ON THE AVENUES: “Adam and Evelyn,” a novel by Ingo Schulze.

ON THE AVENUES: “Adam and Evelyn,” a novel by Ingo Schulze.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

It is the summer of 1989, and East Germans are busy arranging their annual summer holidays to approved Warsaw Pact hot spots: The Black Sea beaches in Bulgaria, Baltic coastal resorts, and Hungary’s Lake Balaton.

The dictates of the Cold War as yet ensure that their choice of vacation destination is restricted to those fellow Communist nations observing a strict reciprocity of border enforcement; in short, members of the Soviet Bloc agree to keep their fellow passport bearers safely inside the perimeters.

For reasons that aren’t readily apparent, quite a few East German vacationers are modifying their itineraries to include Hungary as Ingo Schulze’s novel, “Adam and Evelyn,” begins on August 19, 1989. Posterity knows exactly what the novel’s protagonists do not; in fits and starts, the Hungarian border with Austria is fast becoming that most precious and precarious of conditions in the East Bloc: Porous.

This permeability is of particular interest to citizens of the German Democratic Republic, East Germany’s former moniker. In 1989, it is alone among fraternal Communist nations in having a western counterpart, the Federal Republic of Germany, this traumatic division resulting from great power horse trading after World War II.

West Germany’s constitution bestows citizenship on any and all ethnic Germans elsewhere in Europe and the world, who merely must arrive, alive, in West Germany to claim residence. It is a requirement difficult for East Germans to meet owing to the Berlin Wall and the obliging cooperation of the Iron Curtain itself, except now the latter is a barrier slowly being dismantled, one rusty strand of barbed wire at a time, by the ever-cagey Hungarians.

In far-off Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev is aware of the situation. For reasons of his own, he is not acting to place a Soviet lid on Eastern Europe. Matters are about to get epochal, both for the restless countries lying within the USSR’s sphere, and also for Adam and Evelyn.

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Adam knows nothing about these geopolitical developments, even if the East German grapevine is furiously humming with hints and guesses. Perhaps his obliviousness can be explained by circumstances, because by the standards of his police state milieu, Adam has it remarkably – nay, apocryphally – easy.

Neither a Communist nor a collaborator, and with no previous contact with the Stasi, Adam is entirely content with the East German status quo. Born in 1956, he has missed the worst of the gritty post-war rebuilding and collectivization, and he cannot remember a time before the Wall. He doesn’t yearn to be free, and accepts his station.

Why would Adam agitate? He owns a detached, pre-war house inherited from his parents (yes, it was possible to be a homeowner in the GDR), and he actually has a back yard lawn for tending, with afternoon cocktails and entertaining. His mint condition 1961 Warburg automobile is the envy of the local state-employed mechanic, and he even works independently, as a tailor and dress maker, with a clientele composed primarily of the dowdy wives and frumpy mistresses of the aging Communist ruling class.

Hence Adam’s weakness: A gigolo-like fetish, one surely destined to bring his dossier to the secret police’s gentle attentions, of being sexually aroused by the product of his superior sewing skills and habitually bedding his eager customers while his live-in girlfriend, Evelyn, is conveniently away at work.

But one day Evelyn is fired, returns home early, and abruptly walks in on one of Adam’s “fittings.” Disillusioned with Communist life even before this shock, she now seeks refuge with a friend and plans a jaunt to Lake Balaton. An odyssey of rejection and reconciliation begins, and serendipity doesn’t begin to describe the ultimate destination.

Adam and Evelyn will stay together, removed to a place unimaginable to either of them only months before, one far away from a seemingly rock-solid, systematized society vanishing with astonishing speed.

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Just like Schulze’s fictional Adam and Evelyn, I was in East Berlin on August 19, 1989. It was the middle of my month-long “volunteer” work assignment in the GDR, as one of a hundred or so foreigners assigned to the summer youth work brigades around the capital city. We were cleaning a public park and making it ready for the triumphant national anniversary party in September, when Gorbachev came to town and advised the geriatric East German leadership to learn history’s lessons.

It’s easy to see how Schulze speaks to me, although as a writer, he can be annoying. As an example, most chapters in “Adam and Evelyn” begin with a device of unattributed dialogue, making it difficult to know which of the characters is speaking. However, quibbling aside, Schulze is a solid and believable storyteller, and achieves high marks for establishing the sense of a place now inexorably lost.

To Western eyes, it wasn’t that everyday East Germany was primitive in 1989. It was modern, but in a jarring way, with an element of time lag and an out-of-datedness. In numerous subtle ways, Schulze captures this feeling – in the sandwiches the travelers pack, the clothes they wear, and the appearance of the Wartburg’s engine block.

More importantly, Schulze is obsessed with eliminating obvious and omniscient references to the changes about to come, and while this may seem minor, it lies at the heart of his narrative. Adam, Evelyn and their friends and fellow travelers do not have the luxury of knowing, as we do, that in a few short months, East Germany will no longer exist. Their world is in flux, and the ground is giving way. Nothing is clear. Bono remains a bard, and not the Fly … yet.

The tone is non-elegiac, and by novel’s end, there is hope without an expressly happy ending. Things might yet work out for Adam and Evelyn, and then again, they might not. That’s probably the way life felt like in the two German states as unexpected unity dawned in the spring of 1990.

It might be the way each of us feels, every single day.

ON THE AVENUES: Not simple at all.

ON THE AVENUES: Not simple at all.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Book review: Simple Stories: A Novel,” by Ingo Schulze.

The Berlin Wall fell almost a quarter of a century ago, and two German states divided by opposing –isms were quickly reunited.

These days, we often forget that while Chancellor Helmut Kohl wasted no time in seizing his historical moment by rapidly pressing home the notion of immediate German unity while the window was yet ajar, not everyone on either side of the Cold War divide thought it was a good idea.

Many observers envisioned a more gradual transition, with the two ideologically disparate German states eventually merging into one, but in the end, the prevailing mood did not favor gradualness. Events galloped forward, and in one giant gulp, one of the world’s most vibrant Western capitalist economies swallowed the gritty socialist reality of the German Democratic Republic and its “Ossified”, outmoded Soviet-issue cars, factories, apartment blocks … and perhaps most importantly, people, along with their conditioned responses.

It surely amounted to a bailout; not some curative largesse meant for far-off Ireland or Iceland, but aimed toward eastern cousins widely regarded as poor, oppressed and degraded. Unsurprisingly, these folks didn’t enjoy being lectured about their shortcomings as part of the deal to be absorbed and rebuilt, and these many years later, in spite of everything, a level of indigestion apparently persists.

It required forty years for the GDR to become what it was by the time it expired. A teenager from Germany’s eastern provinces, struggling to cope with the devastating legacy of wartime defeat, first would have been subjected to a period of socialist reorientation, then taken his or her place in the work force, and by 1989, would have been approaching retirement when compelled yet again to fathom an ideological sea change and its inevitable dislocations and redundancies.

Four decades isn’t much when it comes to geology, but it is a long time in human affairs. It will take that long or longer – and the passing of generations – before the scars of unification fade.

Most often this unification tale is related through economic statistics, but it never was a story meant to be story meant to be told by cost-benefit analyses. Rather, it was about millions of ordinary people, getting along as best they could, being raised – working, playing, living, loving and dying – in a certain way, and then overnight, being told (as opposed to being asked) to unlearn most of what they knew, and to relearn multiple different social, cultural, economic languages.

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This is the backdrop of Ingo Schulze’s novel, Simple Stories. Schulze was born in GDR times, and is not a writer by training, but he has established a considerable niche in Germany as a contemporary chronicler of his eastern homeland as it was during the initial phase of unification in the early 1990’s.

The novel itself is constructed as a series of inter-related stories, linked by characters and events already described, or about to be. While I can imagine this unconventional format being handled more deftly by the likes of Peter Nadas, Schulze suffices for the purpose of conveying what it feels like to be stuck in a moment, one you have little choice but to get out of, even if the transition is confusing.

A wall may fall down, barriers may vanish, and although one awakens to a different country, the experience cannot automatically produce a different person. Tellingly, the novel’s characters cope with varying degrees of efficiency with the most fundamental difference between socialism and capitalism: In the former, you were provided sustenance and the propaganda was directed toward you from the top down, but in the latter, if you’re not to starve, you must find work disseminating the propaganda itself, whether as a telemarketer, sales person or peddler, accepting a few more farthings than before to do your job, less overall security, and the latent hope, however ephemeral, that someday the wealth might accumulate.

Some of Schulze’s characters plod forward into their new lives with nary an opinion, while others remain mired inside self-images of the past. The novel shifts quirkily before fading into a collage of the mundane, rather than end with any sort of resolution or moral. No one was saved, and I was left with a feeling of bleakness and unease. West Germans had a lot more things than East Germans, although the question of whether either system possessed a soul is something we’ll all continue to debate, long after the GDR is forgotten.

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In the aftermath of recent European Union elections, and a trend of anti-austerity results, I am struck by the irony that when a candidate in France or Greece now speaks about the imperative of resisting Germany’s solution to Europe’s economic crisis, residents of Dresden, Greifswald and Potsdam have traveled full circle: From part of the problem to part of the solution, and back again, with at least some presumably never having vacated the high rise flat allotted them back when Erich Honecker held sway even if their Trabants are long gone.

Once they were the woeful recipients of largesse, playing the roles of underperforming Mediterraneans to the frowning bankers in Frankfurt with their turnips for checkbooks. Now, once again, they’re just those damned imperialist Germans. Indeed, what a long, strange trip it’s been.