9 - “Somehow or other I want to make up for the mistakes I made back then …”

Summary

I live in a modern ghetto on the outskirts. A bit of green, good view, sixth floor. Brandenburger Strasse, center of the cultural left, is around the corner. Two hundred meters away as the crow flies is the haunt of the brown comrades. They rally in front of our building. They've bashed in our mailbox twice already. And also scrawled their graffiti: “asshole” and a swastika. You get real scared. Sometimes I say a bit casual-like: “Okay, the windows in our editorial room had to be replaced sometime anyway.” Still, I'd rather not have a brick land on my desk, or on my head. When I hear that a lot of Stasi guys have now become browns, I wouldn't be surprised if the brakes on my car fail one day. Everything's possible. After all, they got a good education. On the other hand, I can't wear a straitjacket any more. I did that for forty years. The famous Biermann muzzle.

My nickname at fifteen was “correspondent.” I began writing as a youth volunteer, then went to East Berlin, took a degree by correspondence, after catching up and getting my high-school diploma, and was a sports journalist for fourteen years. Always just one track, one horizon, one angle of vision. Didn't look right or left. The career's the thing. In the worst sense of the word. Influenced by those perennial comrades who said: “There is nothing without the Party. You are a good man. Come on in.” At some point I was convinced. Of course, this conviction gradually crumbled away. One turning point was my divorce after twelve years of marriage; another was my transfer from the sports paper to a political daily.

The wife of the media czar sat twenty meters away in a large room, spouting forth. At the same time I got to know a new woman: well, if you can put all GDR citizens into twenty boxes, you would have to invent a twenty-first for this woman. Christiane was intellectual, clever, nonconformist, unpredictable, and amazingly hot as well … Italian blood.