Berlin Is My Paris - Carmen-Francesca Banciu
Stories from the Capital
Translated from the German
by Abigail Fagan
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://www.d-nb.de abrufbar.
ISBN: 978-3-941524-66-8 (Print)
ISBN: 978-3-941524-91-0 (E-Book)
Erstveröffentlichung 2002 im Ullstein Berlin Verlag
Taschenbuch Ausgabe, 1. Auflage: ISBN 978-3-86789-008-3
© 2007, Rotbuch Verlag, Berlin
First Edition in English, August 2016
All rights reserved
© 2016 Carmen-Francesca Banciu
© PalmArtPress, Pfalzburger Str. 69, 10719 Berlin
Publisher/Editor: Catharine J. Nicely
Coverphoto Carmen-Francesca Banciu: Kerstin Ehmer
© 2016 Elena Mancini, Epilogue
www.palmartpress.com
Printed in Germany
To my children Marijuana, Cantemir and Meda
Foreword
Germany. A Winter’s Tale
Flowers for Breakfast
A Suitcase in Berlin
For a Hand Full of Change
The World Met at Ed Kienholz’s
The Voices of Spring
Language of Children
Ingredients for an Ideal Language
Idylls in the Backyard
Berlin Is My Paris
Milano on the Island
Different Countries, Different Customs
The Dual: A German-German Problem
Sale e Tabacchi
Detlef and Yolanda Should Dance the Tango
Germany for the Germans! But Which Ones?
Pleasure Is a Word from Germany
Babuschka Maja
The Zeitgeist Has Been Born in Berlin
Wald in Progress
Is There Such a Thing as Coincidence?
When Berlin Still Dreamed
Guten Tag Herr Heckfisch
What Color Is Peace?
Homesickness?
Pout-Red Lips
Politically Incorrect
Loser Across the Board
There Is Light Again on Friedrichstrasse
Secret Message
Happy Hour in Oranienburg City
McBride’s
Europa Mon Amour
True Berliners Are the Berliners by Choice
Mother, Is That My Language Too?
Letter to Rita
Book Tours Are Worth a Story
Eagle-View
Praise for All Do-Gooders
It Should Be Blade- and Bulletproof
Education à L´Américaine
The Bike Knight above the Clouds
Christmastime
Guaranteed to Be Tasty
Note of Thanks
Epilogue - by Elena Mancini
Self-Reinvention and Reimagining Cosmopolitanism for a New Age
What, said the young man, who the Deutsche Bahn sent to help me in Munich. You’ve come to Bavaria to work on a book about Berlin? He grabbed my suitcase with disappointment and swung it onto his luggage cart. Why don’t you write about Bavaria? About our mountains. About our beautiful landscape!
So you don’t like the Berliners at all, I asked him. The Berliners? The Prussians? Na, they’re different, he said, dropping into the Bavarian dialect. We see them when they get to the train station. We can tell that they’re Berliners right away. They are so different.
Different how, I wanted to know. Just different. They don’t understand us at all. They don’t understand us when we talk. And that’s when we really start talking deep Bavarian. He did the same for me, saying in dialect: So that they can’t understand anything at all.
We are more like the Italians, an elderly man from Pfaffenhofen told me once during a reading tour. We love life.
And Frau Bertha, who cleans the rooms at the Villa Waldberta with verve and song, recently said to me: my husband is Italian. My children live in Italy. The folk in Bavaria are too serious for me.
The thing is: it was in Germany that I first discovered the love for life.
I sit at the Villa Waldberta in order to write my book about Berlin. At Lake Starnberg. Where it rained millionaires. The area with the highest number of millionaires per square meter, they say in town.
I’ve come to Bavaria a few days before Easter. The same time of year as it was ten years ago when I arrived in the West for the first time with some friends. We arrived through Bavaria by car. It had just begun to snow. And almost immediately the landscape looked like a fairy tale. A winter’s tale in spring.
I can only begin at Checkpoint Charlie. It’s the place that hypnotically drew me in. And even though I consider Berlin as a whole and am curious about the city, I can’t yet leave this place of writing. I sit at the Adler. At the Sale and other cafés, I write my books and try to understand. Checkpoint Charlie as a metaphor for absurdity. As a reflection of the division of Germany. The division of the world. Here is where I am able to grasp it for the first time. Here is for me the beginning of everything. And the beginning of everything that has to do with me and Berlin.
I will be told that the beginning was at the Brandenburger Tor. But at that time I wasn’t yet in Berlin. And watched the Tor and its opening from Bucharest. I hadn’t yet spent much time with German history. I had considered the division of Germany, just like my friends had, a historical injustice. On this ninth of November we were breathless. Our own history had finally started to roll. And we were caught in its bloodthirsty wheels. We didn’t even want to escape it. But when we heard the news, we let out a shriek. A shriek of relief and joy. And this shriek was a battlecry. Even if we weren’t aware of it. It was impossible not to hear. In ourselves. It rallied up our strength, gave us the courage to imagine the consequences. Irreversible. And suddenly we knew that the time had come to implement the change. It was unreflected knowledge. A unity of action and knowledge that came from within.
I will always remember this day. The excitement. The fear. The joy. It’s the end, we said then. And we didn’t really know what we were saying. My friends and I. And the people around us. We lived from day to day, our ears riveted to the radio. Radio Freies Europa. The news from the country and the news from the world broke over us. Between the radio and the telephone there was little time for everyday life. First and foremost there was Timişoara with its explosion of rage and disappointment. The inconsistent news about it. There was the smell of charged air. And the feeling that it spread was the feeling of awakening. Upheaval. We heard of cruel suppression against Timişoara. Of murdered children. Of Glasnost and Perestroika. These were terms that filled us with covert hope and happiness. We heard about East Germans storming the West German embassy in Hungary. And as the Brandenburger Tor fell like a redoubt during war, we got together. Cheered and danced. As if it had something to do with us. As if it were our history. And we didn’t know at all at that moment how right we were. And to what extreme it would become our history too.
We were intoxicated by the fear and the pressure of this life that might soon be called history. We didn’t have any time to think about history. And about whether history was putting pressure on us to bring it into fruition. Or to make history ourselves. And whether we should call the violence of these changes Revolution.
I sit in a café and write. And these times come alive again. And I become aware of the changes. I grow into these changes. Change with them. I sit at Café Adler. At Sale e Tabacchi. I sit at places that surround the Checkpoint.
There, where one leaves the American Sector, the cyrillic letters on the sign look threatening, and the Russian soldier looks at me warlike. Am I allowed back, I ask myself.
It’s not a year, the year 1990. It’s many years in one. Many lives in one. And by spring we already have this feeling. As if one had pressed the events of many years together into this short space of time following the collapse. The overthrow of Ceauşescus and the collapse of Communism took place within two days. Two exemplary days, which in compressed form, like a seed, carry the course of history and the development of society within themselves. Like an exposé. A table of contents for the future. And whoever carefully studied, read, and lived this exposé, shouldn’t be surprised about the events that followed. It is a subjective feeling of time. And this feeling follows me for years. As if there had been more experiences in this year than in five years combined. And only after these five years have actually passed will this discrepancy between time and my sense of time disappear. It is not a year, the year 1990. It is in this year that I come to Berlin. I cross the Romanian border for the first time. I am picked up by friends. We drive through a number of countries by car. Across all of the borders. Nobody can give me the feeling that here a world ends abruptly. And another one begins. And that in between there lies an open wound still festering. Until I arrive at Checkpoint Charlie.
In March 1990 the world is no longer okay. Or it’s just now on its way to being okay. I’m allowed to leave Romania. I’m allowed to cross the border. I can finally collect my literary award. And visit friends. Dieter and Linde stop through Bucharest and take me with them in their car to Germany. A few months after Ceauşescus’s execution. The feeling in the country is divided and insecurity and fear have the upper hand, suppressing the joy of the Wende, the Fall of the Iron Curtain. We drive straight through Romania, first to Târgu-Mureş, where heaven and hell were set in motion in order to provoke a civil war. Which never happened. Romanian and Hungarian fellow countrymen stand facing one another spitting poison.
Hate-filled faces on both sides. I see the unruly masses from the outside. I don’t feel connected to these masses. Hatred is a sticky spider web. I don’t want to get caught. I want to move on.
From Romania to Hungary we drive across the Pusta. Across never-ending expanses that make the transition between one country and the next barely discernible. I pause. And listen deep within myself. I observe myself. Not just me. My friends in the car do so too. We listen. And I’m supposed to describe what happens inside of me as we cross the border. But as far as the eye reaches, and the eye reaches farther and farther across the new expanse. As far as the eye reaches, the spirit of the border can’t be sensed. The guards. The familiar barbed wire. None of it affects me.
I want to go to Germany to finally receive that which I have been refused for years. A literary award for a short story. I want to go to Germany and then sometime afterward farther on to Paris.
Paris. That is the dream of every Romanian. Of every Romanian writer.
Dieter is also a writer and wants to write about me. About my experiences on this journey. He wants to capture the moment at the border with all of his emotions. But I don’t feel anything. Or don’t want to reveal my emotions to him. I feel mute and numb. And sometimes absent. I remember only parts of the journey. I remember Budapest as if it were a city out of a dream. And in this dream several things happened. We are at a restaurant and a bowl of chicken paprika is steaming on the table. I sit with Dieter and Linde. We had just crossed the Romanian border a few hours earlier. And at that moment this appears to mean more to Dieter than it does to me. For him it’s a painful and coveted journey into the past. After his escape to the West he has returned for the first time in many years. He projects his nostalgia onto me. For him I am Romania. I am the victim of his longing. His longing for everything that Romania could have been, if Communism. The dictatorship. The Securitate hadn’t existed. Romania gains a new appeal that it hasn’t had before. The appeal of the lost. I come from the hell that could now become paradise. That is the appeal. And over this the two of them get into an argument.
The next morning we drive on. On and on. To Germany through Austria.
In a small town near Vienna we stop for coffee. Everywhere it’s their treat. This is a part of our deal. I should talk. Disclose. And I’m not even aware that I’m selling my impressions. That I’m practicing for the first time for life in the market economy. In Capitalism.
It’s Sunday and Election Day in Austria. Maybe local elections. They’re not my elections. I’m busy with other things. I need to pay attention. Little secrets and traps lurk everywhere for me. I practice opening doors, turning on faucets, and flushing toilets. Learn which button to press in order to soap the hands. And how to dry them. A world full of buttons. A wide range of buttons. And just when one is finally familiarized with the first sort, one comes across the next. All that helps is: don’t feel intimidated. Think logically.
The elections pass me by. I’m more interested in the posters. Since leaving Romania, I haven’t seen a single one invoking one’s duty to the party, to the love of the fatherland and the power of the working class. Not a single call to the fight to build a new socialist world. Instead I read a lot of advertisements and try to decipher their meaning. Their ideological significance.
As we leave the Wiener Wald, it suddenly begins to snow. It is a vernal, a wet snow. My mind is alert and absorbs a lot. But it’s cut off from my emotions. And so peculiar memories remain from this time. As if my left foot weren’t standing in the same place as my right. As if I were split into two parts, and as if the memories came sometimes from the right and sometimes from the left side. Vienna. The name triggers a sound in me. A sound like children’s laughter. Of Glockenspiel in the wind. Vienna. Our family history is tied to it. My great grandmother had learned to be a midwife here. A hundred years ago. A time when a woman couldn’t just do much of anything else. Unless one was unspeakably courageous. Unspeakably stubborn. Unspeakably uncomfortable. At some point Linz is on the plate. And Mother with her Linzer Torte. And grandmother with her Zwetschgen Knödel. They all emerge out of memory. Leave the place in which I had buried them forever. Since the moment they disappeared from the world. I can still wave to Mother in my thoughts and tell her: you see. It happened after all. I am in Vienna.
And I will also make it to Paris.
I reach the gates of Vienna. Like the Turks. The Ottomans, I mean. But I don’t want to conquer Vienna. My path leads farther. The gates of the Balkans are pushed back and forth. The citizens of Salzburg, Dieter tells me, claim that the Balkans begin in Vienna. And the Viennese claim that they began much farther west, in Salzburg. What I understand is: nobody wants to belong to the Balkans. And I? I don’t belong there either. At school we learned that the Balkan Peninsula begins south of Romania. And the Balkans are a powder keg. But we would have always been peaceful people. We would never have started wars. We would only have defended ourselves. It is clear: we are all superior human beings.
In the meantime, the sun is shining again in Austria. Geraniums bloom in the windows as if summer had suddenly erupted. I enjoy the air. It smells. It tastes different.
When we arrive in Bavaria, winter is back again. Snow is falling on the landscape. The houses wear white in the evening. Little by little lights come on. I remember this winter fairy tale atmosphere.
I have but two memories about my arrival in Germany. And I don’t know how that’s possible. Maybe my left foot was standing once again somewhere completely different. And has other memories. Of the glow of a daffodil and of a little bit of sun. We pull over at an Autobahn rest stop to charge the batteries of the recording device. My friends now want their payment. My impressions. My emotions on tape, before they fade away. What does one feel when one crosses the border of one’s country for the first time and when one arrives, yes, in the Golden West. I probably disappointed my friends. Disappointed means: first I deluded them and then I disappointed them. Or they deluded, disappointed themselves in my deception. But I didn’t do anything at all. I don’t feel guilty. I mean, be it as it may, they deluded themselves in me. I didn’t fulfill their expectations in that I can’t remember having said anything extraordinary.
I get out of the car and look around. It is a daffodil that is the first thing I encounter in Germany. With a freshness and joyfulness that I have never known before. And I take it as a sign. It grows gracefully on the side of the path and I’m the only one to see it. It transmits its freshness to me. I encounter the world with new eyes.
Only when we cross the German border do I truly come alive. It is a sense of security that I feel. And I will hold on to it later too. A feeling that for years I will only have in Germany. And every time I am outside of the country, I feel insecure, and an unexplainable restlessness overcomes me. We cross the border and the first thing that crosses my path is a flower radiant in winter. I take it as a sign. Nobody can ever take this feeling away from me, of being welcome here.
Morning in Germany begins with the watering of flowers. Breakfast comes second. At Linde’s parents’ house there are flowers in the bathroom. Flowers in the kitchen. Flowers on the window sills. Flowers everywhere. Outside in front of the house stand almond trees in bloom. I had already noticed the trees the evening before, as we arrived in Stuttgart. In one single day we experienced numerous alternating seasons. In one single day I left one world and entered another. A world in which watering flowers is serious work. A world in which flowers are significant. And life seems to relativize its heaviness.
Dieter and Linde are staying in Stuttgart. Our joint journey has come to an end. I am going farther by train. On the way to the train station the force of spring explodes into a thousand colors. As if spring in Germany were more colorful. It is not the wealth that impresses me. Not the excess. It is not the glitter that I translate into freedom. That allows this feeling of vastness to arise within me. It is the flowers. These flowers with fleshy petals. With sturdy stems. As if the color of flowers here were clearer. As if the flowers here were healthier. Because otherwise I only remember gray. It belongs to my biography. And it also belongs to my biography to mention it. This gray that has become a cliché in the meantime.
I’m in Suttgart at the train station. Alone. I am in the world. And the world is there for me. The pigeons fly around my feet. They trust me. I am in a country where there are pigeons that don’t end up in the stew. In a country where words are not locked behind bars. I take the train to Frankfurt. And the train goes too slowly. My rhythm is different. I can’t catch up to the train. I want to see everything. I want to know everything. Everything at once. I speak to my neighbors in my compartment. They are curious about me, about that which I tell them. About Romania. About the revolution. I say: we overcame the border. The world has become infinitely vast. For me too.
From Frankfurt I fly on to Berlin. I have time to think about borders. There are sentences that one utters a million times in one’s life. And nevertheless they carry none of their meaning, empty of their weight. For thirty-five years I never once crossed the Romanian border. That is a simple sentence. But its weight is immense. And for me, it hasn’t been worn out yet. For it doesn’t just contain my history. It contains the history of a country. Of a system. Of a time. And as long as I find myself on the track of this history, as long as this track is still visible, this sentence will follow me. People can be caged. But their curiosity cannot be tamed. Their spirit cannot be confined. Chained up. I moved from my town to Bucharest. From the province to the city. I fled from the constriction. But the real vastness was only in my mind. Because the big adventure took place in my mind. That is a dangerous sentence. In the meantime I want to correct it. Deprive it of its radicalism. The big adventure begins in the mind. But when one restricts oneself to the mind, one never again comes in contact with the ground.
I fly with PANAM over East Germany into a chunk of West Germany.
This isn’t actually true. But I don’t know that yet. I need time to grasp what Berlin really is. And that doesn’t actually occur until much later. Not until I live there. Now I’m just afraid of Berlin. And can’t imagine ever living there voluntarily. Berlin is an island. An unsafe place. Communism has collapsed. But its teeth are still palpable. Sometimes I’m afraid and ask myself if it all actually happened. Or if I’m not just simply dreaming.
My Berlin friends are no fabrication, no new trap set by the Securitate. They really exist. I already knew this in Romania. And soon I am going to get to know them.
In Berlin I am going to be picked up at the airport. My friends and I, we have never seen each other. We like each other at first sight. It could have been quite different, they say. I learn quite early to appreciate their resistance to compromise. Sometimes even fear it. We only know each other through letters and phone calls. The first night I can only sleep with the light on. I wake up and shiver. Cold sweat and fear creep up my back. My friends understand it. But I don’t. I thought I was strong.
The next morning I use a street map for the first time in my life and head out to explore Berlin. Midday I go into a restaurant. A royal feeling. I can order anything I want. I want Wiener Schnitzel. I think of my children. Of my family. Of my mother. Wiener Schnitzel used to belong to our family tradition. But there haven’t been traditions in Romania for a long time. And no meat either. The Romanian chickens were strange creatures. They had countless heads, necks, and feet. Sometimes after standing in hour-long lines they could be gotten ahold of in kilo-packs and made into soup. The hen alone was intended for export. To pay back the country’s debts and for the People’s Palace, the Casa Poporului, Europe’s most expensive construction site. Here in Berlin there are people who can eat schnitzel every day. Their lives haven’t changed. They eat lunch calmly. They drink their coffee. They wake up and follow their daily routine. I take in these images of normality. Breathe them in. I sit at a table. I can’t control myself and cry. I can’t stand myself anymore. Ever since being here, I keep having to cry.
My friends idolize the music. They love Celibidache, adore Dinu Lipati and Clara Haskil. I’m pleased to share something with them that is full of light and value from my country. We spend an evening together at the Philharmonic. With Claudio Abado and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. I see and hear and breath it in. I want to capture this atmosphere. These experiences for ever. For I don’t yet know if I will ever be allowed to come back to Berlin. My friends show me the National Gallery. For some reason Ed Kienholz’s Volksempfänger linger in my mind. When I walk through the city alone I don’t visit museums. I visit department stores and shops. I watch the people and the colorful hustle on the street. I am greedy for life. I view the KaDeWe like an art exhibition. It has for me the significance of the National Gallery. The significance of a valuable collection of exemplary objects out of this unfamiliar world. I don’t want to buy a single thing. I want to see. To see what all exists in the world. In the grocery section I can’t see enough. It’s the colors. The fish. The light on their glittering scales, a rainbow. Fish that swim in a pool. Familiar and unfamiliar fish. Colorful fish. Prawns. Lobster and oysters. I don’t buy any oysters. But I think of Hemingway’s oysters. And how they tasted to him. As he in the twenties, still unknown and as young as the century, wrote in cafés. Unknown and poor he imagines himself. But he is rich. And he doesn’t know it yet. He orders only Portugaises. Because he had finished a story. Up in Michigan. Portugaises and a carafe of dry white wine. After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day. As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
Hemingway is rich. And he doesn’t know it yet.
And I am rich, because I know Hemingway. Because I know this and other lines almost by heart. Because I know a lot about Paris. I had never been to Paris. But I had always known, as impossible as it appeared, that I would get there one day. And whenever I had the littlest doubt about it in Romania, or when I doubted my abilities to handle life, I read A Moveable Feast. I knew that I had to go to Paris. Because: If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.