MY EARLY MEMORIES OF THE BERLIN WALL AND MOVIES ABOUT NUNS, PART 1
MY EARLY MEMORIES OF THE BERLIN WALL AND MOVIES ABOUT NUNS,
PART 1:
By
David Gottfried
My prior posts have consisted entirely of essays and poems. For a change of pace, I now offer autobiography with a side order of history:
I think it all started with the Berlin Wall. I had only turned four when it was constructed, but it made a great impression. Somewhere, a great, big, dark wall was built, and this was designed to keep people from fleeing from the place on the other side of the wall. The concept as articulated was simple enough for a four-year old to grasp. One need not hear William Buckley provide a long-winded refutation of dialectical materialism or expound on the superiority of Lockean philosophy. Any child’s fairy tale would suffice: There were ogres or witches or warlocks, and they kept people trapped in their dungeon, or their haunted house, by means of a big, cruel, evil wall.
As I said, I did not need to understand the particulars, but the particulars that I was aware of only served to enhance my obsession. First, there was the name, “Berlin.” The name was as tough as quartz. It had none of the lulling sounds of London, or the soft, sissified S’s of Paris. It was a big tough boy with a bellicose B, and it was a two-syllabic construction which knew exactly what it wanted to say and it said it with assurance and confidence. Second, “The Wizard of Oz” made me think about the Berlin Wall. When I saw the wicked witch’s castle on the television screen, I was more impressed by the walls than by the castle itself, by Dorothy who couldn’t leave the castle because she was all walled-in, and by the legions of witch’s soldiers who marched along the castle’s walls chanting “Oh lee oh.” To find some part for myself in this battle, I marched around the living room, after Sabbath Dinner at my Grandmother’s house, chanting “Berlin wall,” assiduously aping the cadence and martial moroseness of the witch’s solders who chanted “Oh lee oh.” Finally, Berlin was in Germany, and I was a Jew. At this time in my life, I didn’t know what had happened in Germany, and I certainly had no idea that the Communists who ruled East Germany had vanquished the Nazis who had killed the Jews. I simply knew that evil was inherent in anything related to Germany or Germans.
Since I did not know anything about Nazis or Germans or Communists, my sense of evil was fun and entertaining. It didn’t have anything to do with getting killed. It was more like a good horror movie. And I wanted more of it. I loved horror shows, and I wanted to see and know as much as possible about all the evil in Germany and in Berlin with its forbidding, foreboding walls. Of course my Jewish relatives did not find my German fascination entertaining. And my Father had less reason than any of my relatives to be entertained by my Berlin fetish: He not only had served in the United States Military in World War Two but had been on the front lines in North Africa and Italy, and he had injuries, from an exploding shell, to prove it. Nevertheless, he either got a kick out of my obsession or accommodated it gracefully.
He did more than accommodate it. He let me experience my Berlin dream. He told me that he would take me to Berlin, to the other side of the wall. My parents were separated, and on one of the Sundays when he had visitation rights, he achieved the mission. Defeating distance and oceans, we managed to travel from New York to Berlin, to spend time in the forbidden city, and to return safely to New York within a single day by means of a single vehicle, My Father’s car, which was equipped with special powers that James Bond would envy.
Very simply, we went to the Yorkville Section of New York, a German neighborhood situated on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It wasn’t hard for me to believe that I had traveled to Germany. I wanted to believe, and for a child aged four or five, the shortest road trips seem like eternities. And, since I spent most of my time with my Mother since she had custody of me, and given the parochial character of my Mother’s automotive perambulations, which consisted of trips that rarely exceeded two miles, a trip to Yorkville, which entailed a long trek North through Brooklyn of five arduous miles, passage over the Atlantic Ocean by means of the Brooklyn Bridge to reach the continent of Manhattan, and a steady, exertion North along the FDR Drive to reach the Teutonic precincts of New York, seemed like an expedition worthy of Marco Polo.
Of course, my Father enlarged the voyage by circuitous meanderings, that would be the envy of any and all cab drivers, all around the five boroughs to enhance the sense of a trip interminable and extravagantly far. And so we went off the FDR drive, and lumbered in traffic on the West Side of Manhattan, and drove underneath the old elevated Westside highway -- the elevation overhead and the grimness of not seeing the sun simulating the sense of Berlin. We plowed our tank through war-ravaged Harlem where the bleak and perpetually soot-stained buildings cast a pallor that said the Hun had been on the march through these forlorn villages of France. Our campaign then trudged to the massive bridges that unite Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx, to the behemoth of Robert Moses known as Triborough, and the girders, and the steel, and the vast expanse of great industrial dirtiness, connoted a toughness and a grit that could only be military and had to be close to Germany. And when the car toured the sickliest side streets of urban decay and degeneration, where the teeming tenements, of ten people to a room, were besieged with an even greater number of rats, I had an intimation of those Germanic horrors that my relatives, when they thought I could not hear, would cry about in the night.
But I was five, and my tummy was crying, and the trip had gone on for so long that I would have believed that we had journeyed to that new item of interest in the news, South Vietnam. And so the tank became a car, and the car was parked, and we walked down the Streets of Yorkville to find a place to eat.
In the early sixties, Yorkville was still very much Yorkville and not what it is today, which is simply a more northern portion of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which, inundated with chain stores common to all of Manhattan, is indistinguishable from the rest of Manhattan. But at that time, the buildings were staid and stout and stiff like a store’s awning that never fluttered in the breeze; the grid format of the streets seemed to make the right angles of Yorkville even more religiously perpendicular than in the balance of New York; and the storekeepers, peering out of their windows, scowled and sneered and wondered what you were doing in their special land. There were plenty of signs in German, and when the people walked, they seemed to stalk, and when you talked, you wondered if you had blasphemed some Prussian certitude which would incur the wrath of the ubiquitous secret police. The wicked witch of East Berlin was all around me, and I was a male form of Dorothy, and my heart throbbing fearfully made me feel more alive.
We finally entered a restaurant, which was as German as anything in the American imagination of Germany could have been. It was slightly dark. It was almost empty. The somber quietude murmured with agonized noises as I heard jail cells slam shut with every clanking of a fork on a gleaming white plate. The proprietors not only seemed to be miserably unhappy but looked as if they had always been miserably unhappy, as if anything but unhappiness were an unnatural way to be, as if their virtue could be measured in the long lines of despondency engraved deep into their chiseled, collapsing jowls. I loved it.
The food was not terribly delicious. There was no sweetness and light in the offerings. No flaky breads, flippant and carefree. The foods were restricted to one corner of the spectrum. There were no red foods, or yellow foods, or orange foods. There was nothing but an enduring brown and white in some sort of goulash or stew. It was as serious as a scholar’s study. It was food. That was all. That was the way it was supposed to be on this special mission to Germany.
I dozed-off to sleep in the car. When I awoke, I asked my Father where we were, and he told me that we were home, in Brooklyn, which was another way of saying America. I asked him how he had gotten across the wall, and my Father blithely said that he had found a weak spot in the wall and just pushed through.
A year or two later, two days before the day John F. Kennedy would be assassinated, my Father died while eating alone in a Brooklyn restaurant. My Father’s death and the President’s death are psychotically conflated in my mind in ways I have never been able to decipher, but among all the whirling thoughts, one thing endured and one thing was clear: I always was and would always be mesmerized by politics, war and history.