In Europe

passers-by are invited to write down their thoughts and wishes concerning the 9 November celebrations. Dozens of people stop to read. ‘It went too fast,’ someone has written. ‘And the thinking is still going too fast.’ Someone else writes: ‘I wish for better education and less violence. Oh, if only we were back in the DDR!’ ‘I certainly wish YOU were!’ someone else has written angrily beside it.
    Big words like ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘heroism’ are used at all the commemorative meetings, and famous names are dropped: Helmut Kohl, George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev. But the ones who actually razed the wall were the people of Berlin themselves, and ten years later their feelings are a good deal more complicated. Their thoughts hang in the rain on Alexanderplatz, on all those cards: ‘We must learn from each other, really learn. Not accuse, not exaggerate.’ And: ‘From the terror of the Stasi to the terror of consumption. Congratulations,
Ossis
!’ And: ‘The DDR took my youth, and it took other people's lives. Only after turning fifty am I allowed to see the world.’ And: ‘I want a dog and a house, and I want my parents to get back together, and a bicycle and an electric toothbrush, and I can't say much about when the wall fell, because I was only three then.’
    What is left of the barrier that once divided this town? Along Bernauer Strasse, the last remains of the wall have been elevated to the status of monument. Aficionados can still hear the linguistic differences between West and East Berlin: forty years is apparently enough time to develop a separate dialect. The last
Goldene Hausnummern
– the DDR insignias for model tenants – are being unscrewed from the shabby doors. But the cheerful little DDR man on the traffic lights is allowed to stay, he walks straight ahead through red and green, nobody pays him any attention.
    I spend an afternoon with Walter Nowojski, retired DDR journalist, radio and television programme maker, editor-in-chief of the Writers’ Union journal and editor of the diaries of Victor Klemperer. He got to know the old professor back in 1952, as a student in Berlin. Klemperer, he tells me, was a cult figure even then, the only one in the entire DDR who had something to say. ‘His lectures were real happenings. He was old and sick, he talked mostly about eighteenth century French literature, but the auditorium was always packed. His book about the language of the Nazis,
LTI: Lingua Tertu Imperu
(1947), made a deep impression in the DDR. Everything in our minds was contaminated, we knew that, it was all old Nazi garbage. What he carried in his mind, though, was an almost forgotten treasure: the German-Jewish intellectual tradition, of which he was one of the last great representatives. When he began talking we would cling to every word, in complete silence, for an hour and a half.’
    It was not until 1978 that Nowojski first heard about the existence of Klemperer's diaries. Rumour had it that they were being kept in the municipal archives in Dresden. He took the train the very next day, and from that moment he spent almost all his free time on the project, in total fascination. It proved to be a Herculean task: the war diaries in particular turned out to be full of errata, misspelled names, all kinds of things. ‘Klemperer was in a special house for Jews, he barely went outside at all, he heard everything at second hand. But at the same time, in that closed house, he was often better informed than the general population. And he knew what to write down, which is another thing that makes his diaries so fascinating. He made notes about how people in the street greeted him, as a Jew, about what people ate, the rumours about the camps, everything. As a historian he had an unerring sense for the detailsthat could be important later on. Some of the bathing resorts on the Baltic had signs saying ‘JUDENFREI’. Was that in 1938? No, it was in 1924! Everyone has forgotten that, we only know about it thanks to Klemperer. He did the same thing with the language, with all those buzzwords he documented:
Weltjuden
,
volksnah
,
volksfremd
,
Staatsakt
. For me, as a thirteen-year-old in 1938, the word
fanatisch
had a very positive connotation. Klemperer documented that. And the diaries show that he continued his collection during the DDR period.
Kämpferisch
,
gigantisch
, he was able to put together a whole dictionary again, just like that.’
    How could an old man