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0 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
Night and fog lead to the mists of the morning., 23 Jun 2001
By A Customer
Berlin, a city divided ,in a country the same.Where the War has broken everything, the lives of the people, families, fathers and sons. Here is where the streets end themselves in politics. This is where the ruins are removed, only to make a Death-Zone. Walls proliferate, and the biggest of them all falls across Berlin, like a scab in maintainance of a wound. The roads are cleared, the debris lies in peoples hearts instead, piled up in consequence. West and East, Berlin streets echo with the footsteps of each other.In the East , dark memories mass, still cling to pockmarked buildings, survivors of the battle. In the West, new glass shines back the blinding sun of to-morrow or even the day after. Underpinning all, like the sand beneath Berlin itself, are the Nazis and their man, Adolf Hitler. Into this comes the boarding school boy from the land of continuity, out of Oxbridge, to take on the World. Perhaps he knows how it is to be dispossesed and disowned for he wanders in the half - light of that city, Berlin,East and West,inexperienced yet perceptive, in sympathy with its people. There he finds discontinuity, schism,division,all played out on the streets in a banality of pursuit, of shadowing, after a haunted truth. It seems the personal is political, in a sadness beyond telling, typed out by informers in a message to the blind, between lines of false praise to the Ministry. Minds made ghosts, wandering in Friedrichstrasse, in Unter den Linden, wafting across bounderies at their masters whim. Immaterial themselves, they sieze, in paradox, the minutia of each moment, record each step and breath of their "object", that unofficial stranger whose footsteps guide their own. It must mean something, in their amorphous eyes - this Englishman, walking in the damp and dark with a woman of the DDR. So they hide and watch time burn and sift the ash for meaning. And it meant nothing! Nomore than just two people holding the hours between them. Two lives stepping together through their own shadows. All is marked down for other eyes, a life made menu of a forgotten meal, placed in its file by other hands like treasured dust. It was licenced craziness all this, a State paid metaphysic to find meaning. What they found was emptiness and defeat. Sometimes they found themselves, here where everything and nothing was proven. This was a self-made crisis and the only way to understand it was by the heart. But the heart was walled in! Swimmers, minus the micro-chip, they were drowned in the miles of information. They suffered in this lonely place, made speechless by the ocean of words. Silence, stagnation, watchfulness,the organs of a State with its back to the wall. Down came the Wall. All "The Files" woke up. Previously forbidden eyes now viewed themselves. Now began an autopsy using light. Everything was revealed, betrayals, greed, fear,the jottings of lives lost to themselves,seeking security in the shadows of power. Men and women,but mainly men, of quiet desperation, servants of a State which sought the narritive of itself in the rape of its citizens. The authors "File" turns up. Buff-coloured, dusty,faded,stained by theft. The child he never knew he had, another self, strange, out of the hands of strangers. It is a coffin and a grave as well, borne from a shelf. It beckons as if below the earth. So he ,in his turn, pursues light, truth in that darkness, through the shuttered places of the I.M.'s (informers).He meets them, finds faces busted by the years and the knowledge of deceit. They live within walls still, now cardboard thick, everything they have ever done , contained inside the files of others. The clock ticks for them, a hunter, each moment is transfixed in a landscape of memory. They wait to be broken as if in a circus of pain. The past they made now stands by their door on watch. They have no-one and nothing to write about. Their nakedness and their life draws jeers and prosecution, hate and laughter. Humanity divided, plundered depths, a heart the same. The author deals also with those Stasi officers who dealt with him. Often he find them in a form of hiding, desperate for their cases back and their importance. They are unrepentant, having done no more than any guardian does or would. Many are dressed in the cheap leasurewear of the poor, their big bellies wrapped in the colour of poverty and a rich anger. They |
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