This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is history? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
When I was born, only 22 years had passed since the end of World War II. Throughout my childhood, as I grew up in the center of East Berlin, I played in the ruins.
When the Berlin Wall fell, I was in my early 20s.
Not long ago, a publisher prepared a biographical note to be printed with one of my stories claiming that my father was Russian and my mother was Polish. But this was not quite true.
My father was born in Ufa, then the capital of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. His parents were Germans who had emigrated to the Soviet Union to escape fascism and returned to Germany after the war.
My mother was born in a small town in what was then German East Prussia. When that area became part of Poland at the end of the war, my great-grandmother took my 3-year-old mother and her two siblings westward to what was still Germany. They traveled partly on foot, partly by train, partly by horse-drawn cart.
My mother’s father was still a prisoner of war in Norway then, while her mother had been transported by the Red Army to Siberia, where she was performing forced labor. Shortly before Christmas 1946, she returned to Germany and was reunited with her family.
What is commonly referred to as “history” has been inscribed into the history of my family. And everything that happened to us — everything that befell us, that delighted us, frightened us, terrified us — was preceded by our hopes and wishes, and by those of countless other people. But only rarely did those things that we had hoped for come to pass as we had hoped they would. Sometimes that was fortunate for us and the rest of humanity; sometimes it was unfortunate.
My father’s parents hoped to help build a just, peace-loving society in the Soviet Union, one founded on the principle of solidarity. Instead, they narrowly escaped the bone grinder of Stalinist persecution. They kept silent about the loss of their illusions until nearly the end of their lives.
My mother’s parents hoped for the Thousand-Year Reich, only to subsequently scrape together their new lives from its ruins 12 years later.
I myself learned in socialist state schools that the history of mankind was a history of class struggle that would progress with the development of productive forces, until we reached a classless society, known as communism. This dream of a bright future would be realized in maybe 200 or 300 years. At that time, Karl Marx’s principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” would be the motto for all. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, this conception of time and progress collapsed.
But other hopes and dreams also were swept away, like the ones of those few people who had dared, at great risk to themselves, to launch the so-called Peaceful Revolution in East Germany, aiming to introduce democratic elections and freedom of expression while keeping the socialist structure in general. Their hopes were dashed by the wishes of the many who believed that the easiest path to consumption was for their own country to join West Germany as quickly as possible.
And again, what began with the unification of the two Germanys in October 1990 as hope for a shortcut to good fortune instead rendered great numbers of East German workers unemployed over the next four or five years. Many who had just freed themselves from the immaturity imposed on them by the socialist state were thrust back into a new kind of immaturity by the sudden transition to a capitalist society whose rules they didn’t understand.
I see my maternal grandmother, once a member of the League of German Girls, as most girls were during the Nazi era, now a woman in her 30s as she has just gotten off the train that brought her back from Siberia. She sits on the ground like a beggar in the underpass of Berlin’s Ostbahnhof train station. She is confused, malnourished and lice-ridden. Two days later, in a quarantine camp, she initially can’t even remember the names of her three children.
I see my mother as a 3-year-old girl, carrying a blue earthenware jug with white dots as she flees East Prussia. Her grandmother asked her to carry it so she would have a task to distract her from the grueling walk.
I see my paternal grandmother, the emigrant, in the early 1990s, as her mind begins to go. She sits with her eyes closed, saying: Ten people are shot every minute. Now, she says. And exactly one minute later, without looking at her watch, she repeats: Now.
I see my mother in 1992, writing a letter to protest her dismissal from Humboldt University. She hadn’t done anything wrong; the new authorities had simply undertaken a restructuring process, euphemistically described as “evaluation.”
I see my grandparents’ summer house as it falls into disrepair. Like roughly 650,000 other houses that were inhabited by East Germans for 40 years, it was returned to the former owners from the West after reunification. Those old-new owners left it vacant, then sold it at a high price to someone who left it vacant for even longer and then sold it at an even higher price. For years, the only things living under the dilapidated thatched roof were the pine martens. The house falls into disrepair, while the property transforms from a place to live into an object of speculation.
While my mother is temporarily employed in a so-called “job creation scheme” and my father is shuffling from project to project after the dissolution of the Academy of Sciences, I wander through New York, dizzy from looking up. But on the pavement of the streets, under bridges or in the subway trains, I also see those in the shadow, who were not strong enough to succeed in the capitalist society. One of them has wrapped himself from top to bottom in plastic bags and seems to have made the subway his home.
We cannot escape history; it has its place in our lives, and nowhere else. And there is no such thing as “zero hour” — no moment when history resets. Prehistory always hangs like a lead weight on the present, and post-history, which we call the future, has its roots in what is already here. Even when major upheavals happen quickly, the scars are different for each generation — for the old, the middle-aged and the young.
In history books each battle has a name; an amendment to a law appears in print; new borders after a war are shown on a map. But no map shows the place where an historical event becomes a personal experience; these places only exist in each individual life. Only there does an historical moment turn into a reality that divides memory into before and after. The powerful force for change that lies in dissatisfaction and hope is sometimes crushed. Sometimes it blindly loses its way. Sometimes others use it for their own purposes. Sometimes it leads to brief happiness. Often it does not.
“In olden times, when wishing still did some good” — these words begin many a German fairy tale.
Jenny Erpenbeck is a German writer. Her novel “Kairos” won the 2024 International Booker Prize.
This essay was translated from the German by Kurt Beals.
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