On the night of November 9, 1989, after months of unrest in Europe and East Germany, the checkpoints between East and West Berlin were suddenly, almost accidentally, opened, reuniting the two sides of the divided city, and bringing together a divided Europe and two worlds that had been apart for nearly thirty years. However, the fall of the Berlin Wall was just one of many signs of change that came with 1989; before long a spate of revolutions, the "Autumn of Nations," had spread across Europe and by December, it appeared that the Cold War was over.
To mark the twentieth anniversary of this momentous collapse, and to shed some light on how it came to pass, Words without Borders presents The Wall in My Head, an exciting anthology that features fiction, essays, images, and original documents to pick up where most popular accounts of the Cold War end, and trace the path of the revolutionary spirit of 1989 from its origins to the present day.
The Wall in My Head combines work from the generation of writers and artists who witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain firsthand with the impressions and reflections of those who grew up in its wake and whose work, childhoods, and memories are all colored by the long shadow that it cast. The Wall in My Head provides a unique view into the change, optimism, and confusion that came with 1989 and examines how each of these has weathered the twenty years since that fateful year.
Highlights within include seminal excerpts from the work of Milan Kundera, Peter Schneider, Ryszard Kapuściński, Vladimir Sorokin and Victor Pelevin and new work from Péter Esterházy, Andrzej Stasiuk, Muharem Bazdulj, Maxim Trudolubov, Dorota Masłowska, Uwe Tellkamp, Dan Sociu, David Zábranský, Christhard Läpple, and a host of others.
July 1986: traveling down to the Czech-Austrian frontier we had six heavy green bottles of the Moravian sparkling wine clinking delinquently against each other under our front car seats. Legally we could only export two bottles each “for personal use”. The atmosphere in the car was tense as we pulled up at the frontier barrier with careful, almost exaggerated slowness, so as not to seem too eager to cross from the Communist East to the Capitalist West, or worse, as if we were about the crash through the barrier and seek asylum on the Austrian side.
Only a few months before, two friends of ours had done just that at a border crossing between Austria and what was then Yugoslavia. Machine guns had been raised in their direction as they crashed through the barrier, their children crouching in the back of the car in case they were fired at. As they had screeched to a halt on the other side, they had been greeted with a seasoned, nonchalantly official raised Austrian eyebrow and the one-word question: “Asylum?” The family had then spent several months at a holding camp in Austria before being accepted by the United States and moving to the mid-west. Two decades on, they are still there.
On the Czech side of the border, my husband wound down the car window and presented our documents. An officer approached. “Taking anything out of the country?” he asked distractedly, his eyes downcast as he checked them. We were always nervous, running in our minds for the hundredth time through the checklist of things we always had to do before we could travel across the border to visit my family in England – British visitor’s visa for my husband, Czech exit visa for my husband, written proof of my family’s agreement to cover our costs while we were there, return visa for me as a British citizen so I would not lose my right of permanent residence on my return to Czechoslovakia, plus transit visas for Austria, Germany, Belgium and France. The paperwork alone had been a week’s work, hoofing round the Prague embassies: experience had taught me that I could only get one of these transit visas a day – two if I was lucky. Invariably several hours of waiting in line on tired legs would be involved. Much worse than this was the sight of the sour apparatchik faces that would greet us once we made it to the front of the line.
After long years of practice in reading the moods and whims of officials closely, my husband was skilled at controlling the timbre of his voice to convey just the right tone of polite camaraderie. Communist officialdom was a minefield of potential hazards that could be detonated at any moment by perceived presumption, excessive crawling, or even something as trivial as mild indigestion brought on by an over-seasoned sausage. He was amenable without being obsequious, so as not to seem to have anything to hide. Specifically we had two illegal bottles of sparkling wine to hide, but we had already agreed fifty kilometers ago not to hide them. Somehow managing to sound convivial without overshadowing an implied plea for leniency, he launched his gambit:
“Well we do have six bottles of sparkling wine under the seats and there are only two of us, so . . .”.
He trailed off deliberately, gently tapping the ball, or in this case bottle, into the officer’s court, waiting quietly for the other man’s official pronouncement on the matter.
The tried and tested approach elicited the desired effect. A magnanimously bored wave of the customs officer’s hand indicated that an infringement of a mere two bottles was far too trivial for a man of his ranking to be bothered with. Silently, but still pent up, we drove a couple of hundred yards over to the Austrian side of the frontier, where my husband parked wordlessly on the side of the road, out of sight and sound of the border post, turned off the engine, got out of the car, lifted up his head and howled aloud like a wolf.
“I’m out! I’m free! I can breathe!” he shouted, over and over again. Then he got back into the car, started the engine and drove off towards Vienna, grinning from ear to ear. I was not surprised. He did this every time.
Easter 2009. Spring had finally arrived after a March of grey cold and snow flurries. It was a warm, fragrant, sunny noon as I boarded the yellow Student Agency bus to Vienna airport opposite the Grand Hotel in Brno, Czech Republic.
As we drove out of Brno and swept on to the new highway to Vienna, the apple trees were in blossom, the sun shone in clear, windless air, the mood on the bus was relaxed. We approached the border, and I took out my British passport and held it firmly in my hand, opened at the photo page, as I had always done before.
The bus was waved on through the frontier by a bored-looking Czech border guard. The Austrian guard didn’t even bother to look at us.
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Again, a beautiful reminiscence of those bleak years. It reminded me how my wife and I smuggled two anoraks for our children from German Democratic Republic while on a one day bust trip to Karl Marx Stadt. Thank you, Clare!
Best regards, George