Secret Father (46 page)

And how did the madness end?

Unexpectedly, by the act of a Polish peasant nobody, an uneducated farmboy who'd made his way to the city—Gdansk—and become a shipyard electrician. When ordered back to work by an armed Communist apparatchik, he'd said simply, "No." His name was Lech Walesa, and when others quickly joined in that "no," Solidarity was born, and the stunningly nonviolent end of the most brutal regime in history was begun. The "no" ultimately of entire peoples was addressed to puppet regimes, the nomenklatura, the Politburo, the Comintern itself. Within a few years, on December 7, 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev stood before the United Nations and pledged a full withdrawal of Soviet troops from Europe, swearing to uphold "freedom of choice," as he put it, for the nations formerly known as satellites. What began on December 7 at Pearl Harbor ended on December 7 in New York.

And at last the truth of the old domino theory proved itself—but in reverse. Communism fell in Poland: in June 1989, its first free election gave every Polish senate seat save one to Solidarity. Then Hungary dismantled its barbed-wire border with Austria, a first literal breach in Churchill's Balkans-to-Trieste barrier, and then a river of East Germans, voting with their feet again, began flowing by the thousands through Hungary to the West. In October, Gorbachev came to East Berlin, and when hundreds of thousands called out to him, "Gorby, save us!" he ordered Soviet troops off the streets and out of sight. The minute the Soviet leader departed, a frenzied Erich Honecker ordered his army to shoot the demonstrators, and his army refused.

The rallies grew larger throughout East Germany, until November 9. On that night in 1989, as if to redeem the crimes of the same night in 1938, huge crowds gathered on the east side of the Wall in Berlin. East German soldiers and
Volkspolizei,
following orders, pushed the people back. But then one man scrambled up onto the narrow ledge of the Wall. The crowds fell silent as the man stood with his arms upraised, presenting himself to be shot by the hundreds of fully armed soldiers and
Vopos.
Despite orders, not one of them fired.

The man leapt safely down into West Berlin, and the throng roared its approval. A rush of people followed him up and over, as hundreds, then thousands, then—with the
Vopos
opening gates—tens of thousands poured into West Berlin.

We Americans began at once to speak of having "won the Cold War," as President George H. W. Bush would put it in a State of the Union speech, showing how little we knew. In fact, for the first time in history an empire had dismantled itself before the watching eyes of the world, not in response to violent revolution but in response to moral vision—a vision vaguely glimpsed and then fiercely clung to not first by the various nomenklatura or politburos but by what had long been denounced as "antisocial elements." They were the empire's "unofficial" people, like the scientist Andrei Sakharov in Russia, the electrician Walesa in Poland, the playwright Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia, the musicologist Vytautas Landsbergis in Lithuania, the conductor Kurt Masur in Leipzig, a nameless legion of border soldiers who held their fire, and finally a throng in East Berlin, one of whose leaders, we soon discovered, was Ulrich von Neuhaus.

 

Ulrich, like Kit and me, was in his mid-forties now, in his prime as a professor of philosophy at Humboldt University. He had earned his doctorate at Leipzig, where his mother had studied. Beginning there, he would tell us, made him feel close to her.

At Humboldt, on Berlin's Unter den Linden, Ulrich had distinguished himself as an early theorist of what came to be called the New Marxism, an intellectual complement to the slow evolving of what Alexander Dubček had called "socialism with a human face." In the mid-eighties, Ulrich was a founder of the Citizens' Committee, an East German equivalent of the Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia, an analogue of Solidarity in Poland. This democratic resistance movement implicitly, and then openly, challenged the ideological assumptions of DDR state socialism. I was not surprised when I learned of Ulrich's role: "Disobedience," I remembered him declaring, "is how I know I am not dead."

Overt challenges to the political structure were not possible until Gorbachev's influence began to be felt across the plains. Emulating Herbert Marcuse, perhaps, Ulrich emerged as a mentor of the student movement centered in Leipzig and Berlin, a movement that by 1989 had become the engine for nonviolent democratic change throughout East Germany.

From my perch as a political columnist at the
Atlanta Constitution,
I had observed most of this long before November 9. Nothing was going to keep me and Kit away from Berlin once the world knew that the Wall was breached. One advantage of marrying young was that our kids were both in their early twenties, and we could leave on a moment's notice. Kit got a colleague to cover her classes at Emory, and the
Constitution
dispatched me to join our man on the scene.

My father, flying from Manhattan, rendezvoused with us at the airport in Frankfurt, and for the obvious reason we took the train from there to Berlin. Now it was a German train, of course, with crews changing at the border—very different from the duty train Kit and I remembered. As they had once before, the sights of East Germany—rusted factories, chimneys rising from ruins, forlorn-looking livestock, dull-eyed farmers—imposed a somber air on the journey. But now the landscape evoked an interior wasteland, the place where Kit and I stopped being young. I could not begin to imagine what associations that train trip stimulated in my father. Suffice to say the three of us found ourselves sitting silently in a compartment beside two other mute passengers, staring out the window as if we were all five strangers.

It was the afternoon of November 11 when we arrived, and that date, too, underscores the difficulty throughout this story of getting out from under the weight of the past—the nightmares of the dead, as Marx put it;
Vergangenheitsbewältigung,
as Germans put it. And I had thought the phrase applied only to children of the Third Reich.

Kit and I surely arrived at the Berlin
Hauptbahnhof
in a mood far different from my father's. For us the thrill of that first disembarking there, even the memory of the duplicitous Tramm, could still strike the spark of adventure that had brought us together. For Dad there could be only the image of Ulrich's mother dying on the platform, perhaps the very platform onto which we had just stepped.

We joined the exuberant crowd, aiming for the great city outside, which was still in the early throes of celebration. From all across Germany, and from elsewhere in Europe, pilgrims of the Velvet Revolution were coming to dance on the Wall—as, in a way, were we.

Our progress out onto the broad avenue was made simpler by the automatic courtesy of the crowd in making way for my wheelchair. I should explain that six years ago my left leg was amputated above the knee, because accumulated scar tissue caused clotting in its veins. My right leg is intact, but it has atrophied from the calf muscle down and probably won't be with me when I die.

The
Constitution
's European bureau chief, Pete Raymond, was waiting for us with a van outside the station, as promised. Pete was based in Bonn, but he'd been in Berlin nonstop for weeks, and he welcomed us with the hearty ease of a man at home. Kit knew Pete from Atlanta, and liked him. When I introduced him to my father, Dad seemed distracted, too antsy to pay much attention to my friend. I began to feel a bit jittery myself—being driven in a van in Berlin again—which prompted me to ask, "Whatever happened to Herr Krone, Dad?"

"Hans died about seven years ago. Here, in a hospital. He had served with Willy Brandt, both here and in Bonn. He was much admired."

"I remember now. You went to the funeral."

We were headed for the hotel, but Pete abruptly asked, "Do you want to see the Wall?"

"Sure," I said.

Pete spoke to the driver in German. He then explained to us that Potsdamer Platz was as close as we would get to the Wall in a car at that point, such was the size of the crowds. At Potsdamer Platz, he explained, the Wall consisted of two barriers separated by a barren stretch of landscape several hundred feet wide—the death strip. As we drew within a block of it, we could see that the open space was jammed with people, milling around as if they'd just been released from prison but were unable actually to leave. Lost among them, Pete said, were the small pillboxes from which
Vopos
had, until only two days before, manned machine guns.

To the south, beyond the death strip, rose the majestic form of the Brandenburg Gate, on the top of which, in the fading light of that November afternoon, figures could be seen waving flags, generally cavorting, leaning down to haul other celebrants up to join the fun. We watched from the van for some moments, then Kit said, "Novemberfest." And she took my hand.

As we pulled away, Pete turned to face us. "Oh, by the way, I found your guy."

Kit jumped. "Ulrich?"

"Ulrich von Neuhaus?" I said.

"Never heard of the 'von' except from you," Pete said. "But there's an Ulrich Neuhaus, a professor named Ulrich Neuhaus."

Kit said, "Of course. 'Von' and socialism, Michael? Rick would have dropped the 'von.'" She said this with an old edge, a sudden reminder of the structure of our past. Reminders like this I had spent years deflecting.

"If it's the same guy," Pete was saying, "he spoke at the rally last night. He's a kind of Havel here. So far, anyway. His speech was a litany of tributes to other people. 'The secret heroes,' he called them—no longer secret. It was very moving. The 'Wall dancers' love Neuhaus."

"How did he look?" Kit asked. "What's he like?"

"You talked to him?" I asked.

"Yes. After the rally, for a couple of minutes. He didn't want to be interviewed. Not by me, anyway. If you can get an interview with him, you'll scoop the
Times.
I told him you were coming. He said to tell you he wants to see you."

"How do we arrange it?"

"I know one of his associates on the Citizens' Committee, and Neuhaus told me to call him. You tell me."

"Right away," Kit said. "We want to see him right away."

"Well, propose something," Pete said.

Before I could answer, my father said, "Tonight. Tell him tonight."

"There's another rally," Pete said. "Speeches, fireworks, rock music, vodka, dope. That gets cooking at nine or ten. He may have—"

"Tell him eight, then," my father said. His urgency surprised me. "We'll stand by at the hotel at eight. Will he have a problem crossing over?"

Pete laughed. "No, Mr. Montgomery. That's the point."

Kit had wrapped my hand with hers, squeezing my fingers together. Now she let out a long, slow breath, as if she had postponed exhalation for nearly thirty years. Ulrich was good. That was the relief. Ulrich was good.

 

Soon we were at the Kempinski, on the Ku'damm, still the city's best hotel. When I had first proposed staying there, on the phone to my father, his silence was so long and so complete that I thought the line had gone dead. Finally he'd said, "Yes. Good idea."

At the desk, as we checked in, Pete went off to find his contact and pass along our message. I had no idea if it would get to Ulrich, or when, or what would happen then. As I tried to imagine what was coming, a vast weariness overtook me. The sudden crushing fatigue was the one thing about my condition that I still hated.

Kit and I had a room on the fourth floor. For my father, I had booked a suite on the top floor, a standard of luxury he'd not have insisted upon but would take for granted.

As the elevator door opened, Kit rolled me over the bump of the threshold and, with a practiced swivel, turned my chair back toward my father. Standing in the elevator car alone, he seemed framed by the box of it. Seventy years old, but he'd retained his fine posture and trim figure. Though careful as ever of his appearance—well-cut blue suit, handkerchief folded just so, silk tie knotted to ride precisely in the notch of his Oxford button-down—the impression he created seemed as unselfconscious as ever. So entirely American. So fully in possession of himself.

But it was not true. He should have had less at stake in the possible reunion with Ulrich than either Kit or me, yet in the hours of our journey from Frankfurt, he had conveyed in subtle ways the depth of his anticipation and anxiety, and in the van he had all but declared it, as if what had happened on that May Day nearly three decades ago had been as much an interruption in the flow of his life as ours. Over the years, we had hardly spoken of it, and in truth he and I had grown apart. By now I had no idea what the events of that weekend meant to him. Ever the successful banker, yet he had lived a lonely, disappointed life, and being in his presence always made me sad.

"Will you be able to sleep, Dad?"

"A quick snooze," he said, winking. "What your generation calls transcendental meditation."

Our generation. Have two generations ever been more aware of each other
as
generations? Differences, disappointments, defeats. These years had sealed the distance between us. Social history and personal history—it amounted to the same thing. The sight of my father framed in the elevator made me wonder, not for the first time, what had happened to him.

"So we'll see you at quarter to eight," I said.

 

At ten past eight there was a knock on the door, and with a push of one wheel I swung my chair around. My father left his couch and started for the door, but Kit fairly ran there. She wore a flowing navy skirt and a white blouse that set off her long neck and head of grayflecked short hair. She was one of those rare women who, pretty in youth, age into beauty, yet I knew she worried that Ulrich would think her old. Still, whatever of worry was in her had been overtaken by joy. She hopped slightly, an unconscious dance step, as she turned the doorknob. Her free hand went to her mouth as the door opened.

All these years, we had pictured Ulrich with that beard and long hair, our first hippie, and she no more than I could have anticipated the clean-shaven, lean-jawed, balding middle-aged man standing in the threshold. "The Most Unforgettable Character I've Met": the old
Reader's Digest
phrase popped into my mind, and I thought, Yes, still.