"31 August 1990, 1.42 p.m.
I’ve emigrated from my country without leaving it, without taking a single step. Instead, I sit here in the cellar of patterns from my frozen experiences, where all wasted opportunities are conserved – that have been wiped away, à la Mr. Clean, way up there, in glossy reports. It is there, at the top, that my rosy future is now being sealed, wrapped up in a thousand pages, in dark-blue leather bearing the insignias of former and future power.
The ink, all too hastily jotted down, has thirty-three days to dry. And pictures of the process are being sent round this still-divided world to be filed away as an historic fact of supranational significance – ready to be called up annually on a new national holiday, a black-red-and-gold citation. What shall I say one day when my grandchild asks me about these times?
I will probably say: a country swept over me with the colourless fine words of a gleaming steamroller – while I was dreaming of an alternative green and thus missed out on any realistic opportunities.
Today I respond to the sparkling-wine binges of the old and new big shots by taking an almighty swig out of a bottle of flat mineral water, knowing I'll never get my deposit back on the product of a country that no longer exists and which I have no choice but to call my home, even though it has never actually been that.
And so I celebrate this sudden annexation and (unceremoniously) ring in my new state of exile, my future."
(From Das Mauer-Syndrom, a collection of short pieces of prose written and compiled by the author between 1961 and 1990)
Jürgen Nagel (Ost-Berlin)
