The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain
A Words Without Borders Anthology

On the evening of November 9th, this reviewer shuffled westward in the hunched crowd of what seemed to be mostly international tourists pressing slowly through the rain on Unter den Linden toward Brandenburger Tor. A line of big dominoes had been set up along the former path of the Berlin wall between Brandenburger Tor and Potsdamer Platz, and knocking over the big dominoes was thought by many to be an appropriate marker of the twentieth anniversary of the end of history.

We were also promised fireworks.

Earlier that day while having lunch with some colleagues at the former East German publishing house where I work (now located in what was West Berlin), the atmosphere had been lightly sardonic: a joke about operating in enemy territory, the droll suggestion that someone would perhaps go to a Wendeparty? I did not mention that I would be attending an event even more tawdry and uncool than a German-reunification-themed house-party, though if I had, I would certainly have justified it with the fact that a visiting out-of-town acquaintance had asked me to accompany her. Really, she did.

If the 20 Jahre Mauerfall celebration elicited reactions ranging from apathy to antipathy in people like me, there must be a better way to look back on what was a totally fascinating political and cultural phenomenon. For me, reading The Wall in My Head in the weeks leading up to November ninth was a more interesting approach and a far more meaningful experience.

The Wall in My Head succeeds because it doesn’t feel like a reenactment or a rehashing or a celebration or even a condemnation. What it does feel like is intelligent people grappling with difficult questions in very human ways that are often funny or sad or both. Treating the subject of the fall of the Iron Curtain in the form of an anthology works well because its heterogeneity resists reducing what is a very complex and oft-retrospectively-oversimplified situation. Due to to the book’s commemorative nature, all of its pieces, fiction and nonfiction alike, take on a journalistic cast when viewed together, all of them contributing to a sense of what it was like.

And here is where The Wall in My Head can be really breathtaking. It communicates not just an image of a vanished era, but also its eidos. “Farewell to the Queue,” Vladimir Sorokin’s analysis of the significance of standing in line in Soviet culture is dazzling and pithy, perfect for this anthology. He likens the passivity of standing in line to living in the USSR: “The ordeal of the free market turned out to be more frightening than the Gulag, and more burdensome than the bloody war years, because it forced people to part with the oneiric space of collective slumber, forced them to leave the ideally balanced Stalinist cosmos behind.” Sorokin’s inversions and perceptions are surprising and smart.

For me, the perception of money, a recurring theme in many of the pieces, is always particularly shocking. Take this passage from Irakli Iosebashvili’s “The Life and Times of a Soviet Capitalist” on unwanted government attention when people earned too much money illegally:

Because of this, there was often the very un-Soviet problem of having too much money. But there was a solution. At weddings, my father-in-law and his friends—who, in a Soviet court, would be reviled as smugglers, speculators and currency traders, and in the West would simply have been called capitalists–would show up with their suit pockets stuffed with rubles. They danced with the bride and sent showers of bills cascading over her head. They tossed handfuls at the band and the band played like madmen. And deep in the night, when half of the guests had already passed out, they sat around a table and, with smiles of pure enjoyment on their faces, set fistfuls of money on fire.

Too much money? My American head spins. The Wall in My Head contains countless telling quotidian remembrances, moments when the unthinkable happens, and moments that seem only unthinkable now.

Though the Iron Curtain fell twenty years ago, many of the pieces in The Wall in My Head are not purely retrospective. They chart the continuing effects of communism on the writers’ lives. Péter Esterházy’s preface to his book, Revised Edition, which recounts his discovery of files in Hungarian government archives revealing that his father was an informer, describes the lingering social malaise associated with the country’s communist past. Dorota Masłowska’s “Faraway, So Gross” is a defiant answer to the contemporary Western pity and romanticization that her Polish childhood elicits:

And we all know all know that this image of those years is multidimensional with that same special tourist’s multidimensionality as the Arafat rag on the teenager’s pimple-bespattered neck, carton-pasteurized country-style milk, as well as lacquered Dutch clogs with paintings of windmills and little houses.

Masłowska’s direct address of the question of authenticity make her descriptions of her childhood all the more compelling.

Similarly, the excerpt from Ryszard Kapuśiński’s 1994 Imperium captures a sense of excitement at political change that might seem crass or nostalgic in a retrospective work: “Just as Columbus lived in the epoch of great geographic discoveries, when every sailing expedition altered the picture of the world, so we live today in the epoch of great political discoveries, in which ever newer and newer revelations continuously change the picture of our contemporaneity.” Kapuśiński’s forward-looking worldview is echoed in Stefan Heym’s speech from the same year at the opening session of the 13th German Bundestag, a notable document on a number of accounts. First of all, it’s incredibly beautiful. In German the speech is stately, and John K. Cox’s translation achieves its classic elegance. Heym grasps the continuity of Germany’s history from National Socialism to the Cold War, as well as the need to move on to new problems faced by the united nation.

The Wall in My Head is perhaps most heroic in its quietest moments. Mihály Kornis’s “Petition,” a bureaucratic document in which a man petitions the Hungarian government to lead a difficult, unremarkable, and undignified life at the mercy of 20th century political upheavals, is an intelligent, moving, and understated commentary on fate and the helplessness of people to control their own lives within large systems.

Regardless of how we return to the fall of the Iron Curtain, the fact is that it’s pull is, well, magnetic. To take a line from Sorokin, “Like everything epic that has plunged into the Lethe, it arouses interest.”

Reviewed by Amanda DeMarco

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain;
A Words Without Borders Anthology
Open Letter Books, 2009
Paper, 231 pp, $15.95
ISBN-10: 1934824232