R.H.I. Read online

  ‘You shouldn’t be out this late.’

  ‘I know. It’s necessary to, I’m interested in a quick survey of building progress in the Western sectors.’

  ‘At this hour, Professor?’

  ‘Ah. Well, I’m interested in looking at the new constructions under different lighting conditions. At the effect of different conditions and—’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  But what was he doing here? Had the guards read the newspaper? He walked around a little, then returned and thanked the guards. There was no way he could find her. He went to the Academy building, but still did not enter. Instead he returned home. There was no way he could do what they wanted. Visiting Anita R’s apartment—this gave him the sense of unchanging devastation, of conditions built of heavy and oppressive matter. It had, to be sure, been dark. He wanted to take Anita R with him. Where to? Well, take her with him towards the future he imagined. But that future was in ruins also. Could there be a city without her? What a strange question. He would never ask such a question of himself. Home then. By the time he arrived it was very late indeed; the house was as silent as the city. He walked carefully past the children’s rooms. The children! They would cope. Standing over Isi, he shook her gently awake.

  ‘?’

  ‘We need to pack.’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘We have to go.’

  ‘Now?’

  It was a fair question. For the first time in hours, he stopped. The question stopped him. Was this H being a despot, his decisions arbitrary and final? The children were asleep.

  ‘You’re exhausted. What’s going on?’

  He said, ‘Oh. Nothing. Nothing.’

  ‘Wait until the morning.’ It was the sort of thing she said when she was half asleep, ultimately unrousable. More weighty matter? No. This was Isi. He undressed, slowly. They would pack and leave in the morning. Undressed, he stood at the window for a second, looking out between the curtains. Then he climbed into bed beside her, pressed himself against her where she lay on her side, felt her warmth. After all this pacing, the thoughts, a human body—it broke through. ‘Careful,’ she said, still half asleep. ‘I think eight children is enough.’

  ‘Friede in unserem Lande, Friede in unserer Stadt, daß sie den gut behause, der sie gebauet hat.’ In the morning, after a few hours of disturbed sleep, he left her and the family to pack their things. He promised to be back shortly. This time, on the streetcar, there were no unusual events or perceptual distortions. There was however a strong sense of the ruins around him. He knew that he would find Anita R gone from her work site, her absence unexplained—though, he knew, I wrote, also explainable, like so many such absences, by the better economic possibilities in the West. Money had its magnetism. America’s money was flooding into the West, while Russia had refused all such inputs and had demanded from Germany—from East Germany—war reparations and a weak currency. Even while there was some justice in it—it meant, didn’t it? that the city would be built on the work of its people, not on imperialist dollars—it also made that work difficult, if not impossible.

  He found her easily enough. She was there, supervising at the same site. He hadn’t planned for that. He stood for a second, without asking for her or calling for her. No one paid attention to him, until she met his eye. She looked down immediately, carried on with what she was doing. They were still sorting clean bricks here, knocking mortar from them.

  ‘Fräulein R?’

  She came across to him, and they moved off to one side.

  She said, ‘You were mentioned in the newspaper.’

  ‘I was afraid you had left.’

  ‘Afraid?’

  He said, ‘… For you, of course. I think you will be better here.’

  ‘We have had this conversation, haven’t we?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And—I thought you might have left.’

  ‘I am leaving today. It’s decided.’

  ‘Are you asking me to come with you?’

  He didn’t know. He said, ‘Well, of course it is better for you here. That seems clear. But …’

  ‘But?’

  He whispered, ‘Without me?’

  Silence, and a smile from Anita R. She might have said (but didn’t), ‘Do we run away from our problems? Even the most difficult, the most unsolvable ones, the sheer paradoxes of our lives? We are workers, we are builders. We build in the face of them. Hopefully, hopefully we will succeed.’

  He might have said, ‘And if we succeed, what then?’

  ‘Then we will live!’

  ‘Only then?’

  Something of that possible conversation was present, in her, in them. As it was, they constituted, right now, in this moment, a paradox for each other. Each was doubled, or we might say split, as if a wall ran through each of them, an internal structure, one that they repeatedly found themselves on opposite sides of, if it makes sense to speak like that. H would have liked to think that life lived, not at the end of the task of solving and working and building, but in it, through it—that life was work, work was life. But Anita R spoke now also as someone who—to be sure in a supervisory role—was responsible for bricks, for mere, shineless things. Her plainer wisdom seemed to win out: work’s drudgery, and the festival only on completion. There was no dance and no higher thought to what they were doing. It belonged in the REALM OF NECESSITY. More importantly, the REALM OF FREEDOM could not be associated (was this what Anita R meant?) simply with the West.

  Now she said, ‘Are you telling me that I should go, or that I should stay?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I may still need you, at some point. Although, in the West, that will be different. I won’t need you there.’ She said, ‘I need to work.’

  He whispered, ‘Don’t.’

  She said, ‘Don’t be silly. Of course I need to return to work.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Look at this city!’

  She turned back towards the site.

  He said, ‘That’s not the only reason.’

  She laughed.

  He said, ‘I’ll stay.’

  She said, ‘Good, then.’

  Then, to the Academy. It had been, in the end, a simple enough declaration. Having said, ‘I’ll stay,’ it became the truth, as if, standing opposite each other, they had been involved in some ceremony for which those two words were the culminating utterance—a promise, a sealed contract. It settled things. But hadn’t things been settled before, over the course of the last day? Over and against his current certainty was the fear of what might tip him again. Isi and the children were packing their small suitcases again, as if they were again heading for the bomb shelter or U-Bahnhof during a raid. The suitcases of itinerants, of refugees. And around him, again, the work of clearing and building. He passed the buildings that Scharoun had designed, now with their first tenants. He couldn’t quite look at them, for fear that they would now appear double: standing and destroyed. But the world was a simple thing, after all, and buildings were either up or down, not both, not neither. Still he didn’t look. The simple world was the one he needed now, the world seen clearly, the world always built. It was, in fact, a hard thing to see. Buildings could tend to conceal their builtness. But if any circumstances were right, it was these, where building and the activity of work were so visible, where buildings revealed parts of themselves—their bricks, their foundations, their innards—that were more usually walled-off. Strangely, the thing he now wanted was to pick up a wheelbarrow and add his muscles and tendons, his hands, to the work. He wasn’t afraid of physical labour. But where, what? The activity here all proceeded according to a plan that didn’t include him; he had, after all, set himself aside as planner. Then: but that is work! So: to it.

  But Isi, the children. Did he notice how tired his feet were becoming? Another walk, then, through the city, out, to their house. He found himself nervous about Isi’s response—unpack again? He had never been afraid of her. Between them there was nothi
ng but the most profound openness. Hadn’t there? Now, however (and this had something to do with his ‘secret’ acquaintance with Anita R) he could only appear with an openness that he hadn’t thought possible. It was an openness that manifested itself as confusion, as outburst, as an insoluble vacillation between East and West, as repeated commands—pack, unpack, pack … It was quiet. Then, in the washhouse, he found Trudchen, boiling the sheets.

  ‘Where are they all?’

  ‘Gone to the park I think. Or at school of course.’

  Nothing was packed. That work had never begun. Somehow, this intensified his hurry. Here, in this house—and outside of it, with his wife and family, and in its washhouse—was life, carrying on! He felt gloriously in love with Isi now, for carrying on, for ignoring him. He had, however, too much to live up to, in this moment: Brecht-Anita-Isi.

  So (again) to the Academy. What was he doing out here? He had wasted so much time and energy, pacing back and forth through the city. His few hours of sleep had served only to emphasise how tired he was. He walked as though still asleep, and the city’s shattered and hollowed landscape took on the character of a dream. In such a state, was there some kind of receptivity or sensitivity? He faced the Academy building’s facade again before entering. It was, of course, an example. The only possibility for a return to classicism was in classicism’s own anticipation of the modern. It had much the same sleek facade as the Feilner House, a classicism pared down to a relatively few essential elements. Now he entered. In him, the MODERN BUILDING was in ruins. The Feilner house was largely destroyed, and its remains, though H could not know this—and well after Khrushchev’s assumption of power and the relaxation of the architectural regulations—would finally be demolished in 1962. The Academy building, in fact, would also be demolished in 1962. Roughly in its place (how could this future be relevant to H?) the Ministry for Foreign Affairs would be built, a building that showed the renewed influence of modernist ideas in East Germany after the death of Stalin. It would show the influence in fact of H’s own later buildings; inside it would be Walter Womacka’s mural showing a man and a woman launching from the earth outwards to create, in the words of the mural’s title, their own world. The Ministry would then in turn be demolished in 1996, opening the way, again, for the Academy building to be rebuilt. A corner of the building would be erected in 2001; funds for the rebuilding of the entire building would prove difficult to come by, and the site would remain wrapped in a trompe-l’oeil plastic sheath, which would become increasingly tattered.

  But the future must be, H guessed in 1951, in a version of the classicism of Schinkel’s more elegant designs: Feilner, Academy, and so forth. He would put his design skills to it as a contribution to the work of the city. Like the builders, he would work standing in a field of ruins; like them, he would turn himself towards the materials at hand. He would take up pieces of the old city—heavy, compromised matter—for the construction of the new. What did it mean about building, about the shape of building and the lives of the people who lived there? H did not know; he had, so to speak, ‘stepped down’ into that life. In the meantime, what to do with all that glass? The cantilevering, the pilotis, the shattered and twisted forms of reinforced concrete that remained in his imagination? The other future would need to be swept up and kept somewhere, in some part of him, I wrote, some walled-off section designed for the purpose. Did he secretly know that it would be needed again? It was necessary to redesign both inwardly and outwardly.

  When he presented the initial sketches to the Central Committee, they looked harder at him than at the papers he showed them. H said, ‘I am one of you!’

  They smiled; was that, even, a tear in an eye, as they, one by one, embraced him?

  They said, ‘You are one of the people now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  And, now, there was an opportunity for H to become an example. He was encouraged to write about how he had learned to dedicate himself to the coming order; his story began to circulate; his building was to be built. How could he write about it? How could he describe the process of his ‘education’? It had been conducted over the course of almost clandestine walks through the city’s streets, walks that, I wrote, progressively wore him down and changed him. But the walks led him back and forth, between decision and counter-decision, from here to there—they were no simple PATH for others to follow, in their conversion to communism. He thought about how these walks and the thoughts and constructions associated with them might be turned into a STORY, something useful—as Brecht might have said—for teaching. He was aware as he wrote about the change in himself (a change on the inside, to accompany a change on the outside) that he might easily, at any number of points, have made the opposite decision, the other choice, the choice to design modern buildings for wealthy clients and capitalist concerns in the West. On the one hand, then, he had to believe that History, cunning, lived through him; on the other, History was only the sealed, final form, seen in retrospect, of what had been an unstable, chaotic, back-and-forth series of events—it was a crust that hardened over a molten core. This was all difficult to think about, and not really very useful for composing his public account, which necessarily involved the process (not absolutely unrepresentative of his own) through the stages from bourgeois individualism to final conversion.

  The building itself was intended for the Weberwiese, a space at some remove from the main planned thoroughfare of Stalinallee, on a street that ran diagonally away, at the edge of what had been intended as part of Scharoun’s Friedrichshain development. It would include a greenhouse on the roof, and within each apartment all the luxuries to be expected of modern life: telephones and built-in kitchens with chutes for waste disposal. Over the entry was a verse penned by Brecht. His next design also showed the influence of Schinkel, also with reference to Soviet neoclassicism. Here, grand houses were to surround the new Strausberger Platz. The road kinked at that point, presenting a problem for the intended grand axis towards the centre of the city. The problem was solved, after a suggestion by his colleague Paulick, by an oval layout, with houses curving around the edge of the roundabout, their horizontal lines leading the eye, at the eastern and western entrances, to the verticals of the towers, which presented to the city something of a gateway. The grand avenue would proceed east from here, out of the city in the direction of Moscow.

  Der Widerspruch zwischen dem Volk und sich selbst. There had been protests and isolated strikes, and basic foodstuffs were in short supply. At the 13th plenum of the central committee, the Party had announced the raising of expected work outputs by ten percent. This time, it was workers at the hospital building site in Friedrichshain that were first to take action: on the morning of the 15th they refused to start work, encouraged by the fact that other hard-line measures had been repealed and that the state, in a complete turnaround, had shown itself willing to negotiate with the church. The next day, the gates to the hospital building site were closed off with workers inside, and rumours spread that the site was surrounded by police. Several hundred workers from the Stalinallee building site set out to free their comrades at the hospital, and, having broken in and taken around half of these workers with them, they marched to the House of Ministries, picking up other protesters on the way.

  They were on the roof of the Strausberger Platz building with Isi’s brother-in-law. Their new apartment was below—a double apartment, large enough for the family and their frequent guests. Around them, the still unfinished building site wrapped itself around the square’s empty space like arms; to one side of the square was a small concrete works set up for the project, but it sat idle now. There was nothing to be heard or seen of the usual activity, the work of the place. Instead, the chant of a small crowd was heard before the chanters marched into view: workers, heading towards Alexanderplatz, led by a nurse in uniform carrying a large red flag. Isi’s brother-in-law stood and pointed down, as if they hadn’t noticed. He shouted out ‘Hey!’, but was ignored by the members of the proc
ession. ‘Hey you!’ They kept their step, not hearing. He shouted, ‘The revolution is in the other direction!’ He laughed. H and Isi laughed with him, if not quite as loudly. H looked down, intently, at the marchers—was Anita R among them? He thought so, though it was hard to see clearly. The woman he thought might be her was near the front—one of the leaders, or simply one of the mass? He had an uncomfortable feeling about her whispered appeals that one day she might need his help. Was this why? No, this was something spontaneous, an act of ECONOMISM, as Lenin would have said, the splitting of workers’ economic interests from the vision of intellectual leadership, etc. Lowered working hours, etc. The working hours were, however, in the service of their city, of their lives and their wellbeing. Here was the opportunity for work to become life! Not all at once, but slowly, as the city grew through their labour. He had always thought that Anita R’s requests for future assistance were not, in principle, any different from the small appeals and offers of help that passed around daily: Brecht, say, asking H to help find actors’ accommodation; humans helping humans. Now, HELP itself seemed a threat to the proper order of the city, as if there might build up another city, an underground city of favours and friendships, along with their opposites, on top of which his own city would be simply an empty monument, more dead matter.

  To be sure the situation in the city in the last weeks and days had given everyone something of a headache. A truck mounted with loudspeakers was wrecked, another commandeered. The air in the city was dusty and stretched like rope. A huge crowd had gathered in the morning in front of the House of Ministries. The routine sitting of the Politburo was interrupted with the news of the crowd. On the telephone line to the House of Ministries the crowd outside could be heard as a static, a disruption. The crowd of workers, by now ten thousand strong, was raising its demands, and started to call for the government’s resignation and for free elections. By the time the Politburo announced the repeal of the new work outputs, it was too late—the crowd moved away to the east of the city. The call over the loudspeakers was for a general strike, for further protests, centred the next day at Strausberger Platz. At some point the commandeered truck came past H’s workshop and announced the location for the strike, and the repetition of the name was a shock, as if H’s own name were being called out. The strike, the anger were no surprise to anyone in the city, but now his name had become implicated. Until now he had simply watched, waiting. The expectation was palpable that evening. There was a quiet composed of the footsteps and quick conversations of a crowd for the time being dispersed, but ready to meet there tomorrow. The place now became something SYMBOLIC, for an evening. For tomorrow, hopes were pinned on it. Over West Berlin radio in the early hours of the morning came the call to those in the East: find your Strausberger Platzes, wherever they might be. In this way the place became larger than itself.