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PARTISAN REVIEW
regard it as either Western squeamishness or a Bolshevik plot and feel there
is no cause for concern to say nothing of alarm.
So here we sit, looking and gazing; here we sit, screwing up our eyes.
And the name we give our squint-eyed sit is "our European homeland."
The European Dog, European Water,
and the European Problem
It's as if we'd come through a war. Everything is in ruins. We try to
remember what "normal" is like, but we have no recollection; we have to
start from scratch. And we're not particularly wild about recalling details.
We'd rather go on about how our heroic opposition routed the system, which
is true, though it wasn't so heroic as all that and the past forty years were
anything but heroic - a pile of shit is more like it.
In 1956 the country and its people shook off the system as a dog
shakes off water. We haven't yet shaken off the Kadar regime, because we
still can't tell where the dog stops and the water begins.
As
I see it, each
"new" East-Central European country has a dOg/water problem. The desire
for revenge is snowballing everywhere, dividing populations into us and
them. Even taking into account the wide discrepancy in matters of responsi–
bility, we cannot ignore the fuct that neither Kadar nor Honecker created the
whole mess
fly
himself. (The
diabolical Hitler leading the worthy and well-in–
tentioned German people by the nose....) Things are more problematical
than that.
And we seem unprepared to deal with the problem. In the good old
days the German Democratic Republic was a prison surrounded by barbed
wire and the Federal Republic of Germany
eo ipso
the Free Germany with a
clear-cut political agenda - a less than radical, rather pedestrian view of
things to come, but an agenda nonetheless with both a past and a future. And
now? What now for the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Re–
public of Germany? Reunification, of course, and rightly so, I think, but what
will it
mean?
What will be its framework, legal and historical? You can't just
turn tin Lizzie GDR Trabants into state-of-the-art FRG Mercedes; no,
there's a new car in the making: A Mercedes with a glued-on Trabant. And
think of all the problems involved. Driving licenses. Speed limits. And most
important: the environment. (In those good old days, ten years ago, when
there was still an East Berlin, it was there, in East Berlin, that I liked the
Four-Power Agreement best, and I loved the Four-Power Agreement, that
and a little Greek bar in Lenin Square. Those were the days when you could
still make a splash with a Trabant, and I would cover the Kurfiirstendamm
\
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