Cees Nooteboom - Roads to Berlin

Roads to Berlin

Also by Cees Nooteboom in English translation

FICTION

Philip and the Others

The Knight Has Died

Rituals

A Song of Truth and Semblance

Mokusei

In the Dutch Mountains

The Following Story

All Souls Day

Lost Paradise

The Foxes Come at Night

NON-FICTION

Roads to Santiago

Nomads Hotel

Roads to Berlin

Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Germany

Cees Nooteboom

Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson

With photographs by Simone Sassen

An imprint of Quercus

New York London

2012 by Cees Nooteboom

English translation 2012 by Laura Watkinson

Photographs Simone Sassen

Glossary compiled by Jamie Bulloch

First published in the United States by Quercus in 2013

First published in the Netherlands as Berlijnse Notities by Uitgeverij De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 1990

Later published with additional material as Berlijn 1989-2009 by De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, 2009

This book was published with the support of the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to Permissions c/o Quercus Publishing Inc., 31 West 57 th Street, 6 th Floor, New York, NY 10019, or to permissions@quercus.com.

e-ISBN: 978-1-62365-098-8

Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services

c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway

New York, NY 10019

www.quercus.com

For Willem Leonard Brugsma

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

All photographsSimone Sassen unless otherwise indicated

PART I

PROLOGUE: CROSSING THE BORDER

January 23, 1963. On either side of the Autobahn, white landscapes open out towards other parts of Germany. We have been driving down this road all day, the most unreal road in Europe, a road that does not pass through any country. No cities, no villages, just traffic signs, Tankstellen and Rasthuser. This is driving across the face of the earth, not through a nation. It is only when we reach Helmstedt that past and politics finally make an appearance, in the guise of their symbols: guards and guard posts, flags, barriers, signs. Slowly, they draw closer: the small buildings, the flags of America, England and France flapping in the frozen air. How could anyone have explained this future to a German thirty years ago?

The checkpoint procedure here is straightforward. Yet another sign clearly states (to avoid any misapprehension) that we are leaving the West and entering the East. The German uniforms are the same, but different. We have to get out of the car and they send us over to a hut. A childish thought: So this is itI look around with eager eyes, but what is there to see? I join a short queue at a low counter with a man and a woman sitting behind it. The man, booted, in uniform, is puffing out clouds of smoke. He looks cold. It is chilly in there. The woman, who is closer to the heating stove, flicks through my passport. She looks at my photo, up at me, and then back down again. Yes, its me. How much money am I carrying? She notes the amount on a small piece of grey paper, with a carbon copy. Do I have a camera? A radio? Foreign currency? Any coins? Everything goes down on the piece of paper, which I have to sign. Passport and paper disappear to another department. The copy goes into a drawer. I am filed away forever, with my 450 Marks, my 18 guilders, my 20 Belgian francs. Through the frosty window, I see snow-covered trees, a barrier, also covered in snow, a tall watchtower built from large tree trunks. No one is up there watching. They hand me a pink form to fill out in a different room. There are some metal chairs, but it is too cold to sit down. Later they return my passport and I have to pay some money. I notice the womans big black boots under the small wooden table; she is scuffing the soles across the floor. What else is there to see in this place? Not much, just a surreally thorough check that takes as much time for them as it does for usand that is a long time.

I pick up a newspaper from a pile. The layout is designed to mock the garish sensationalism of the West German Bild-Zeitung, and the paper has the fitting name of Neue Bild-Zeitung. The D.D.R.s agricultural show in Tamale, northern Ghana, is attracting lots of African visitors every day. And, in Dar es Salaam, the vice-president of Tanganyika has declared that the issue of German reunification must be solved through peaceful means. Inside the newspaper, a modern West German sculpture stands alongside one from East Germany. Question: Which country is most effectively preserving the legacy of the German Nationalkultur? I think about those people in their uniforms and wonder how interested they are in their

Big photographs of workers beside a steel furnace. Big photographs of workers in a car factory. Big photographs of Ulbricht. That is what it looks like here: drab, frozen and incredibly German.

We are permitted to drive on. Show the passport, barrier rises, show the passport again, another barrier rises. And suddenly we are out on the other side. The same snowy landscape rolls on into the distant fog. In the woods to our right, more fences and watchtowers. And then, as we drive over a bridge, we see the shocking image of two men in white hooded suits, men made of snow, with a black dog, panting, tugging, tongue lolling. Long rifles on their shoulders, they vanish into the woods, hunting for humans. We are still driving along the same Autobahn. Sometimes, in the distance, there is the shadow of a village, a cluster of farmhouses with a small church. What are the people there doing right at this moment? Only once do we see movement: a group of whooping children, a painterly addition to the scene. And, at regular intervals, signs welcoming delegates to the party congress: Wir begren die Delegierten des VI. Parteitages der S.E.D.!every slab of concrete: an asphalt strip. Or could it be the hatching that you see on maps in history books, those thin lines indicating conquests, decline, transformation? Roman Empires that were once Holy, principalities, republics, Third Reichs, zones? Battling against the wild, insane flurries of snow, we press on, creatures possessed by micromania, beetles scuttling across this space that history has written all over, yet where there is nothing to see.