The Weekend (18 page)

Karin went into the big room, opened the doors, let the air in, stood in the doorway and looked into the park
and the rain. She breathed in the cool and damp, forgot for a moment her worries about the prayer meeting and felt beautiful and strong. She enjoyed her strength. She was a disciplined, resilient worker; when others were stressed and excitable she introduced peace and structure and made plans and decisions with a light, safe hand. She was good in her office; she taught her church to live with fewer taxes and fewer believers, when she spoke publicly about the issues of the day she found the right tone and when people sought her advice she looked them in the eye with concern and sympathy. Sometimes she suspected her heart was no longer in it and she enjoyed her job only because she did it well. But should she give it up for that reason? She also enjoyed the fact that she was a beautiful woman. She was slim, she had big brown eyes and a smooth, taut face, which was lent a fashionable finesse by her gray pageboy cut. Even when she frowned she looked younger than her age. When she lost herself in her thoughts and dreams or concentrated as she played the violin or the guitar, her eyes had a gleam that wasn’t childlike and yet, like a child’s beaming smile, it was a gleam that came from another world—her husband had said it so often that she knew it was there, even though she couldn’t see it in the mirror. Sometimes she exploited it.

She arranged five chairs in a loose circle. If fewer people came, it wouldn’t look empty, if it was more, the circle could be extended. She heard footsteps on the stairs. Her husband greeted her with a kiss, sat down in silence and closed his eyes. Jörg didn’t join the circle but sat down by the wall, propped his arms on his knees and
looked at the floor. His son and Dorle also avoided the free chairs in the circle, but pushed two chairs into a second row and looked expectantly at Karin. Ulrich and his wife sat on the empty chairs. “Is there a songbook?” Ulrich asked, and when Karin shook her head, he said, “Do you sing us something and then we sing it back?” Marko leaned against the wall next to Jörg and folded his arms, Ilse and Christiane brought chairs to the second row. Last came Margarete and Henner, who sat down a little apart from the others. With each new arrival Karin’s heart grew heavier.

Karin sang three verses from the song about the golden sun—her husband and Ilse knew the words and joined in, a few of the others hummed the tune. Then she read out the line.

“That’s the motto of Freiburg University,” said Ulrich.

“That’s the motto of the CIA,” Marko added mockingly.

“It’s the motto of all life,” said Karin, and she talked about seeing and understanding. Who we are—if we see and understand, we have the chance to go beyond it. If not, we are trapped in it. For that reason, however, we mustn’t impose the truth on others. Where truths are too painful and we are not a match for them, we all have our “life lies,” the lies we need to keep on living, and what we must do is see and respect in others the truth of their pain as revealed by their life lies. But life lies do not only reveal pain, they also create it. Just as they stop us from seeing ourselves, they can also stop us from seeing others and letting ourselves be seen by them. Sometimes
it is impossible without a struggle for truth, one’s own and everyone else’s.

“So you impose it,” Andreas interjected.

“No, I’m talking about a struggle between equals, not one of force and compulsion.”

Andreas wouldn’t give in. “What about parents and children, husbands and financially dependent women, women and the men in love with them? Equals, or power and compulsion?”

Karin shook her head. “You get only one or the other. If you don’t meet the other as equals, you may achieve power, but certainly not truth.”

“If that’s true, you can’t impose truth on someone else. Why did you say we mustn’t if we can’t?”

Karin explained that she meant it’s not just that you can’t impose the truth, you shouldn’t even try.

“But why shouldn’t we be able to? Time and again in history truths have been imposed successfully—right truths as well as wrong ones.”

Karin had got muddled. Does the interpretation of the line work only if truth is seen as the truth of the word of God? But she hadn’t wanted to talk to her friends like that. Could she still go on talking like that? She had always seen the line as consistent in its worldly, analytic, therapeutic wisdom. She wanted to get to the conclusion, and end by saying that truth compelled was unblessed. But Andreas cited the German defeat in 1945 as a successful compulsion to truth, and she let it go. She smiled and said, “I don’t know how to go on. I like the line—it gives me courage. But perhaps I don’t understand it. Perhaps it isn’t even true. Some people turn it
around, so that it’s not that the truth makes you free, it’s that freedom makes things true. In that case there are as many truths as people freely living their lives—that idea scares me; I’d like there to be a single truth. But what does my wish count for! And what kind of prayer meeting was that! Thank you for coming and listening and let us say the Lord’s Prayer.”

Afterward Christiane organized breakfast: Ulrich went to the baker for rolls and took Jörg with him; Dorle and Ferdinand took care of grinding and brewing the coffee; Karin, her husband and Ilse sang hymns as they set the table and put out a plate of ham and a board of cheese; Andreas boiled the eggs and carefully packed them in a bed of towels; Margarete inspected the attic and the cellar with Henner. They were all glad to be active and not to have to talk.

But how were they to escape talking? Only the perfectly happy escape it and the hopelessly despairing. As soon as the friends were sitting around the breakfast table, Jörg sat up in his chair and began.

“I know we were wrong and made mistakes. We took up a struggle that we could not win, so we should not have taken it up. We should have taken up a different struggle, not this one. We had to fight. Our parents conformed and shirked resistance—we couldn’t repeat that. We couldn’t simply watch children being burned by napalm in Vietnam, starving in Africa, being broken in institutions in Germany. Just as Benno Ohnesorg was shot, an attempt was made on Rudi Dutschke’s life and a journalist who looked like him was almost lynched. While the state, with increasing impunity, showed its hideous mask of power, suppressing dissenters, the awkward, the unusable. While our comrades, before they were sentenced, before they could even stand before a court, were isolated, beaten, silenced. I know we misused violence. But resistance against a system of violence is impossible without violence.”

Jörg had talked himself into a state of excitement. He had marshaled his speech so carefully that it sounded professorial at first, but he delivered it with growing confidence and passion. Most of them were squirming;
Jörg was talking the way people had thirty years ago and simply didn’t anymore—it was embarrassing. His son, for whom the speech was particularly intended, struggled to seem bored and superior, and looked not at Jörg but at the wall or out of the window. Marko was wide-eyed with fascination; this was the Jörg he had been waiting for.

“I was rebuked for the attack on the American barracks, condemned too, of course, but rebuked by people like you. We couldn’t put the bombs where the Americans committed their crimes, only where they prepared them and recovered from them. If one couldn’t have attacked the SS in Auschwitz, one would have had to do it in Berlin, where they had prepared the extermination of the Jews, or in the Allgäu, where they had recovered from it. And as for the President—our lawyers fought for us to be seen and treated as prisoners of war and were unsuccessful, but he understood, he was with us in the war, he saw himself as a fighter, and us too.”

Karin found the direction Jörg’s speech was taking dangerous. “Let us …”

“I just want to say one more thing. I know I have been wrong and made mistakes. I don’t expect you to approve of what I have done, or even think the state and society should have treated us more fairly. I just want the respect due to someone who has given everything for a larger cause and a good one, and who has paid for his errors and mistakes. Who has not sold himself, has asked for nothing and been given nothing. I never struck a deal with the other side, I never applied for special benefits, I never asked for mercy. I only made the applications anyone
makes. We talked about it yesterday—I can’t remember everything now, some things I’ve forgotten, but I’ve paid for it all.” Jörg looked around the group. “So, that was what I wanted to say to you. Thank you for listening to me.”

“If that’s how you see it all—where did you actually go wrong, as you say, where did you make mistakes?” His son asked his question coldly and calmly.

“The victims. A struggle that doesn’t lead to success doesn’t justify victims.”

“But if, with your actions, you had sparked the revolution in Germany or Europe or the world revolution, would the victims have been justified then?”

“Of course they would have been justified if we had created a better, fairer world through revolution.”

“The sacrifice of innocent people?”

“The bad, unjust world we live in sacrifices innocent people too.”

The son looked at his father, but said nothing more. He looked at him as if he were facing a monster with whom there could be no common ground.

“Do you really mean the sacrifice of innocent people is never justified?!” Jörg said. “If the only way to kill Hitler had involved innocent people …”

“That’s an exception. You’ve turned the exception into the rule.” Ferdinand turned to Eberhard, who was sitting next to him. “Would you pass me a roll, please?” He cut the roll open and beheaded an egg.

Jörg shook his head, but said nothing more. Eberhard passed the rolls, Christiane handed around the plate of ham and Margarete the cheese board. When
Dorle got up, picked up one coffeepot, went from seat to seat and poured, Ferdinand took the other one and did likewise. The conversation got under way, about the rain, the impending departure and journey home, the truth that makes you free and the freedom that makes things true, the changing times. Eberhard mentioned that, and although he didn’t say so, everyone knew he was talking about Jörg’s outmoded speech. “Even though they haven’t been contradicted, the subjects, problems and theses of another era are simply finished. They sound wrong; anyone who represents them isolates himself, anyone who represents them passionately looks ridiculous. When I started my studies, all that counted was existentialism, at the end of my studies everyone was keen on analytic philosophy, and twenty years ago Kant and Hegel came back. The problems of existentialism hadn’t been solved, nor had those of analytic philosophy. People were simply fed up with them.”

Marko had listened attentively. “Because they haven’t been solved, they come back. The RAF will come back too. Not as it was back then. But it will come back, and because capitalism has become global, it will fight capitalism globally too—more consistently than it did back then. The fact that it is no longer chic to speak of oppression, alienation and disenfranchisement doesn’t mean they’ve gone away. In Asia young Muslims know what they have to fight against, and in Europe it’s the young guys in the French suburbs, and in the flat-lands of East Germany they don’t know it yet, but they feel it. It’s fermenting. If we all pull together …”

“Our terrorists saw themselves as part of our society. It was their society too; they wanted to change it and thought it could be done only through violence. The Muslims don’t want to change our society, they want to destroy it. You can forget your great coalition of terrorists.” Andreas asked mockingly, “Or is your new RAF going to bomb its way to a theocratic state in our country?”

Henner was lost in thoughts about his mother. Sometimes she terrorized him with her demands, her accusations, her complaining and nagging, her unerringly wounding remarks. She no longer played the game where you’re nice to others so that they will be nice to you. It wasn’t worth it for her anymore; why should she be nice today so that others would be nice to her tomorrow, when tomorrow she might be dead? Were real terrorists like that? Had they stopped playing according to the rules because they got nothing from following them? Because, if poor, they had no chance of success, and if rich, they experienced the game as mendacious, sordid, empty? He asked Margarete.

“Women know that. They play according to the rules and achieve nothing, because the game is a men’s game and they’re women. Some say to themselves that in that case they won’t commit themselves to the rules. Others hope that, if they pay particularly faithful attention to the rules, they will one day be allowed to play on an equal footing with the men.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I’ve looked for a corner where I can play on
my own. But I understand the women who don’t feel committed to the rules. I understand why so many of the terrorists were women.”

“Could you …”

“You mean, if I didn’t have my corner?” She laughed and took his hand. “I’d find myself another one!”

She pressed his hand and threw him a glance that drew his attention to Jörg. He was sitting opposite them. After his little speech he had said nothing more, hadn’t eaten or drunk anything, had only stared straight ahead. He looked like someone who has done what had to be done, who is confident that it will have its effect, even if the effect will be a long time coming, who is at peace with himself, even if it isn’t easy. He looked not happy, but contented. That suited the group as little as his speech suited the times, and for the first time Margarete was seized with sympathy. Jörg was locked in his perceptions and ideas. He carried his cell with him—presumably he had done so long before he was put in a cell—and she couldn’t imagine how he would find his way out of it. She split a roll, put ham on one half and cheese on the other and set it on his plate. “Eat something, Jörg!”

His eyes returned to the table and found hers. He smiled. “Thank you.”

“Your coffee’s gone cold. I’ll get you a fresh one.”

“Oh, no. Cold coffee makes you handsome—don’t you know that? It was often cold in prison.”