germany to america

I returned to the US on Friday, although I'll only be here for a few days before leaving on another three-week international trip (more on that later.)

Bavaria puts on a sublime show for my departure: a golden-red sunrise over Tolkien-worthy Alps; meringue tufts of fog thick enough to sculpt wafting off the ground. It's amazing and makes me not want to leave. It was worth getting up at 4:30 in the morning for this.

The Munich airport is nearly empty due to the early hour, and so clean you could eat off the floor. How do Germans keep everything so clean? I guess in part by hiring sufficient cleaning staff for public places.

In contrast Newark airport seems like the Third World: jarringly loud, crowded, dirty and hot. I know people all over the world talk about inane things while waiting in airports, but suddenly being able to understand all the conversations again is overwhelming. It's now Friday afternoon and the security lines are epic. The bathroom near my gate is gross and entirely soap-less, the waiting area is overcrowded and the seats are grubby, and the last tiny leg of my flight, from Newark to Baltimore, is delayed. Welcome back to America, indeed.

I realize I feel homeless in the US, and not in a carefree, smiling-hobo way. I've pulled up whatever meager roots I managed to plant in Los Angeles. Baltimore hasn't been my home for ten years and doesn't really feel like it now. My childhood bedroom is full of stuff that isn't mine. New York feels like home but I don't actually live there yet, and every time I think about the city I feel an unpleasant mix of acute longing and despair at my profound and total lack of money. I find myself looking forward to leaving the US again in a few days. Then at least I can be a traveler and not some kind of weird self-imposed internally-displaced person.

an open border

On the trip from Garmisch to Wurzburg, my traveling companion tells me we're going through Austria to avoid the traffic around Munich. I assume this means I must have my passport handy and slip it into the front pocket of my bag. But the border turns out to be marked by no more than a blue-and-yellow road sign, which we breeze past without batting an eye on a winding road at the base of the Alps. It's no more dramatic than crossing from one state to another in the US.

I knew the EU has open borders, but still couldn't get it through my head that that means no passport control. Even though I assume my American passport will get me almost anywhere, I still can't conceive of crossing a border without a passport check. The reflex of asking for permission is deeply ingrained.

Later we are in Aachen, the westernmost city in Germany, which sits at the triangle where Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands meet. While eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant, the couple we are staying with point to a white house on a hill. "That house is in the Netherlands." I ask them where the border is, exactly. They have to think about it, and finally decide they're not sure. Nothing marks it, after all. If not for the change in language, architecture and flags from one country to the next, you wouldn't know there was a border there at all.

Of course, this is how it should be. The ability to cross a border freely, without fear, without having to endure harassment, humiliation, or arbitrary detention, without worrying if you will be allowed out, or allowed back in, or when or if you will be able to see family and friends again...this isn't a luxury. It's a basic human right (see Article 13). But I know so many people to whom it's denied, for whom the idea of crossing a border without even hitting the brakes would be inconceivable. It was inconceivable to many Germans as little as twenty years ago. And anyone who thinks sealed borders and walls and checkpoints and controls are a thing of the past, or the purview strictly of America's enemies, should compare this post to the one on Eva Bartlett's blog describing what it's like to cross a border with a Palestinian--even on the rare occasions that that border is technically "open."

I may never fully understand what it's like to grow up a prisoner inside your own country, but I know enough to know not to take an open border for granted. It makes me grateful for the walls that have been torn down, sad and angry about the ones that still exist, but determined and hopeful--no, certain--that they will fall one day too.

stasiland

It's probably surprising to no one who reads this blog regularly that the project I'm currently researching here in Germany is about repression and political prisoners in the GDR (aka East Germany.) How lucky for me that so many relics of repression from this not-so-long-dead dictatorship have been preserved. If you really want to understand a state, you have only to look at its prisons. And, if possible, walk through them.

The GDR was a dictatorship that called itself a democracy, and at least put on a pantomime show of acting like one. But behind the (extremely thin) facade was one of the most effective secret police forces of all time, the Ministry for State Security or Stasi, which maintained hundreds of offices across East Germany, tens of thousands of full-time agents, hundreds of thousands of informal collaborators and informers, and a mind-boggling level of surveillance over its citizens' daily lives. While other states may have been more fearsome in their use of physical violence against their own people, few can beat the GDR in the intense desire for control over the most mundane details of individuals' behavior, and the harsh punishments that were meted out for the most banal acts of resistance.

Something about the modus operandi of the GDR finally clicked for me while on the tour of the former Stasi facility at Hohenschonhausen, which is excellently preserved and today open to the public. Usually referred to as a detention center or a "remand prison," Hohenschonhausen is really a giant interrogation factory. For 102 cells (most single, a few double) there were 120 interrogation rooms. Here prisoners were made to confess to political crimes--rarely completely fabricated but often absurdly trivial--manipulated, tricked, broken, exploited, made to betray friends, family and comrades, sometimes turned into collaborators and spies for the state they once resisted. It didn't happen the way you might expect from watching a few episodes of 24. As is often the case, reality is more creative and more terrifying.

This is one of the interrogation rooms in Hohenschonhausen. Doesn't look so bad, does it? Hell, it even has curtains. Curtains! In fact it looks almost...friendly. And therein lies its deviousness. There is something indescribably creepy about a warm, sunny, friendly interrogation room. Because of course this is not a warm, sunny, friendly place at all, but ground zero for an intense and premeditated psychological assault.

Imagine yourself a political prisoner in the GDR. Perhaps you have tried to escape, been critical of a speedup at work, or simply listened to a banned western radio station. From the moment of your arrest, which is calibrated in every way to be as terrifying and disorienting as possible, you are kept in an environment of intense isolation. Not just physical isolation in the form of solitary confinement, but isolation from information, from news of your family or your own potential fate, from anything familiar and even from the merest scrap of human contact with guards and other prisoners. You are referred to by number, spoken to only in orders, and forced to look at the floor when being moved through the prison so as to not even glimpse the faces of your guards. An elaborate system of signal lights ensures that you will never pass a fellow inmate in the halls while being taken to and from interrogation. Alone, with no stimulus but your own thoughts, you inevitably imagine the worst.

Of course if you are starved for human contact, exhausted, frightened, with no idea what fate awaits you or even if anyone knows you are here, having had enough time alone to conjure up all your own unique worst nightmares, you are ripe for psychological manipulation. You may perhaps be easily disarmed by a friendly man who offers cake, coffee, a cigarette, maybe even a smile, in a sunny room that looks no more sinister than an office. If that doesn't work there is another man (called in, unbeknownst to you, by a secret button under the desk) who is a lot less friendly, who tells you in no uncertain terms what they can do to you and to anyone you care about. Threats to family, loved ones, destruction of your career, long imprisonment, even death--you can bet they have researched, they have watched you, and decided which will cut the deepest. And in this environment where they have total control, who are you not to believe they can carry out their threats? Oh, but on the contrary, all can be forgiven...freedom, safety, maybe even a promotion or a bump up in the queue for a new apartment...all this can be yours. If only you sign this piece of paper.

By now you're probably starting to see the evil genius of this system. Without a single blow or a drop of blood, thousands are made to confess. To me there is something uniquely diabolical about the cleanliness of it all. Everything projects a sense of absolute power. The message is: "We're so overwhelmingly in control, we don't even need to hurt you to get what we want. We can break you without leaving a scratch."

Of course, those who ran the repressive machinery projected the image that this process is infallible and you cannot resist. And of course that is not true. There are always resisters--I'm reading the story of one now. And if there was one, there were others. But after visiting Hohenschonhausen I can fully understand the fury of the well-organized crowds when they stormed Stasi offices all over the country after the Berlin Wall fell, and weight of the message graffitied on the wall of the Stasi headquarters in Berlin: "You've watched us long enough--get out!"

berlin

I'm currently in Berlin, researching a project set in East Germany...or the GDR (German Democratic Republic) as it's more precisely known...or the DDR if you use the German-language abbreviation.

The same thing can have a lot of names here, given the vagaries of language and politics. The Stasi, the dreaded East German secret police agency that features prominently into the research I'm doing, is also referred to as the MfS, using the German abbreviation of its full name, Ministry for State Security. The Berlin Wall (inside Berlin) or Inner German Border (across the whole country) was the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall to the GDR government...although a cursory glance at its design will reveal its intent was to keep East Germans in, not fascists out.

Berlin is a lovely city, chill and inviting despite all the waves of history that have crashed over it. Or perhaps because of them. A first-time visitor will be surprised at how modern the architecture in this historic city is--until he or she remembers that great swaths of it were leveled during WWII. Twenty years after reunification, the dividing line between East and West has been almost completely erased. Other than in official monuments--of which there are many, some excellent, others cheesy--it remains only in codes and shadows: a street name here, an unrenovated building there. And traffic lights. For some reason the East German-style traffic lights have become a kind of fetish object. There is a whole store selling items detailed with the little green walking man in the hat and his red counterpart, standing still with his arms out straight to the sides.

I have much more to say about the history I've been learning, which I'll save for another post, coming shortly. Suffice to say it's fascinating and I'm excited to be here. Oh, and the public transportation is excellent.