Reunification:
A Monterey Mary
Returns to Berlin
by T.H.E. Hill
(CreateSpace /
1-490-49026-4 / 978-1-490-49026-7 / July 2013 / 226 pages / $12.95 / $11.66
Amazon)
Reviewed by Celia Hayes for PODBRAM
Reviewed by Celia Hayes for PODBRAM
“Alas, poor Cold
War, I knew it well. It was a war of infinite jest and most excellent fancy,
fought more often in the shadows of the mind than to death, yet the lives of
millions hung in the balance. It is a war without monuments, but not without
casualties…”
Long-retired from
the CIA, Mike Troyan returns to Berlin, where he once served as a military
linguist – a Monterey Mary – at the Army Field Station in the 1970s. Now
comfortably ensconced in academia, he intends to write a book about the Stasi,
the East German secret police, and do a great deal of research in the Stasi
archives, where the files they kept on almost anyone of interest have been
pieced back together. But on his return he is almost immediately walloped by
the realization that there was an informant among his comrades at the Army
Field Station, an informant code-named MUSIK. He is also walloped in the face
with a plate of currywurst by the mother of the head of the Stasi archives… a
woman of his age who just happens to be his one-time Berlin girlfriend.
And with that,
Mike begins unpacking and reviewing his suitcase of memories of divided Berlin,
memories which are poignantly at odds with the present-day rebuilt, revived,
and reunified Berlin. Everything he once knew so very well is either gone or
changed almost beyond recognition; the Wall itself is gone, Checkpoint Charlie
is a tourist attraction with the golden arches of a McDonalds’ in the
background and manned by a pair of badly uniformed actors who pose for pictures
with tourists, and one of the main recreational centers for American personnel
in Berlin is now something called the “Dahlem Urban Village.” “The sidewalk was full of people speaking
German as they went about their business. All of them were unaware that they
were walking down a street full of English-speaking ghosts who shimmered before
me on their way to a PX that didn’t exist any more.” And when Mike’s daughter,
Samantha comes to Berlin, about halfway through the book, the plot just
thickens.
He remembers that
particularly vivid past, as he tours present-day Berlin, by himself or with
Samantha – and accounts of the antics
of his fellows at Army Field Station are interspersed now and again with how
ominous the Stasi was to ordinary Berliners.” “The Stasi could make things not
happen,” says one of the former East Berliners that he meets in his
peregrinations about the city that he once knew so very well. “Your kids would
not get into college. That apartment for which you were three years on a waiting list was no longer
available. The new car that you had paid for in full at the start of a six-year waiting list for delivery was suddenly delayed or postponed… and there was nothing you could do.
There was no legal recourse because nothing could be done. There was nothing
you could prove. There were no documents.”
For my money, that kind of impersonally deliberate bureaucratic malice
is at least as chilling as the threat of overt violence, interrogation, and
imprisonment with the threat of a capital sentence.
And now, to
people the age of Mike’s daughter, what was once a very real menace is
completely toothless, a rather shabby joke when not a focus for a weird kind of
nostalgia. Only people the age of Mike and some of his old friends remember
that it was all in grim earnest, as concrete as The Wall itself. One day, out
of the clear blue sky, it all came down, dissolving into little chips of brick
and concrete, valueless coins and clumsy relics like East German-made
telephones (pre-bugged) and Trabant automobiles.
Reunification is quite readable, and nicely-plotted:
part puzzle, part travelogue, part memoir and part history, with some quite
nice turns of phrase, some of which I have quoted here. Mike on setting to work
at the archives: “I’d worked in the salt mines of bureaucracy long enough to
know the coin of the realm, and how to mint it.” For me, the passages which
resounded were the melancholy episodes of re-visiting old haunts; just about
every base which I served at in the 1970s and 1980s is either closed entirely,
re-purposed by the host government or changed beyond all recognition. You
cannot go home again, for strangers have taken it over.
See Also: Voices Under Berlin, a 2009 PODBRAM Award Winner
