The File by Timothy Garton Ash Read Free Book Online Page B

tree on the Ettersberg, near Weimar, under which Goethe had supposedly written his sublime “Wanderer’s Night Song,” but which was then enclosed on the grounds of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Goethe and Buchenwald, the highest and the lowest in human history, together in oneplace. A place called Weimar. A place called Germany. A place called Europe.
    This fascination with dictatorship and resistance, with the extremes of good and evil, civilization and barbarism, also led me further into communist-ruled Europe. I traveled through Albania in the summer of 1978, on a Progressive Tour with seven Marxist-Leninist teachers from Leeds, a Scottish engineer and a former imperial policeman called Mr. Godsave. Over a cup of spirit-laced coffee known in communist Albania as a Lumumba—after the Congolese independence leader, Patrice Lumumba—Mr. Godsave confided in me that he had now visited every communist country in the world. Why? “Must get to know the enemy.”
    The next summer I drove through all six countries of what was then called Eastern Europe. In Poland I discovered the spirit of resistance that I had long been seeking. outwardly poor, dirty, neglected, though still with pockets of ancient beauty, the country was made magical by its people, now supercharged by the recent, incredible pilgrimage of a Polish pope. In Kraków, over a beef dish presented as “Nelson’s bowels,” giggling, indomitable Roza Woźniakowska told me how, as archbishop of Kraków, the future pope had ordered that a lecture on “Orwell’s
1984
and contemporary Poland,” banned by the authorities, be delivered in church. In Warsaw, the irrepressible Wladyslauw Bartoszewski, who had survived both Auschwitz and Stalinist prisons, informed me at the top of his voice over lunch in a crowded restaurant: “We count on the collapse of the Russian empire in the twenty-first century!” What a contrast to craven East Germany.
    Returning to West Berlin, I found that James had decided to leave. He asked if I would like to take over the lease of his flat at Uhlandstrasse 127. Although the war had disfigured the outer façade, now just an ugly cement rendering with strange teardrop gouges for decoration, it was a fine old place inside. You walked up another marble staircase, under Wilhelmine plaster busts and a flower-strewing cherub, to a gray-painted wooden door. This opened onto a long corridor, wide enough to take a grand piano and perhaps fifteen feet high. There were two smaller rooms off to the left, then three beautiful, large, high-windowed rooms, each connected to the next by a handsomely carpentered, high double door. The previous tenants had been political refugees from Iran. They had now gone back to their—as they thought—liberated homeland, but above the big double bed there was still a lurid poster proclaiming “Death to the Shah!”
    How could I resist such a place? So I took it on, saying farewell to my little commune in the Traunsteinerstrasse. The diary records my last sighting of Bernd, setting off for a business trip to East Germany. Although theoretically convinced that the German Democratic Republic was the better Germany, Bernd did not much like going there. On this occasion, his car was loaded with cans, jars, bottles, tubes and packets of Western provisions. “You know the food over there is so bad,” he explained, “and the
service
…” Good-bye, comrade.
    The Uhlandstrasse flat was wildly expensive for a student. In fact, ever since I came to Berlin I had been enjoyably but rapidly spending a small inheritance left me by my paternal grandfather, a sometime president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, whom I knewonly from the stern black-and-white portrait photograph on the piano at my grandmother’s house. I somehow don’t think he would have approved of the fruits of his Victorian thrift being spent in Ax Bax, Romy Haags and Foofie’s, let alone in Warsaw or Tirana.
    The letters from my bank manager