In Europe

like Klemperer have such a productive life in claustrophobic East Germany? ‘It's very simple, really: he had a great sense of urgency. Between 1933–46, for thirteen of the most fertile years of his life, he had been unable to do a thing. In the West he would have been put out to pasture. In the DDR, though, they regarded him as a celebrity, they made him a professor at Humboldt University, just what he had always dreamed of.’
    That feeling is one that Nowojski, a celebrated literary critic in the DDR, experienced for years himself. ‘I was at the centre of the system, but from 1978 I still worked each and every evening on Klemperer's diaries. I knew exactly how the DDR censors worked. I led a schizophrenic existence: propagating the official literature by day, working by night on Klemperer, a set of volumes which I knew would never be published here, for a host of political reasons. But I couldn't leave it alone, I couldn't stop, I was too enthusiastic.’
    In essence, the choice he made was the same as Klemperer's. ‘I owed the DDR a great deal as well. My father was a miner, the DDR system was the only thing that made it possible for me to study. That ambiguity clouded my view of the regime for years. I could see the dark sides, but my gratitude kept me from drawing conclusions. That's the problem with our whole generation, especially the intellectuals. Many Westerners will never understand how we had to live in the DDR. The nagging, the red tape you had to go through just to get your bosses to do something, the fussing about, the waste of talent. Lots of political questions, therefore, were essentially matters of character: how do you keep going, how do you deal with your principles without destroying yourself? That same inner conflict also applied to Klemperer.I recognise myself in his diaries, including that feeling of urgency and wasted time.’
    And now everyone had become a Stasi-hunter: ‘The last few years here have been dedicated to one huge parlour game: who was spying on whom? I came across my own name in Stasi reports, I was evaluated as a “revisionist” who was trying to achieve a central position in order to “further advance revisionism by means of legal machinations of power”. And, couched in their own terminology, that was a pretty accurate description of what I was in fact trying to do. Who was spying on us? No one I wouldn't have suspected of doing so, with the exception of one person: my best friend, my chosen substitute in our literature programme. We're still good friends. He came to me one evening to tell me about it, in 1994. He had a weak character, I knew that, and there must have been a blemish somewhere they could blackmail him with. But I remained the head of the programming department for eleven years, so he couldn't have said too many bad things about me. He also covered up for me a great deal, I'm sure of that. And that's what I told him: it's better to be spied on by a friend than by an enemy.
    ‘I've known two Klemperers in my life; the cheerful, inspiring Professor Klemperer with his openness and his remarkable sense of humour, and the Klemperer of the diaries, who was bitter and angry about everything the DDR dictatorship brought with it. The two Klemperers were one and the same: the outgoing Klemperer needed the Klemperer of the diaries in order to stand up the next morning in front of his students and be cheery. “We vomit out our souls to our friends,” he wrote at various points. All those nights working on his diaries had the same effect on me: I vomited out my soul with Klemperer.’
    There is a remarkable anecdote about Joseph Roth, or rather about Berlin. Around 1970, when an American historian was researching Roth's Berlin years, he found himself constantly amazed by the distances between the places where Roth had lived, where he worked and where he frequented his favourite cafés. ‘Roth must have spent hours in the S-Bahn every day!’ Until finally a Berlin acquaintance showed him a detailed map of the city: in fact, all those places were quite close together. The difference with Roth's day was that a wall had since been built between them.
    The story says something about the way the wall was taken for granted, timeless and ineluctable as a river running through the city. But it also shows how the wall threaded its way through the very warp and woof of Berlin. On the East Berlin side alone, more than 120,000 people had lived close to where it was