An American at the Wall (some of this has appeared in The Rambler)
I never wanted to do it.The thought of doing it made me want to repeal any attachment to The United States.I wasn't even going near the wall until my dad called.
Friends called, too.From the states and from other respective places in Europe and Germany.They didn't come right out and say it, but they all wanted a piece of the Wall.And, if not the Wall itself, they wanted to hear about the free-falling confetti of freedom sprinkled over Berlin.
I was working for a well known author, actually
the author who wrote books about the Wall, who also ironically left me to watch the apartment while the family visited the states.
The phone rang off the hook.Le Monde,
The New York Times, and other heavy-hitter papers called for (I'll call him Klaus) to illuminate the experience.Instead, they reached his nanny.They all asked me "How does it feel?"I, not Klaus, was telling
The New York Times what it was like to wait two turns for the next subway train due to the overcrowding of Ossies.I told them the quintessential Ossie always carried a new boom-box or T.V. in one hand and bags of fruit, chocolate, or a skateboard in the other.They looked me in the eye, something West Germans did sparingly, and smiled.
When I told that last fact to a German writer, he laughed.In Germany, they value privacy; one does not simply smile at just anyone on the street.That smile is reserved for close friends."We're not trying to be obstinate or mean.We have priorities," the writer laughed again.I encountered that quite a bit, where Germans could be introspective, pick themselves apart, and even laugh at themselves, yet know they will enact the behavior the next day on the way to work.
I understood.After living in Berlin for almost a year, I was used to their private culture and actually converted to the new idea, reserving my energies for those closest to me, not spreading myself too thin.
My American friends were practically camped out at the wall, taking part in the biggest party in the world, probably wanting only a couple of kegs to make it perfect.
I had come to Berlin as a nanny only in February of 1989, because the family was building in Italy and would take several trips there.What I didn't realize was the complete hold the city of Berlin would have on me and how I would be caught up in such an important moment in its history, and that of the worlds'.In Denver, the mountains were my West direction.In Berlin, East used to be the Wall.Now, with the wall about to be de-erected, sold for a mighty prophit and immortilized in art installations, Berliners were going to have to find new directions, and a new reference point.
My history with Berlin started as a timid twenty-year-old nanny in New Jersey. I had an outgoing Dutch nanny friend who hooked me up with her German family.We switched families in order for her to remain in the states, and for me to travel to Berlin.Klaus was a famous writer (the father of the family) and Paula displayed her art in Houston and Washington.
I flew with them to Frankfurt in a bullet through sheet metal gray clouds, and we landed in a sleepless fog.Paula directed me into my nanny duties and I shuffled low-lidded five-year-old Liesl with her bear, canteen of juice, and rucksack to a bench and gathered the two-year-old Max onto my lap where we were to wait for the next flight to Berlin.Flights are cheaper than trains to neighboring cities.I'm not sure why.It all went with the strangeness of that first day, where, as a traveler, one accepts virtually anything.
My first impression of Berlin was overall cleanliness.I didn't know a city could be so clean, especially a largish Metropolitan city.The bathroom at the airport (which is a busy place and would be reasonable to accumulate some mess) was spotless.Every door to the stalls worked, all the soap dispensers had soap.
As we arrived at their fourth floor, four-bedroom, three sitting-room-flat that Klaus and Paula owned in Charlottenburg (then the largest stretch in the middle of Berlin at the tail end of Ku'damm) I noticed no weeds nor trash, no sleeping people on streets nor discarded anything.I don't remember much from that first day in Berlin since fatigue was all consuming, but they ordered a pizza for dinner.We sat down and I was the only one to use my hands to eat.Everyone else, including five-year-old Liesl, used a knife and fork.
After I'd settled in a little bit, it was my duty to take the kids to neighboring playgrounds.We had the choice between the trudge to the Castle, Schloss Charlottenburg, which was a few U-bahn stops away, (and if you've pulled a stroller up three flights of stairs, you don't go for that option most of the time), Lietzensee, a sizable park with a lake for the kids to throw hard-crust rye bread clumps at unsuspecting swans, and Stutti, which was just down the street.At that time, Charlottenburg housed all the café's, bookstores, shoe shops and anything remotely fashionable, so Stutti became my destination.
It wasn't like New York, though.Like I said, it was clean.Perhaps a smaller, more sterile San Francisco?I settled into a nice pattern of taking Liesl and her little brother in a buggy stroller, to Stutti.I'll never forget the foggy mornings of the quiet street, Droysenstrasse.When I smell car exhaust and cigarettes on a misty morning, I'm immediately back on that street, walking slowly to Stutti with the kids.It was normal to see worker men in orange jackets, crouched on knees, fixing cobblestones that had worked loose or windows being vigorously cleaned every morning at the second hand clothing shop.I don't know if dust existed in Germany.
We played in the sand and then either bought Pizza from the Turkish man's Imbiss stand around the corner, or on rare days went into the toy-store and bought an un-painted, handcrafted, wooden toy.All around me, the German language exploded with new meaning as Liesl taught me anything from ordering coffee to asking "how much?" She was told by her parents, in order to learn English, she could only speak English to me.Later, as I went to school and spoke German more often, she'd hit me and say, "Kein Deutsch!"
I met other nannies at school, and they introduced me to friends.After a while, I had to choose between activities on any given evening.
Eventually, after ten years, I went back to Berlin.As we drove through the middle of Berlin, I noticed graffiti and tagged buildings, trash collecting around the bottom of bushes, weeds on medians, and couldn't believe I was in the same city."What happened?It's a pit!This place is a disgrace to Germany," I declared in the backseat.
"Isn't it grand?" Franz smiled.
"Huh?It's like New York.It's trashed!You want Berlin to be like New York?It's like, now that the wall's gone, the graffiti artists lost their canvas."
"I know-it's annoying," Pamela piped in.She explained to me that since the graffiti was so overwhelmingly out-of-hand, the government left anything unless it was politically threatening.
"Yes, and this is the only time you'll see any part of Germany looking so 'trashed.'With all the new construction, they don't have time to check for weeds, trash or graffiti."
I let out a little whimper, "Cobblestones."
"Yeah, forget about your little guys in the orange jackets repairing cobblestones."
We drove around what used to be East Berlin's Alexanderplatz. Now the square was all color and adds. No drab storefronts, no wall.It was packed full of life.I scrutinized the people walking briskly with stuffed shopping bags.What a strange sight.It felt like seeing a rich person peel out hundreds and hand them to a beggar.It was a mixed wash of feeling happy for change, but still hanging on to an old house, or favorite socks with holes that need to be thrown away.Capitalism didn't only bring the East Germans a colorful canvas of adds, but it afforded them unity.West Germans are still proud to integrate the "Ost" side of Germany.Any East-crafted streetlight stayed and older buildings were resurrected if they could be, and built up.
I couldn't stop commenting on how the city shifted.I didn't miss the wall, but then realized the lack of it caused my sense of direction to be off kilter.In Denver, the mountains are my West direction.In Berlin, East used to be the wall.
Even the "hip" parts of the city shifted eastward.I mentioned my beloved "Stutti."
"Ew.No.You don't want to go there.Der Mitte is where it's at, now."Pamela craned her petit head to the backseat.
I thought back to November 9
th.The day the Wall came down.They sold T-Shirts "Ich War Dabei"-I was there!It was so touristy, cashing in on freedom like it was a rock concert, converting it to some cheap money making version instead of the immense, heavy joy Ossies carried in droves on the subways.It wasn't just the Americans that partied and chipped their pieces to sell.Besides the Germans, there were people from all over Europe, all over the world, acting out some kind of feeding frenzy, chipping off pieces of the wall, not meant as pieces of memory but as profit.
Then my dad called.He wanted a piece."Oh, and if you could get a little pebble or two for Dr. Kargen, we might get a discount on our bill."He wasn't kidding.He wanted a piece of the wall for our chiropractor back in Loveland, Colorado.I thought of my 16 year old self, how cold his pressure point instrument always felt on my foot arch, how his mustache curved with his smile, how once, when I babysat his kids, I hadn't noticed that the 8 year old had scrawled all over his face in permanent marker right before he fell asleep, so that when Dr. Kargen and his wife came home, they came downstairs and laughed about the facial art.I was glad for their attitude.I owed Dr. Kargen.
I had to do it, then.My dad put it in such terms, "You're there, honey.We're in Loveland.We can't do it.People are selling rocks here and claiming they're pieces of the wall.Couldn't you get us some of the real stuff?"
I put my camera around my neck and went with an American family I babysat for.They already had cups and bowls full of the wall in their hallway as I was waiting for them to get the proper wall extracting tools: two axes, a crowbar and a bucket.The Wall had been "down" for only a week and a half and they were already stocked and armed. The pieces glinted with spray-paint, looking like buckets to take away from a destruction zone.
We drove down, instead of taking the overcrowded subway, and as we neared the Brandenburg Gate, trubbies (the east German car) and Mercedes were at a standstill, creating a new wall to get to the old one.No horns honked.People seemed patient, or perhaps they were too enthralled, people watching, as the crowds teamed up and down the Strasse Des 17 Juni.
The father dropped Dixie and me off to walk with all the equipment heavy in our hands.Other people started doing the same.We were a strange workforce, all dressed in day clothes, as if we were going shopping, only with axes and buckets.
As we neared the Brandenburg gate, we saw punky youths, their hair to stabbing at gray sky, kicking bouts of air on top of the wall like they'd negotiated its new felled status themselves.
One woman slung a hammer. A single vein popped on the side of her face and spatter of colored graffiti stones plopped around her.Kids scrambled to pick them up and she "no-noed" them with an index finger.The kids walked evenly to her and dropped them in her bucket.
I took a few pictures of what became known as "the wall peckers."To me, they looked like untrained construction workers, demolishing whole sections of graffitied stones like stolen pieces of history, leaving gray cement as true structural boring pieces that could have been any wall, say in Omaha, Nebraska.And why not Nebraska?What was the meaning of these small stones people so greedily pecked and stored in all manner of pockets, buckets and shirts up-ended?I didn't want to join them.The feeling that I was more a Berliner at this point than a tourist "pecking" at the same wall we were celebrating its end seemed false and wrong.
Finally, the point of reckoning came, though.I had to do it for my chiropractor.Dixie handed me the axe and insisted that she take a picture of me holding it against the wall.At that moment, I looked directly over her shoulder.Walking solemnly in my direction was a tall, balding man, flannel gray coat older style but well-kept, wing-tips making heavy taps into the pavement.He looked at me with a blue-eyed clearness and shook his head.The disdain of that shake sunk into my arms and made them heavier.He shook his head, scanned the crowd of peckers and shook it again.It looked like he might cry.Thinking back, I expected someone like him to come and witness me being a tourist.At that moment, I realized that I had come to the wall, not for the "pecking," but for the reckoning; to receive that look.I had come to the wall to cancel that tourist out and to feel the heaviness of history and freedom.