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| Teufelsberg - she ain't what she used to be |
I blogged yesterday on the demise of the listening station
on top of Teufelsberg in Berlin where I celebrated my 24th and 25th
birthdays in combat boots, sitting at a desk wearing out the replay button on a
giant tape recorder listening to East Germans talking about broken water mains
and their grandchildren’s birthday parties.
I left out the water mains and birthday parties and focused
on the graffiti on the collapsed installations.
Not because I’m still keeping secrets.
But because I thought that if I ever started talking about that chapter
in my life I might just go on talking forever.
So much of who I am today began in those days.
When I consider the trouble Edward Snowdon is in, for
revealing to the world the immense spying apparatus he once was part of, I have
to laugh at the thought some of my friends have that I was in the same
business. He worked for the NSA and at the
macro level. I worked for the ASA at a
micro level. He saw the whole picture,
or at least a much bigger chunk of it. Snowdon is on the run for revealing what he
found out about America’s spy activities.
I’m inclined to think he did us all a favor by revealing how much of
what the United States does today is illegal.
But that’s not a judgment. It’s
only an inclination. I don’t have
enough information.
In any case, my insignificant role in the Cold War is
distantly connected in that I actually was part of the world of an estimated
40,000 people engaged in some sort of espionage work in Berlin in the 1960s. I was one of the Americans listening first to
Russian soldiers in the field talking to each other on short wave radios. And later to communist party officials in the
German Democratic Republic, the DDR. I
have no secrets to reveal. I doubt if I
had revealed what I knew was going on even back then any harm would have come
from my revelations. I didn’t. I bought into the work we were doing and
liked the idea, at least initially, that I was doing my part in the Cold War.
Compared to Snowdon’s activities, mine were trivial
indeed.
And there was little doubt the
Russians and the East Germans knew what we were doing.
Friends of mine from Monterey who got sent to
do the same work on the Black Sea in Turkey told me when they arrived they got
messages from the Soviet bases across the water welcoming them and hoping they
had a nice flight from California.
A
Wikipedia
article on the ASA informs me the information we dealt with has been “partially declassified” and
I’m pretty certain anything I say here will pale in comparison what can be found in the many books and articles on those Cold War years. There was even a novel by somebody using the pen name of David Von Norden,
entitled
Death On
Devil's Mountain,
which came out in 2009.
More
relevant, probably, to the Teufelsberg experience are books by other “Monterey
Marys” as we were called, but I have not read them. I list a few here without endorsement, for
that reason, just in case you want to pursue them. There is Voices Under Berlin: The Tale Of A Monterey
Mary, by T.H.E. Hill, which
deals, I believe not so much with Teufelsberg as with an escape tunnel. There is also C Trick by Donald M. Cooper, which I’ve just ordered and suspect
may be more directly parallel to my experience.
And Soldier Boy: At Play in the
ASA by Timothy James Bazzett, who might be able to confirm or deny
that story of welcome in Turkey.
Bazzett, I understand, is one of the few who went on and made a career
in the NSA. And no doubt many more. To say nothing of the dozens upon dozens of
spy novels and memoirs of the many Cold Warriors who followed their need to
tell their tales.
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| Teufelsberg as I knew it |
Just to backtrack a bit, Teufelsberg, literally
“Devil’s Mountain” was a rubbish pile.
But Berlin had been so severely bombed that the pile created the largest
mountain in the city.
I always thought
the term “Devil’s Mountain” referred to the evil of the Third Reich.
The name apparently comes from the nearby
Teufelsee - “Devil’s Lake,” a name which goes back considerably before 1933.
The water is famously clean and there’s
nothing devilish about the place, unless you are bothered by the habitual nude
bathing.
I note that in later years many
who worked there called it the “field station” or the FSB, Field Station
Berlin.
We simply called it Teufelsberg.
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| Teufelsberg as it became in later years |
Memories are flying around now like exploding
firecrackers, not necessarily connected, or of any apparent import. Like my roommate’s fascination with his prize
Tandberg tape recorder, for example, and his argument that its superiority lay
in the fact that it had all mechanical parts, unlike the complex machinery we
worked with on the job. And the time we
found one member of our company sitting on top of a wall locker playing a flute
in the nude. My memory may be faulty on this, but I believe
there were on the average three suicides a year in the unit and it was not
unusual for guys to be shipped out for medical or disciplinary reasons. Mostly though the attitude was that we had a
job to do and we followed the military rule of keeping your head down and not
making waves. There were simply too many ways of getting
into serious trouble.
The surface cool belied all the churning
within. We lived four to a room and there
was no privacy to speak of. Tom, one of
my roommates, was fighting demons regularly in his sleep and keeping us
awake. He would drink till he got
falling-down drunk, but many people drank heavily and we were too young to know
or care about something called alcoholism.
You drank. You got sick. You got over it and drank some more. Tom’s problem (he’s no longer with us) was that
he got belligerent. One night at about
three in the morning I happened to be alone in the room when the MPs burst in
and shouted at me, “Where does this guy sleep?”
I pointed to his bunk and they dropped him there, unconscious. He was a bloody pulp. I learned later that he had kicked in the
door of the police car and they decided to beat him up for making them fill out
all that paper work. I spent the rest of
the night wiping the blood off his face with cold towels and trying to clean
him up and not gag at the stink. He woke
up at one point briefly, kissed me in a stupor and fell back on the
pillow. The next day he went to the
hospital and we never talked about it again.
I’m pretty sure he had no memory of that event after the beating.
I was dealing with my own demons at the time. I too was having nightmares, night after
night, until in desperation I forced myself to stay conscious as I fell asleep so
I could confront this ugly face that was appearing to me in a dream and demand
it tell me who it was. “I am a lie,” it
answered, and left me to figure out what it meant.
In the days that followed I came to the realization
that I was gay and that I had had a gay experience when I was eighteen that I
had completely suppressed. The coming out
process took several more years, but the
burden I was carrying was largely lifted that night, in Andrews Barracks, some
time in 1964.
We worked in shifts.
Tricks, they were called. A
Trick, B Trick, C Trick. A trick went to
work at something like 7 a.m. if I remember right. The bus would bring in B trick to relieve
them eight hours later, at 3, and bring A trick home, and then repeat the
drill, bringing C trick to work at 11 and B trick back through the Grunewald so
that the listening in went on uninterrupted.
The ride took between twenty
minutes and half an hour, and we often rode in silence, I remember. We couldn’t talk about work, and after eight
of the dullest hours imaginable, somehow I don’t remember ever feeling very chatty.
Most of us sat in front of a radio, turning the dial
endlessly, looking for something that might sound like it ought to be
recorded. Most of the people in the pit
doing that job were in no position to make a decent assessment. They twisted dials, drank coffee, told jokes
and exchanged information about alternate bars to “The Golden Scum,” the bar
just outside the entrance where one could get a blow job under the table if you
timed things right. The real name of the
place was “Zur Goldenen Sonne” (In the Golden Sun), but the one most people
used seemed like a more accurate description.
I had enlisted to avoid the draft and was assured
I’d be admitted to the Army Language School in Monterey. I ended up in the School of Russian. For a year I sat in classes eight hours a
day, did homework for an hour or two beyond that, and got to know a dozen or more
native Russians up close. It wasn’t
heaven, exactly, but it also wasn’t the Bay of Pigs or Vietnam. I had taken two years of Russian in college
and started the program with an advantage which enabled me to graduate at the
top of the class, and I loved the feeling of accomplishment. By the end of the year I was attending
lectures in Russian by people like Shaky Jake, whom some of the old folks would
bow to as he passed, because he was a Romanoff.
He was also a drunk. Or so we
assumed. It is possible his tremors had
another explanation. He loved
Tchaikovsky and would talk endlessly of the delights of Russian classical
composers. And we ate it up. We were also regaled by tales by General
Markov of going on patrol in places so primitive that the locals would put out
the headlights on the jeeps thinking they were eyes. And Minnie Mouse, as we called her, the wife
of the priest who would go on and on about how happy they all were before that
awful revolution and why did they have to kill the tsar’s whole family?
We were already cleared with a top secret
clearance. Which was useful, because our
Russian-English dictionaries were stamped “CONFIDENTIAL” since they contained
Russian words. Because of this we were
instructed not to “fraternize,” an us-and-them holdover concept from the
occupation of Germany and Japan, where it was easier to make the people “off
limits” than fuss with the details.
The order was unworkable, though. We spent all day every day with these people
and warm friendships grew, even between aging ex-Bolsheviks and naïve American
kids from the boonies, and there were even tears when it was all over.
I had amassed a collection of Russian literature in
the original, purchased mostly from the Znanie Bookstore on Geary Boulevard in
San Francisco, where I would spend many a weekend, eating borscht and piroshki
and seeking opportunities to meet Russians who still lived in the Clement Street
area at that time, well before it became the second Chinatown it is today. We went to services at the Russian Orthodox
cathedral or one of the smaller Russian churches, and did what a language
learner should do, approach language and culture as two faces of the same
phenomenon.
When that year, 1963, came to an end, and I flew
first to Frankfurt, then to Berlin to actually work as a Russian “linguist,” I
was full of anticipation. Excited to be
back in Germany again – I had spent my junior year in college in Munich – and
anxious to save the world from communism.
My job was to listen to Russian soldiers in the
field talk to each other. Apparently
their radio lines needed to be kept open around the clock and since they had to
speak the entire time and obviously ran out of things to say, they spent almost
the entire time simply counting to ten and then back down again. We were supposed to write down everything
they said, so our pages were filled with lines that said 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6
– 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 9 – 8 – 7 – 6 – 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1 – 2 – 3, etc. Line after line, page after page.
After about a month of this, I began to feel
something slipping. It was all too
unreal, and I was far too earnest a 24-year-old to let it all wash over me, as
most people did. Only years later did a
friend say to me, “Your trouble is you’ve never developed an appreciation of
the absurd.”
At some point one of my colleagues, bored beyond
endurance, crumpled up a page of numbers and tossed it over his head into a
burn bag against the opposite wall. It
landed in a bag labeled “Unclassified Trash”.
At just that moment, a sergeant came in – we were two classes of folk:
“Monterey Marys” with college degrees and Specialist 3 or 4 or 5 rank, and
career non-commissioned officers, almost none of whom had any advanced
schooling or interest in the actual work being done at the site. Their job was strictly to keep us, an
undisciplined lot by nature, in line. We
referred to them sometimes as orang-utans, sometimes as cannon fodder. The sergeant went over to the burn bag,
picked out the paper and hauled the guy off to be court martialed. Whether he was actually court martialed or
not, I don’t know, but he never came back and word came down he had been shipped
home.
A sense of doom already existed in that place. This event added to it a sense of
paranoia. We would never know when
something would happen to make our world fall apart. “Random fuck” was the expression. You never knew where it was going to come
from and who it was going to hit next.
Some time later I was assigned to “burn bag
duty.” It was my job to go around the
site, staple all the burn bags shut, put them on a dolly and take them out to
the furnace where all the trash was burned.
When I got out there I immediately noticed that the bags labeled
“classified trash” were going in the same furnace as the bags labeled
“unclassified trash.” There was only one
furnace.
My blood ran cold.
I had had quite a few examples of the random fuck phenomenon by this
time, but this was beyond the pale. That
guy had disappeared for absolutely no reason I could see that made sense. I went to the captain to register my
disgust. He looked me in the eye and
said, “This is a good opportunity for you to learn that the rules don’t need to
make sense. The only thing you need to
know is that you are to obey the rules.”
In principle, blind obedience made sense to me. I could see how in a combat situation it was
probably the lesser evil. But I had also
been raised in a post war age and was familiar with the Nuremburg trials and
the fact that my country had told the Germans they could not use blind
obedience as an excuse. And perhaps more
importantly, here in this situation, I had seen one of my own mistreated by a
mindset which was not merely wrong-headed, but pernicious. I snapped.
I took off my headphones and announced I was done with writing numbers
on a piece of paper that made no sense.
They told me I could expect a court martial. Bring it on.
By this time I had talked myself into thinking I’d do better sitting in
a jail cell then here in this place going out of my fucking mind.
Apparently my resolve persuaded them I needed to see
a psychiatrist. I can’t be sure, but I
think people had become aware by this time of how much self-destructive
behavior was going around, the suicides being only the extreme form. In any case, I was removed from duty and told
there would be a three-month wait till I could get to see the shrink in
Frankfurt. Apparently there was only
this one guy in the entire European theater who they would trust me to talk
with. I had a top secret crypto
clearance, you see. Never mind the only
thing I had ever heard in all the time on the hill was Russians counting to
ten.
Instead of getting up before first light and driving
through the woods to the cave with no windows, I got to spend my days reading
or watching television in the day room.
I had things I had to do, like rake leaves and mop floors, but I could
get those jobs done in short order and get back to watching television. German television was a trip. It amused me no end, I remember, to discover
that in the early sixties they still put all their commercials together in one
piece, fifteen or twenty minutes long, and people would watch them as they
watched television programs. And German
television was still very highbrow and instructional.
The best part of the confinement to the day room,
though, was the presence of three other misfits. One was a guy who spoke with such a drawn-out
southern drawl I first thought he was retarded (to use the politically
incorrect concept of the day.) I soon
realized, though, that he had a rich knowledge of American literature. I imagine he went into teaching
eventually. I hope he did. He was able to make Faulkner interesting in a
way my college American Lit classes never could. And he knew the plots of all of Flannery
O’Connor’s short stories. I told him
how literature had come alive for me when I read Catch 22 while at Monterey and how what probably came across as satire
to most people seemed like objective description to me. He insisted I read Thomas Pynchon’s V, which had just come out. When I asked him what he was doing among the
misfits, he said, “I honestly don’t know.
Maybe because I can’t keep my tie on.”
Another one of the guys – Jeff, I think his name was
– was a flamenco guitarist. Very
accomplished. The music was new to me
but I never tired of hearing him practice.
He had gone to Monterey to study German and was now working in Violet
Section, a name I heard for the first time.
He had not sergeants over him but civilian bosses and they worked on
German political issues. He told me they
were having difficulty with some of the Saxon dialect speakers, and six months
of German, it turned out, was not sufficient.
“They could use a guy like you,” he told me, planting an idea in my head
I was later to use as a way out of a bad situation. Matthew, a friend of his from Monterey days, who
also worked in Violet Section, came to visit on his days off, and we used to
sit around playing vocabulary games, to see if we could come up with the German
and English equivalent of tree names, automobile parts, flowers, and religious
terms like justification (Rechtfertigung) and Purgatory (Fegfeuer) and the
Ascension of Mary (Mariä Himmelfahrt). I still get a lot of mileage dropping that
last one at parties.
When the time came for my appointment with the
shrink, I boarded the “
duty train”, as it was called, that ran for the American military between Berlin and
Frankfurt.
Each of the occupation forces
had one that connected their zone in Berlin with their headquarters in in the
West.
The American train ran between
Berlin and Frankfurt.
The British had
their own train, and if you’re interested, have a look at a video of the
celebration of the end of British occupation of Berlin
here.
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| Helmstedt border crossing |
From the edge of the city, when the train entered
the territory of the DDR to the crossing into West Germany at Helmstedt, the
doors were sealed, and nobody was allowed in or out. The trip was like something out of The Spy Who Came in out of the Cold, the
way we inched our way past rows and rows of Volkspolizei carrying automatic
weapons and scowling at our faces pressed against the windows like kids staring
out of a locked car when Daddy drives nervously through the inner city. At the border crossings, Russian soldiers
would enter the train (but not the cars we were in) and get a roster of the
names of all the people on the train.
They were making it plain who was in charge of the territory. We may be a fellow occupying force in Berlin,
but within the confines of the German Democratic Republic we were reminded with
each journey that we were not in charge.
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| Gutleut Kaserne, Frankfurt |
I was happy to be back in Frankfurt. I had made friends there during the three
months of training before being sent to Berlin.
The army had lost my records, so they couldn’t pay me. That meant I had to borrow money if I wanted
to do anything off base. On base, the
Gutleut Kaserne, I had free room and board, but for anything of real interest,
one obviously had to get out and about.
Movies were about $1.50 in those days but soldiers could get into the
opera for seventy-five cents. One of my
friends there, Dennis Wakeling, who later became director of an opera company
in Texas and professor of music, had majored in opera at the University of
Southern California. We would have
dinner together and he would tell me the plot line of the opera we were going
to see and regale me with opera lore – like the midget they got at the Met to
play Madame Butterfly’s kid who bit her on the breast and stopped the
show. (I may be misremembering, but I’m
almost sure that’s the story I heard.)
The result was a virtual introductory course to opera. Dennis, I remember, thought the sun rose and
set on Richard Strauss. I, on the other
hand, thought his music was the equivalent of sugar on honey cubes and walked
out of Rosenkavalier once to Dennis’ great chagrin. In the end, though, he was generous. “Some day your taste in music will grow
beyond Grieg,” he said to me once. I
went to a performance of Rosenkavalier last year that brought tears to my eyes. From
the beauty of the performance, for the most part, but there was also
considerable sadness that Dennis was no longer around so I could tell him how
well he had predicted my future.
I didn’t have time to go to the opera this
visit. I had one night in Frankfurt
before my appointment with the shrink and got on the train back to Berlin the
very next day. After three months away,
they wanted me back at work.
I found my way to the psychiatrist’s office, found
him sitting at his desk and asked him whether I should sit in the chair or lie
on the couch. “Suit yourself,” he said,
and I sat down. “How old were you when
you first masturbated?” he asked me. “I
don’t remember,” I answered truthfully.
“Do you masturbate now?”
“Sometimes.” Do you have any
brothers or sisters?” “I have a
sister.” “Have you ever had sex with
your sister?” “No.” “Have you ever
wanted to?” “No.” “How about your mother?” “No.”
“Your father?” “No.” “Thank you.
That will be all.”
I was in his office for less than ten minutes.
I went to the train in a state of shock. I had suspected I was losing my mind. Now I was almost convinced of it.
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| Andrews Barracks to HQ |
Back in Berlin I asked about the results of the
interview and was told, “That’s classified.”
There was no way I would be allowed to know what the doctor had to say
about me.
By this time, however, I knew
my way around the Berlin Brigade and knew that if I made an appointment with
the dentist, they would give me my records to hand-carry on the bus trip across
the city to headquarters where the dental clinic was.
Somebody has posted a YouTube
video of the
place as it looks today, suggesting some of the buildings will look
familiar, but
nothing, absolutely nothing
sticks with me from those days.
American Army Headquarters was in Clay
Allee.
The bus ride took only ten or
fifteen minutes, but that was long enough to sneak a look at my records.
There it was, right on top.
“This well-adjusted soldier speaks coherently
about…”
I didn’t need to read another word. My goose was cooked. I had this image of a giant rubber stamp
coming down and stamping “arbeitsfähig”
on my forehead. “Capable of work,” the
Nazi designation for Jews who could be worked to death rather than gassed
straight away. If I’d given the metaphor
its due I would have realized I had come away lucky. They were not going to jail me. They were going to put me back to work.
I had had three months to think things over and came
to realize how much I didn’t want to sit my time out in a jail cell and then be
dishonorably discharged. I went back to
work.
For about an hour.
When the counting started up again, and I looked around at the
zombie-like faces, I took my headphones off a second time. This time more somberly, because I was much
more aware of what likely lay in store for me.
I had a sergeant in charge at Teufelsberg I had
gotten to know and like. He was an
African-American and I had had little contact with black people before this,
growing up in what was then still very white New England. He was handsome and soft-spoken. Not one of the grunts who thought politeness
meant not spitting on the floor but in the wastebasket. There was a campaign going on to get soldiers
to re-enlist and any of our superiors who got us to sign up got a considerable financial
reward, so he went to work on me as well as everybody else in sight. When
we were on night shift we’d often talk for hours over coffee when nothing much
was happening and we were all caught up.
As we talked I learned what the army meant to him. It was a way out of poverty and ignorance, an
escape from limitations that were handicapping everyone he ever knew before the
army took him to Europe where he could walk the streets as an American soldier,
and not just as a Negro.
Ever since the
Berlin Airlift, which began in the
summer of 1948 when the Russians decided to get tough and close the borders
in and out of the city, Berliners had come to see Americans less as an
occupying army and more as the people saving them from the Russians.
For almost a year planes flew in and out of
Tempelhof Airport, staying only long enough to unload and refuel, before flying
back for another load of supplies.
Thirty-nine
Britons and thirty-one Americans lost their lives keeping Berliners from freezing and starvation, and the Berliners were
grateful.
There was no place in the
world an American in uniform got a warmer welcome.
I tried to explain to the good sergeant that while
he saw limitations everywhere I was “free, white, male and twenty-one.” The point was I had the illusion the whole
world was open to me. The thought I
would spend thirty seconds more in an organization characterized by stupidity and
random fuck than I absolutely had to was beyond absurd. He finally stopped pitching. He would be what we called a re-tread. I would not.
In this tug of war, though, a friendship developed
as we reached the point where we could see how our backgrounds determined our
opinions, rather than blindness or thick-headedness. When I took my headphones off that second
time, I could see in his eyes that I was in trouble. I also saw that he cared what happened to me
and was going to do what he could to protect me from my own pattern of
self-destruction. He escorted me
personally to the new captain’s office back at Andrews.
The captain had just taken command. He was a young man, not much older than
me. He came across like some kind of
missionary, a blond baby-faced Norwegian-American kid from Minnesota, fresh off
the farm and officer training school. I was in luck. “What am I supposed to do with you?” he asked
me.
I had been preparing for the worst. A tirade of invective probably, followed by a
big show of calling the MPs to haul my ass off to the brig. But this guy was actually solicitous. He was asking me a real question.
“I’d like to work as an interpreter on the troop
train,” I told him.
He knew that would never happen. The Russian interpreters could not come from
those people who had worked as a spy.
The Russians might actually have ways of spotting me if I took that
position and haul me off for questioning.
No matter that the only information I could give them was which of the
soldiers spoke with a Moscow accent, and which with a Leningrad accent on those
rare occasions when they said more than the numbers from one to ten.
“No,” he said.
“You can’t work on the duty train.”
“What about working in Violet Section?”
“You know about Violet Section?” Here it was, the idea that secrets could be
kept and that people living and working together around the clock would not see
who went where once we entered the Listening Station.
“Of course.
It’s a small place and everybody knows what goes on inside.”
“But you’re a
Russian linguist!” He had the party line.
“But my mother is German and I grew up with the
language,” I said. “And I happen to know
they need somebody like me who can handle the dialects,” I told him. I was bluffing. I didn’t know Saxon any better than anybody
else working there, but I figured I could fake it.
And that’s what happened. I went with my misfit friends, the flamenco
guitarist and his friend of the words for all the plants and animals, to meet
the civilian employees. Two weeks later
they put me in charge of the section, and people were coming to me with bits
and pieces they couldn’t quite make out.
I got real good, real fast, at guessing at things from context and
fortunately I didn’t make too many mistakes (actually, who would ever know?) And, to everybody’s relief, my little
trouble-making stint blew over and things went back to normal.
If the party members had used the regular
telephones, we probably would not have known what they were up to. But there was a special network set up for
party members which circled the country in a narrow beam – not broadcast, in
other words – from Berlin to places that became as familiar to us as our home
towns – Erfurt, Halle, Magdeburg, Schwerin, Rostock, Leipzig, Dresden,
Karl-Marx-Stadt and the rest of the state capitals. Because the line went through Berlin we were
able to tap into it, and because things were so centralized that gave us access
to the entire country. The number of
people we listened to was limited, so we got used to their voices and could wow
the bosses who dropped in from time to time with our ability to identify people
quickly and often give some personal history.
Gertraud has an unmarried daughter and her granddaughter’s birthday is
coming up. Manfred hates going to the
airport to pick up Russians, but he pretends he doesn’t mind. In some cases, I learned where people lived
and found their addresses on a Berlin street map. I used to fantasize about going over,
knocking on the door, and offering “a little something for the three-year-old
on her birthday.”
We read Neues
Deutschland, the official state newspaper because it helped us
contextualize things, and we were aware of how many times a world event would
be interpreted differently. There were
times we got wind of things that did not appear in the Western press, and times
when we knew we were not getting accurate information. It was not a stretch that there would be
people who might actually want to “escape” from the West to the East. We kept a lid on such thoughts, because we
understood what could happen if they were overheard and misinterpreted. Nobody I worked with, even though we joked
about it from time to time, seriously entertained the idea. The kids getting shot or tried for the crime
of “Republikflucht” (flight from the [East German] Republic) kept us in
check. But the idea at least entered the
realm of the conceivable. The more so
when the orang-utans got abusive and the “bad guys” turned out to be loving
grandmothers or giggly gossips indistinguishable from our own sisters – people
we knew we would want to get to know if circumstances were different.
The months went by and my time came for having my
necktie cut off. When you “got short” –
got close to leaving, somebody would get a pair of scissors and slice through
the middle of your tie to mark the approach of the great day.
What followed was a series of rapid changes in my
life. I went back to Connecticut,
registered for unemployement - a mistake
– I should have waited till I got to California where the rate was much higher,
bought a car and drove with one of my friends from Andrews/Teufelsberg days to San
Francisco where I stayed for a while with a spook – one of the guys who used to
spy on us at Monterey to try to weed out troublemakers early on. I rented an apartment first with one of my friends
from Berlin, then a second, then a third.
I took a year off till my $3000 savings was used up and I had to find a
job. Most of that year I spent with
others from the 78th USASA SOU, the Berlin Brigade, playing bridge,
learning to cook, to manage a checkbook, and to keep house. I began to have a sex life, to know what it
felt like to be on my own as an adult for the first time, and moved away from
the Cold War and into the Age of Aquarius.
The flower children had begun to show up and I would march next to them
in anti-Vietnam war protests and join them in trying to persuade men in uniform
they were little better than paid killers.
I missed my Aunt Frieda and the friends I got to
know through her, her neighbors and other friendships I had formed. But I wanted more than anything to establish
myself in San Francisco, and get a life I could call my own. Then, I thought, I would go back to Berlin,
find a teaching job, and become a German citizen. I had come to feel a close connection to
Germany during my junior year in Munich, and Berlin had taken me the rest of
the way. No place on earth was more
exciting. I couldn’t image a better
place to live than Berlin. It was the
center of the universe, where Communism and the Western World were lined up
nose to nose. You lived with the here
and now, knowing a spark could ignite the fire that would bring on the end of
the world. Where things were
consequential. Where you swept away the
trivial and got to the essence of what made the world go around.
So, at least, it appeared to my young mind. How are you going to keep this kid tied down
anywhere, now that he has seen Berlin?
I went back to school to get a master’s degree in
teaching English as a Second Language, hoping it might lead to a teaching job
at the bilingual school in Berlin. One
of the requirements was to take a non-European language, to experience what it
felt like for students to be challenged by what you would be teaching
them. I chose Japanese because I had
made friends with a Japanese woman in one of my classes.
Two and a half years later, when I finished my
degree program she got me a job in Japan.
Might as well go, I thought. When
will I get another chance like this. I
can go back to Berlin anytime.
Fast forward to today, seven years after retiring
from my teaching job at Keio University, where I taught for eighteen years, and
forty-three years after going to Japan for that first stint, and it’s clear to
me what people mean when they say, “Life is what happens to you when you’re
waiting for life to happen.”
Tante Frieda died back in the 80s. So did my friend Achim. Achim’s wife died last year, well into her
90s. Their daughter, Barbara, now in her
50s, was eight years old when I first met her.
She and her husband and I are still close.
Barbara e-mailed me from Berlin last week:
Anytime I run across Teufelsberg it makes me think of you...
There's even a book about it now, are you interested or does it put you off?
XxxB.
This
is my answer to Barbara.
Photo credits:
I’ve been wallowing
in the luxury of victory, in the delicious news. I finally understand what
they mean by the taste of victory. It’s coming at me via a number of senses. The long haul to get rid of DOMA is now mostly accomplished. And the right to marry in California has been given back and is now in sync with the way most Californians would vote today if they had to.
