The File by Timothy Garton Ash Read Free Book Online

around the German countryside, and the story faded away. I was on the case as both fledgling historian and apprentice journalist, James as a fully fledged journalistbut also as a poet. Out of this experience he wrote one poem, “A German Requiem,” which captures better than anything else I know the elusive, haunted quality of German memory:
    How comforting it is, once or twice a year,
To get together and forget the old times.
    One evening Friedrich rang to say that a neo-Nazi group called the Viking Youth would be out in force at the opening of a new pub called the Café Vaterland. He had seen some of them earlier at a discussion with schoolchildren about the American television series
Holocaust
, which was making a huge impact in Germany at this time. Their “ideologist” had said that they would again erect concentration camps in Germany.
    The Café Vaterland was on the ground floor of a nondescript modern block on the Tauentzienstrasse. The walls were decked with military bric-a-brac and a crude oil painting showed Hitler sitting on the lavatory. When we arrived, the place was already half filled with teenagers in leather jackets and boots. They ate bread smeared with dripping and greeted each other with a Peter Sellers version of the Nazi salute, stopping with a bent right arm, halfway up. The rest of the pub was packed with journalists, observing these Viking Youths. At about midnight, since nothing seemed to be happening, we left and walked around the corner to where my car was parked in a dark street. Suddenly there were several black-jacketed figures running toward us. They carried beer bottles broken off at the base to give a jagged cutting edge.
    At this point, my memory goes into slow motion. I see the thugs coming out of the darkness into the light of a streetlamp. I see myself walking slowly—idiotically—around the car, to open the driver’s door. James is on the pavement, vaguely brandishing a collapsible umbrella. Friedrich is running away diagonally across the street, toward a brightly lit multistory parking garage on the other side. I don’t remember at all the sensation of the bottle hitting me on the side of the head. Perhaps I lost consciousness for a few seconds, since the next thing I see is both James and Friedrich bending over me, as I begin to pick myself up off the dirty tarmac. I think I first realized what had happened from the horrified expressions on their faces, looming above me, garishly illuminated by the streetlamp. Then, to complete this B-movie sequence, I put my fingers to my neck, bring the hand down again and look at the blood.
    One of the thugs had got me with a broken-off bottle just behind the ear. Dazed and bleeding, I was driven by a passing motorist to the nearest emergency department and sewn up by a very unsympathetic elderly nurse, while James and Friedrich loudly insisted on immediate access to a telephone. She said, “Your friends there are worse than the Nazis.” Next day a journalist from one of the tabloids got annoyed with me because I had washed my bloodstained shirt, which he wanted to photograph. “Where’s the bloody shirt?” he demanded.
    The East German communist party daily,
Neues Deutschland
, covered the story under the headline PLAYGROUND FOR F ASCISTS IN W ESTBERLIN . In line with the Marxist theory that fascism grows from capitalism, it reportedthat “with the support of the beer company Dortmund Union-Schultheiss” the owners of the pub had
    established a center of neo-Nazism and militarism in the middle of Westberlin. Members of the neo-Nazi Viking Youth felt encouraged to make their first terror actions against those with different political views. They threatened three journalists, among them two Englishmen who were working on a documentary on the Nazi Reich. They followed the journalists onto the street and beat them up. So far the state attorney has done nothing.
    In fact both the West Berlin authorities and the British military government