their intended effect on you.Why did they need all that? Where did this fear, this paranoia, come from? Fear of a population that had done so much to them and whose smaller portion they now ruled.Now had to rule, without being able to rid themselves of their suspicion of this people.A cold fear came over you; you would not have been able to put it into words, not yet.At the time, the issue was a book you had written whose publication the high-ranking comrade wanted to prevent because he considered it damaging.The book was important to you, it was a test of whether you could continue to live in this country or not.Then he shrieked at you.It went deeper than just this book and you both knew it.You parted, unreconciled, on the long walk to the door you fainted, and when you came to, his frightened face was above you.I knew that Lutz had not lived through such scenes, and that I would not be able to make them comprehensible to him, even to him.* * *Doctor Kim did not let up, he asked me with a sanctimonious smile: Can you cut down on your eating? and I said yes, I said yes to everything Doctor Kim recommended, but I was not determined to follow all of his reasonable suggestions the way I had been at first, I wanted to be rid of him, I didn’t want to restrict myself anymore, I wanted to live how I was used to and how I liked, and I also didn’t want to tell him what I was thinking or feeling, but then he got me again after all by asking how my relationship with my mother had been: Did you love her? Again I said yes, that she had been a strong woman, I had loved her.Doctor Kim, with his dark face under a black head of hair, in his blue tracksuit, smiled as though he already knew everything I could tell him, and he stuck his needles in my back, hips, and legs.Relax! He turned off the light and left me to the stream of memories and thoughts flooding over me.Mother’s life.A strong woman, the strongest in the family, who unconsciously inculcated the message that nature had designed things so that women took charge and directed affairs in times of crisis.She always needed to know exactly which way the wind was blowing and to say it too.You did not grow up with a model for feminine submissiveness, I thought in my warm dark cell.Instead I saw that strength does not exclude goodness, but it goes with severity, against oneself too: not being weak, not revealing your weak points to anyone, adhering to self-mastery to the point of self-destruction.Not telling anyone about the tumor in her breast she had discovered until the family celebration was over, because she did not want to disturb it.Later, you could not help but imagine the growth of the tumor during those lost weeks, again and again, while Mother lay in the hospital, still self-controlled, or while she gave off a strange smell after radiation treatment.When you told her one day, distraught and flustered, that soldiers from the Warsaw Pact states had crushed the Prague Spring, she answered—she who was dying: “There are more important things.” But it was important to you, maybe too important, maybe the truly important things hadn’t been important enough to you for a long time [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]