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For me impatience
is
The whore of cowardice
And buddy-buddy with laziness
Getting the bed ready for crime.
For you, though, patience would be an
Adornment.
Set a good conclusion on your work
In that you leave to us
The new beginning!
ERIC BENTLEY
"You wait there," says Biermann
in
another poem, "seriously certain
that I'll go swimming into the net of Self-Criticism for you; but I am
a pike: you'd have to tear me limb from limb, chop me up, put me
through the mincing machine,
if
you wanted me on bread!" Well,
maybe they do want Biermann on bread, the mincing machines are
certainly on hand, but the political point is clear: today the opposition
comes from within. The opponents of the Communist governments are
not necessarily friends of Lyndon Johnson and
J.
Edgar Hoover, or even
of Leo Cherne and Sidney Hook; they are other Communists, with
a non-Stalinist view of Communism. Isn't there a lesson there for our
people too? For the dissident young in the Western countries are not
young Whittaker Chamberses wanting to work for the Gay Pay
00.
The issue is not treason, or even desertion. And anyway, going over to
the other side, whichever the other side is, has less and less drama
because it has less and less significance, whether the "defector" is Peter
Weiss or Uwe Johnson.
It is staying that counts now,
but staying, not
as a hired man of a regime, but as a thorn in the flesh of a regime.
So one does not cross the Wall to make headlines, one stays on one's
own side of it-to make trouble.
And so the Wall is accepted? By no means. It is the fighting of the
Cold War that favors this Wall-and Walls to come, as, maybe, between
North and South Vietnam. But more and more what the writers and
other artists are feeling is that they should put themselves at a distance
from the regimes and their wars and address themselves to just people
-which, as a minimum, means "to each other." And so Wolf Biermann
and I were able to speak "to each other," without my seeming to be
a Communist, and without his intimating that he wished to "choose
Freedom," and I was considerably more at home than I could be sitting
down with my ex-Dean McGeorge Bundy or with the Trustees of a
university which has given doctorates to McNamara, Lodge and Erhardt.
Martin Buber comes to mind: "That people can no longer carry on
authentic dialogue with one another is not only the most acute symptom
of the pathology of our time, it is also that which most urgently ma'kes
