 |
9th November. The night on which the Berlin Wall came down is one of those moments in history which leaves its mark on everything. Years later we can still remember where we were and what we were doing at that moment. Clarissa Lichtblau, the singer, happens to be staying in West Berlin where she is giving one of her celebrated concerts. Her one-time boyfriend, Hermann Simon, the composer and conductor, is also restlessly passing through Berlin on this night. The former lovers come suddenly face to face in front of a television set on which the events at the Wall are being beamed in to their luxurious hotel foyer. The historical moment has brought them together. The two artists make love in a faceless hotel room, while, at the Brandenburg Gate, strangers from East and West are jubilantly falling into each others’ arms. In the face of the historical background of these moments, their private reunion has a pathos which neither of them can quite deal with. Passionate embraces, appearing together at a spontaneous concert, conducted by Hermann, hours of caresses and conversation are inadequate to express the depth of their feelings. The lovers are already in their mid-Forties, successful and used to living alone. In the midst of the turbulence of German reunification they decide (laughing at themselves) never to lose each other again.
In Hermann’s arms Clarissa tells of a place she longs for, a house in which she would have liked to live with him, whom she could never forget. Hermann is thrilled and more than curious. He sets off with her at once. He joins in with her game which consists of not revealing where the journey is heading. In the evening, after an adventurous journey across the country roads of the collapsing GDR, after queues stuck in streams of Trabis driving through the newly opened borders to the West, Hermann unexpectedly finds himself back in his homeland again with Clarissa. Clarissa’s dream house is in a vineyard on the Rhine, immediately opposite the Loreley Rock. Hermann knows every inch of the area. He is both delighted and alarmed. Close nearby is Schabbach, his childhood village, which he had left as a young man full of anger and pain, and in the hope of finding a freer and happier life somewhere else. He would never have wanted to return here again. But Clarissa’s dream house and the idea of living there with her beguile him. The romantic old timber-framed house, which they buy together, is not, however, habitable. It has to be totally restored. But these November days of 1989 are crazy days, when things are happening throughout the land which only a little while ago nobody would have thought possible. While Hermann is visiting his family in Schabbach and, as he had feared, is thoroughly assimilated by them, Clarissa meets Gunnar and Udo, a carpenter and a mason, in the Leipzig Gewandhaus, where her concert has been cancelled because of a Monday demonstration. For the lads from Leipzig, Clarissa’s offer for them to restore the house on the Rhine is their first “adventure in gaining assets in a capitalist foreign country”. An hourly rate of 15 West Marks, without a tax card, and with settlement money entices Tillmann and Tobi to the Rhine as well. It is Tobi who turns out to be an imaginative worker. He takes over the supervision of the building and sets a new pace. Hermann and Clarissa have the pleasure of being midwives to freedom and to be able to describe the world to the Saxons as if they were children. Everybody is happy and every shovel of cement, every tile or screw becomes the start of a vision of the future, and when Gunnar buys a high-grade steel chisel for 29 Marks 80, he feels that this gleaming tool will carve his way to a new life. There is a legend that 200 years ago a famous poetess lived in the romantic timber-framed house and had a great love affair there. The fact that the story proves untrue, because the poetess, as it turns out, never knew the house and had found nothing but misery in her love affair before she stabbed herself to death on the bank of the Rhine, does not prevent Herman and Clarissa in their “Günderrode House“ from wanting to achieve their utopia of “love after the happy ending”. By Christmas the roof is watertight and the lads from the East can take a well-deserved break. Hermann makes the Saxons greatest wish come true. He invites them for Christmas to Munich with their families from Leipzig. At last they will be able to see the Alps. Clarissa, however, cannot be there. All too soon she is dragged back into reality after her ecstasy with Hermann. Her 18 year old son, Arnold, who had grown up with his mother in Hamburg, has to go to court because he has manipulated accounts in the Deutsche Bank as a computer hacker “for the fun of it”. She accompanies her son to the trial and succeeds in getting a lenient result. Clarissa is relieved, but then her mother remonstrates with her for having neglected her maternal duty because of a sentimental former love. Confused and guilt-laden she cannot bring herself to return to the place of her romantic nest. She takes a short-term substitute role at the Berlin Opera to find time to think. She wants to discover whether her new vision of life is realistic. Walter Momper called the Germans on the day the Wall came down “the happiest people in the world”. For Gunnar these words are only true until Christmas Eve, the day of the family outing to Germany’s highest mountain. It ends in drama. Gunnar’s wife Petra is so fascinated by the charms of Reinhold Loewe, the West German concert agent, that she slips away with him from the group on the Zugspitze. The fact that both are missing is not noticed until the valley station of the funicular. To prevent worse from happening his friends stop the deceived Gunnar spending his last Western money on going back up to the top of the Zugspitze to bring Petra back. He has lost her for ever. Deeply hurt and in a panic, Gunnar rushes back in his second-hand VW Beetle to the renovation work on the Rhine. When Clarissa arrives in front of Hermann’s door in Munich after the holidays and falls into his arms, she knows that she will never again be able to live without him. |
|---|