Germany: Memories of a Nation

Twenty years later, just before the fall of France in the summer of 1940, the philosopher Walter Benjamin, a Jew born in Berlin but then living in exile in Paris, wrote his Theses on the Philosophy of History, one of them a now famous paragraph inspired by Klee’s work: A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Shakespeare introduced Goethe to the idea that language could be used to express deep thoughts and raw emotions. It was the answer to the question that had haunted him: how to articulate being German in a way that spoke to other young Germans. The first page of Shakespeare that I read made me his for life. I jumped high in the air, and for the first time, I felt that I had hands and feet. These words come from the celebration of William Shakespeare that the 22-year-old Goethe organized in his father’s house on 14 October (in the German religious calendar, that is the name-day for Williams) 1771. The manuscript text of his address survives: a young man’s carefully drafted and scripted account of being entirely overwhelmed. Goethe’s speech on Shakespeare Day is a love song: ‘Nature, nature, nothing so like nature as Shakespeare’s people!’ ‘Shakespeare, my friend, if you were still among us, I could live nowhere but with you’, and warming to his rhapsody, he compares them both to the heroes of Euripides’ Iphigenia: ‘How happy I would be if I could play Pylades to your Orestes.’

Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven), written by the East German novelist Christa Wolf, was published in 1963, two years after the Berlin Wall went up. It made Christa Wolf’s reputation, and has long been seen as the most thoughtful, poignant account of the divergence of the two Germanys as seen from the East. It tells the story of Rita and Manfred, young lovers living in the East before the Wall was built, when travel from East to West Berlin was still easy. Manfred becomes disillusioned with the East and does not return from a conference in West Berlin, where he feels the opportunities for his career are greater. Rita visits him but does not warm to the crowded consumerism of West Berlin. She decides to end her relationship with Manfred and to continue with her life in the East. She knows it is flawed, but she feels more at ease in a society where people at least aspire to work together. The couple, ideally matched in every other respect, founder as the two Germanys diverge. ‘At least they can’t divide the sky,’ says Manfred at the climax of the novel, when Rita chooses the communal ideals of East Germany, over a life with him in the individualist West. ‘The sky?’ thinks Rita, ‘This vault of hope and desire, love and sadness?’ ‘Oh yes, the sky is what gets split first.’