I remember in 1988 scouting the German countryside for film locations for a movie called The Forest that the theater director Bob Wilson and I had hoped to make. At that time the Wall was still up, but I managed to scout locations in the East as well, which made the scouting job fun and challenging. Given the title of the piece, inevitably there were to be scenes in a virgin forest, so I went looking for one. In all of Germany we found one piece of virgin forest—a preserved one-kilometer-square roadside tract.

It was indeed different, very different, from all the other forests we had seen. None of the trees were straight; they were gnarled, twisted, and had evidently led interesting lives. The forest floor was littered with massive dead and rotting trunks—twisted corpses, the ancestors of those giants still standing. It was just like the forests described in fairy tales or seen in certain movies—chaotic but almost comforting, creepy but beautifully alluring. One felt that one was inside of a creature and outside of it at the same time. As if one were walking around the innards of a huge being. A bit sad, I think, that my visual reference for an unmediated forest derives from images in fiction and movies. Sad too that the forest in this preserved area was once quite common, but now lives on mainly in our collective imaginations—an image burned into our psyches over millennia, indelible, but now having little relationship to the real world. This little parcel was the only one left—except for a rumored larger forest in Poland, but going there to shoot would have been impractical.

Europe is manicured. The whole continent, except for some semi-accessible places in the Alps, northern Scotland, and Scan dinavia, has been groomed and tended by the hand of man. It’s a vast millennial project, this custodial effort, requiring the cooperation, over centuries, of scores of nations and peoples, all speaking different languages and with different cultures. The greatest physical human enterprise of all.

America has nothing like it. There is no historically manicured landscape except maybe in the aptly named New England, or perhaps parts of the Great Plains, where the steppes of North America have been organized by agribusiness. America still has, lurking around its edges in tattered remnants, bits of unkempt wildness and danger. Even in places where that wildness is illusory it still exists within living memory, at least for now—people therefore internalize its existence and act as if it is still there, and behave accordingly. The seductive and dangerously chaotic and capricious unknown lies just beyond the farmland in many places—or is at least remembered as being there not so long ago.

Europeans’ attitude toward their landscape is to cultivate the continent as if it were a vast garden, while Americans prefer to subdue the landscape by force, paving over vast areas, or planting miles of a single crop—like corn—that stretch to the horizon. In the New World it is assumed that there will always be more land over the horizon, so sustainable cultivation and conservation are often viewed as namby-pamby. I suppose a lot of Russia and the former Soviet republics are like this too, which might explain a thing or two. Maybe that’s why lots of North Americans feel that the whole world has to be tamed and brought under control while Europeans, having more or less achieved that control in their own lands, feel a duty to nurture and manage rather than simply subdue. Industrialization and agricultural subjugation throughout most of Europe is now a thing of the past—its legacy a nasty memory of polluted rivers and blackened skies, many of which are now being cleaned up, sort of.

Here even the bikes themselves are practical. They are usually black, with only a few gears, mudguards, and often a basket—something no sport cyclist would ever even dream of adding to a mountain bike in North America. In Holland they go even further, with special carts for kids and groceries and bike windshields (!) for your child. Granted, riding in the streets of New York City, with the recurring potholes, bumps, and yearly resur- facings, is closer to an extreme sport than riding is here, where somehow, despite the harsh winters, the streets are mostly smooth and obstacle free. Hmmm. The biggest bumps here are on the occasional cobblestone streets or bits of pavement. How do they do it? Or rather, how is it that the richest country in the world doesn’t seem to be able to do it?

In making smooth streets some may say that the Germans have ironed out the psychological bumps in their daily lives. If the New York City streets are wilder and funkier (at least outside of “Mall Manhattan”), then these German streets are on Prozac—civilized but slightly less exciting. But should we in the United States be forced to ride on “exciting” streets?

Modern northern European society is fairly homogenized. There are immigrants, but they still don’t make up a huge percentage of the population. There are also fewer economic differences and gulfs between the classes here than there are in the United States, except among those same immigrants—the Turkish in Germany, Indonesians in Holland, Africans in Belgium, and North Africans and Arabs in France. For the white folks, the locals, it is certainly a more egalitarian life than in the U.S.A., at least as far as social services are concerned. These same white folks are now aware that people from their former colonies now wonder why they also can’t get the free medical care and schools. Even if people can vote in a country, as they certainly can in most of the United States, if there are incredibly wide economic differences and inequalities in education and health care, then the majority’s interests and the public good cannot prevail. A minority’s will is trumping that of the majority. Then true equal representation doesn’t exist.

For the walled city with no room to expand that it was in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s Berlin had a surprising number of parks and greenways. Being almost flat, it was, and still is, a perfect place for getting around on a bike, though the winters can be bitterly cold with the winds sweeping down from the north. It has a great film festival, which often features movies from the East and from countries not known in the West for their cinema. I once saw a wonderful Turkish film in which a respected theater director takes a quick job acting in a shampoo commercial, only to find himself stuck living in the imaginary world of the characters in the advertisement. His new family knows him only as the character in the ad, and they know what he does for a living, etc., but he, the actor, has no idea. After some initial befuddle ment, he gives in and attempts to adjust to his new life.

For twenty years he was the only prisoner in the whole complex, “the loneliest man in the world” according to one book. What a beautiful image. Apparently he could wander more or less at will around the vast prison, but no one was allowed to touch him or to shake his hand. (Again, like the bricks, it seems it was assumed he possessed some magical Nazi touch juju.) He had famously flown to Scotland in 1941 in hopes of negotiating a peace deal. He parachuted onto a laird’s property south of Glasgow and was allegedly arrested by a man wielding a pitchfork.

The German national colors, not the colors of the flag but the colors one sees most often, are yellow, mostly of a dull sulfur hue; green, leaning toward a dull forest tone; and brown, ranging from a muddy beige to a rich brown earth tone. These warm earth colors and their combinations are the most popular ones for buildings, clothes, and accessories. To me they signify Germanness—the national and cultural identity. This is national stereotyping for sure, but it makes me wonder: does every culture have its palette? Certainly buildings used to be made of local materials and as a result London’s buildings are often redbrick while those in Dallas are beige.

In the hotel elevator there are glass walls that allow a view of the highway just outside the hotel, and simultaneously on the opposite side, a view of the elevator shaft and its workings. The cables and mechanical devices are all immaculate—spotless, almost dust free. In New York these shafts would be filthy, every surface caked with dirt and decades worth of old grease, and the floor at the bottom of the shaft would be littered with discarded coffee cups and rat pellets. When I mentioned this to a North American friend he responded, “Yes, but we Americans have better music.”

Whoa! You may not care for techno, a musical mainstay of a lot of the discos here, but a lot of people would claim that Ludwig van, Bach, and Wagner alone could hold their own against whatever North American crap you care to name. So yes, that statement is ridiculous, but what does it mean? What was implied? Besides being unprovable, is there an underlying assumption that cultural and social qualities are finite? That a surplus of one necessarily means a deficit of another? That cleanliness and order will necessarily sap some other qualities? (This has a corollary that if someone is beautiful he must be stupid.) That whole nations and people have psychic things in common that only take effect when you cross passport control? Is this idea like the one expressed in Will Self’s wacky short story “The Quantity Theory of Insanity,” where there is only so much sanity to go around? The implication is that every psychological thing, every part of our mental makeup and character is a trade-off against some other, unexpressed, form of social behavior. If you’re hap pier than average, you have, in this view, forfeited something else—intelligence, for example.

Are our brains weirdly finite? Do we intuit this odd tit-for-tat idea? We’re familiar with blind people whose brains have changed, with new neural connections being established in the areas formerly allocated for sight. Is the same true with other psychic parts of ourselves? Do any of those psychological/mental clichés hold true? Do great creative geniuses necessarily have less common or business sense? Do extremely rational minds inevitably miss out on some wild, creative intuitions? Are sensuous people hopelessly disorganized? As one improves oneself in one area does another area necessarily shrink and suffer as a result? Is there a chart with sliding scales we can look at so we can be aware of how we’re doing on the psychic tally board?

These interior courtyards are massive. Some are so big that there is often another whole apartment structure built inside the first one, and sometimes yet another structure might nestle inside that one—like Russian dolls as an architectural model. Some of the interior buildings were formerly small factories, but now they are transformed into charming cafés with outdoor seating and spaces where the clientele leave their bicycles—often unlocked. The entrances to the new art galleries are often within these courtyards. The interiors of these galleries are not usually as massive as some elsewhere in the world, as they are in restored and reworked former offices rather than former industrial spaces.

Stefan and I talk about the fate of the CD, and of recorded music in general. Stefan has just been to South Korea, which he describes as being a few years ahead of us in some respects—he says no one there buys CDs anymore. In fact, when he wanted to buy a CD copy of something he’d heard he had to go to a specialty shop to obtain it—as one would in Europe or North or South America to buy a recording on vinyl.

We wonder about the fate of the images and design associated with LPs and CDs—something he’s been involved with quite a few times. He reminds me that the linking of image and music is a result of the fact that vinyl scratches easily, so it needed sturdy board packaging. And until relatively recently even those packages didn’t come with images, credits, liner notes, etc.—music packaging originally was generic. People happily enjoyed music for centuries before that without any accompanying visual aids or attractive packaging. However, I found out that when Alex Steinweiss designed an early album sleeve for Beethoven’s Ero ica symphony, the package caused sales to increase 800 percent. So design is nothing to sneeze at. The music package has evolved into an embodiment of a worldview represented not just by the music but also by the package, the performer, the band, the show, the costumes, the videos, and all the other peripheral materials. But it might soon be back to just the audio without all the rest of it thanks to the digital world, where many folks buy digital versions of just the one song they like, and the surrounding and accompanying materials and images are left behind or ignored. The era of the data cloud surrounding pop music as representative of a weltanschauung might be over. Stefan doesn’t seem nostalgic about it.

The artists here do have it pretty good in another sense. Many incredible studios and living spaces are available here for much less money than in Williamsburg or East London. And they’re in the center of town too.

In Matthias’s gallery there is a piece I like by Thomas Hirschhorn of mannequin hands holding aloft a mixture of literary tomes and ordinary tools—it makes for a sort of hilarious intellectual “workers arise!” image. An idealized revolution—symbolically embodied on a (large) tabletop. In another era I could imagine this piece being an actual proposal for a large-scale monument that might have been made in the former East. Maybe this proposal for a monument might have been done by a high school senior using available materials: paperbacks rather than more visually impressive antique bound volumes, and puny screwdrivers and measuring tapes rather than larger hammers and sickles. And of course, like a junior high school science project, Hirschhorn’s piece is held together with packing tape.

Matthias says beauty, being ephemeral, evanescent, and impermanent, reminds us of death. I would have never put an equal sign between the two myself—this statement seems overly romantic à la Rilke, but I see his point. The morbidity of beauty. Huh. I suppose when one is referring to a person—a strikingly beautiful young man or woman, for example—it rings true, as their beauty will inevitably fade, and will eventually be gone completely. So, by that reasoning, leafing through a fashion magazine is essentially a tragic and melancholy experience. Well, it might be anyway, but for other reasons. But what about people who age gracefully—who become more interesting, or nontraditionally beautiful, with age? A trip to the Louvre in Matthias’s view would be downright depressing. I often think of beauty in a song (a thing that disappears as soon as you hear it) or in a fleeting view of a landscape, which renews itself (we hope), or of the kinds of objects that sometimes become even more beautiful as they age and begin to show signs of wear and tear. My friend C says the same thing sometimes happens with people—some of them grow into their faces, for example, looking merely childlike when young, and not that interesting, but becoming more themselves as they begin to show some age. They’re not really beautiful when young, at least not deeply.

Some people find beauty hard to define—often things we at first find ugly or strange grow on us and we discover a depth and beauty that can be more profound than mere prettiness. The definition is complex and slippery and it changes over time. It’s not absolute and can’t be fixed. If that’s true, then no one can point to a thing or person and ever say unequivocally, “That’s beautiful.”

In a kind of defense of the notion of some kind of absolute beauty I’ve read that there are evolutionary and biological reasons that explain our criteria for ascribing physical beauty and attractiveness to people. People and animals have built-in visual preferences that we use to judge attractiveness and fitness. It’s said that symmetry, for example, is evidence of smooth physiological development—that symmetrical facial features are a sign of probable genetic health and fitness. The implication is that we may be biologically programmed to view certain things—in this case some other people—as beautiful. The accompanying implication is that we find them beautiful because they are suitable and desirable as mates. We call them beautiful but we’re thinking about something else.

I suspect that if that is true then it may extend to other aesthetic areas—landscapes and rooms, for example. Why not? Don’t some landscapes, with their unique light and setting, imply somewhat timeless criteria that would signal to our ancestors that this spot is a good place to nest, a good place to hunt, a good place to grow food, a good place to meet a mate?

The talk turns to beauty’s opposite, in a sense—to the artists of the Vienna actionist movement of the 1960s, in particular Otto Muehl, who went to jail for allegedly having sex with everything and everybody in his commune—children included.

Here are the text/instructions for one of his “actions”: “I spread artificial honey on an old grandmother and then allow her to be attacked by 5 kg of flies that I had previously starved for 7 days in a box. I then kill the flies on her wrinkled skin with a fly-swatter.” Poor granny.

And another (from http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/38/muhl3.htm#12):

He said, “My life should be perfect, have direction, be an artwork.” Otto took this wish seriously, and soon he abandoned the arty actions and happenings created for a rarefied art-world audience and decided that they were actually a kind of therapy in themselves—they didn’t require the audience. So these activities could be beneficially incorporated and integrated into one’s life outside of the museum and gallery context. He would finally rip art out of its “frame,” as he had long dreamed.

“The action also has a frame, a stage, and people stand around. It is not serious. It is artificially produced. I want to rid myself of the word artificial.”

He founded a commune influenced by the psychosexual theories of Wilhelm Reich. It was a kind of action-group-psychoanalysis. Members were encouraged to act out—physically—their sexual and psychological issues. We can only imagine, based on Muehl’s earlier actions, what these might have been. Marriage in the commune was prohibited. There was a jazz band too, as Muehl was a big fan of Charlie Parker. Rumor is that the commune turned into his personal fiefdom, a real grotesque hippy artist cult nightmare.

Now, being somewhat rehabilitated in the perception of the art world, Muehl has, in recent years, been accorded big retrospectives in prestigious museums.

The presence in town of the Empire means I have to ride a very circuitous route wherever I venture near the central city—avoiding roadblocks and redirected traffic—but the weather is perfect, so it’s okay.

I’d heard that there is a Stasi museum in Berlin. I have recently read the book Stasiland, which details that life in which Big Brother encouraged everyone to spy on everyone else, so the museum sounds intriguing. It is some distance from the center of town—almost out in the suburbs—in a massive complex that served as the East German security services’ headquarters. It’s not listed in most of the museum guides—and Berlin has a lot of museums—so it requires a little bit of research to locate. I bike out, appropriately enough, along the amazing Karl-Marx-Allee, a sort of Soviet-inspired version of the Champs Élysées or Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires or maybe New York’s Park Avenue. But this boulevard is even wider and grander than many of those. The vaguely Moscow-style grand apartment buildings that line this boulevard outdo those in Moscow and rival the apartments on large avenues in other cities, except these are more orderly and repetitive, echoing each other, going on and on as far as one can see. The scale of both the street and these buildings is not quite human, and the images that come to mind and the accompanying sensations imply to me an idealistic utopian infinite heaven. Ideals and ideologies do not have boundaries, after all. This particular heaven, to me, is not like the typical ugly, bland modernist projects. That was a utopia of another sort. These have almost northern Italian detailing, and though they’re frightening in their somewhat inhuman scale and surreal repetition, they are far more appealing than typical North American housing projects or even a lot of Western modernist buildings where lack of decor came to be held up as a moral virtue. Here’s an infrared digital image:

On one side of the boulevard the ground floors are sad and forlorn—former cinemas, hardware stores, and medical supply stores—most of which are either shut, decrepit, or reconfigured as DVD shops or similar fast-buck enterprises. The other side has charming outdoor cafés with tables arrayed in the shade of trees. The stores in general in this part of town seem to have lagged behind the gentrification that is now endemic in the center of town since the Wall came down. The luxury shops and goods that flooded into the former center of East Berlin haven’t gotten here yet. There is a window display in a medical supply shop that to me harks back to an earlier time:

A thing of beauty. What kind of thing, though? The basic food groups? Not exactly the basic food groups as we know them, but maybe that was the idea.

The hard times in some of the Eastern bloc Communist countries after World War II ensured that some of the existing architecture was left alone. Yes, it’s a cliché that neglect equals preservation, but there’s some truth there as well. At least the buildings that weren’t bombed in successive wars weren’t torn down and replaced with bland new edifices, housing projects, or highway overpasses. The Easties couldn’t afford it. Instead, the buildings were often given new purposes, as it was cheaper to do a slight refurbishment than to build a whole new structure. There was little money for wholesale urban redevelopment here, unlike in many Western European and North American cities, and besides, the Allied bombing had cleared much of the city anyway. While Robert Moses had to raze whole neighborhoods in New York to make space for his highways and housing developments, here the demolition part of the job had already been accomplished. Some buildings that in the West would have been torn down were left standing as they were the few that remained, and those are now extremely desirable. One blatant exception is the former Communist Party headquarters on Alexanderplatz in the former East Berlin, a giant postwar modernist monument, copper-mirrored and toxic—both psychologically and chemically—which is being slowly and very carefully dismantled due to the amount of asbestos inside. The removal of this psychic eyesore is controversial, as it symbolically erases a prominent reminder of the former regime and of the country’s recent history—just as the Nazis took over and repurposed formerly Jewish-owned offices and buildings and then the Communists later reworked and renamed the Nazi buildings to their own ends. Eliminating this eyesore is wiping away part of the collective memory.

I passed through and worked in West Berlin fairly often in the ’80s, when the Wall was still up. West Berlin then was an artificially pumped-up, arty capitalist showcase, the better to show those commies on the other side of the fence what high life and culture they were missing. East Berlin was full of incredible historical buildings and shabby apartments, and there were no amenities. It really was gray and depressing—at least to a visitor. And it smelled—many houses and businesses were heated by coal fires, a smell I recognized, and loved, from visiting my grandma in Glasgow as a child. Even the sky seemed grayer to Western visitors then.

I suspect that many of the folks who lived in the East felt otherwise and may have viewed the half of the city on the Western side as a decadent cesspool of junkies and hookers (which it partly was) while they alone were maintaining the traditionally high German intellectual, cultural, and moral values and standards. Someone, they might have reasoned, had to preserve civilization while the Yankees turned West Berlin into a soldier’s playground and a haven for crazy artists, playwrights, drug addicts, and musicians of questionable talent.

In West Berlin at that time the young Germans who didn’t mind living inside a walled island were compensated—they could escape compulsory military service, rents were relatively cheap, and parking laws were almost nonexistent. (Cars would park on the sidewalks, at any angle, and never get towed.) Kreuz berg, the Lower East Side of West Berlin, was one of the most decadent low-life places I’ve ever seen. Lots of black leather, heroin, and late-night punk clubs—a sort of government-sponsored bohemian world just out of reach, but significantly visible to the Easties just over the Wall. The rest of luxurious Western decadence—the plentiful food, crazy fashions, and expensive cars—the Easties could see on bootleg films and TV, and they could probably smell wafting across no-man’s-land the curry wursts and kebabs that fueled the nightlife just across the Wall.

After the Wall came down all that changed. There was no further need to artificially entice people to live in an isolated island city anymore. Now the decadence here is of another sort, and it has migrated to various neighborhoods in the center of the former East. Friedrichstrasse and the surrounding boulevards are filled with luxury-goods boutiques, designer labels, and swanky hotels. There was a brief time right after the Wall came down when the historic buildings of Mitte were selling for peanuts, and many of them quickly became squats and cheap housing for artists, but that was a relatively short-lived period. Now there are a few coffee shops and some graffiti remaining as reminders of those post-Wall days, but the fancy-goods stores and developers are moving in fast and the rents are going up. More mentally disrupting, for me at least, is that the entire center of town has moved. When the Wall was up, what we in the West considered the center of West Berlin was somewhere around the tower of the bombed Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, and Kurfürstendamm and Kantstrasse radiated outward, but now the center has shifted back to more or less where it was before, pre-cold war—to Friedrichstrasse, Alexanderplatz, and Potsdamer Platz. It’s as if my memory were playing tricks on me.

Big old Karl-Marx-Allee has yet to catch the wave of gentrification, though the apartment buildings have been cleaned up and I hear the former apartments of party members and Stasi higher-ups are lovely. So, this route is a fitting prelude to the Stasi Museum visit.

Stasiland, the book by Anna Funder, an Australian journalist stationed in the former East Germany, investigates personal stories involving that notorious state security agency. Funder’s perceptions are wonderful. She spots the bizarre and oppressive not only in the detaining and spying on citizens and the unexplained deaths, but also in things like a weird sexless popular dance (the Lipsi) that the government attempted to insert into popular culture as a kind of immunization against Elvis’s rock-and-roll gyrations.

The Stasi kept massive “files” of all types: Some consisted of jars of smells of suspected subversives—jars that were filled with scraps of clothing, or preferably underwear, secretly procured from some poor soul suspected of a lack of patriotism. In some cases if actual clothing belonging to the suspect could not be found then an agent would surreptitiously wipe where that suspect had been seated and then quickly preserve the rag, labeling it by name of suspect and how long he or she had been seated on said chair. These rags were filed away just in case that person should disappear, and then at some future date a dog could sniff the rag and presumably discover the culprit’s hiding place.

It goes on. . . . In the book there’s a beautiful Kafkaesque scene where a woman, denied employment for suspect activities, is called in for questioning:

We like to think such stories are typical of middle European paranoia and behavior under repressive Socialist regimes. But imagine someone being questioned by Homeland Security saying, “But I was tortured, the information was obtained under duress.”

“The United States does not torture people, so that can’t be true.”

These days many people know of the Stasi from the recent movie The Lives of Others. The combination of psychological and Orwellian horror is hellish and weirdly seductive. The agency was known for turning citizens against their neighbors by subtle pressure, implied threats, or economic incentives. It seems it’s something that many national security agencies do from time to time. (“If you see something, say something.”) Turning the citizenry into rats makes the entire populace scared and docile, and after a while no one knows who’s informing on whom. Anyone could be an informer or an agent. The world becomes a Philip K. Dick novel—although in his version everyone would also be informing on themselves.

The Stasi Museum is a massive compound that encloses a whole city block. I ride my bike into the inner courtyard and lock it up. Since both the parking and the main entrances to the various buildings are located inside the compound, when it was functioning no one outside could see who was coming or going—exits and entrances from the building all took place within the large interior courtyard. I am told that the whole complex is now for sale! For one euro! Well, there are conditions. The city is actually trying to sell it to Germany, on the condition that they will turn it into a proper museum.

As it now exists, the museum is rudimentary. One floor of former offices displays clunky spy devices: cameras in logs, behind large coat buttons, and in fake rocks. Here’s one in a birdhouse—a little obvious, I think:

Maybe the intent was actually not to hide this surveillance gear too well. Maybe it was deemed more important to make people aware that they were being looked at and listened to rather than having the public just suspect that the spying was going on. A camera this blatant would confirm the rumors. If you’re not aware you’re being observed, if there isn’t occasional proof, then you won’t live in fear, so then what’s the point? The best surveillance is when everyone suspects that they’re being watched all the time. The government then doesn’t even have to watch the cameras—they need only let people believe someone might be watching. Sometimes buildings here in the United States put up fake surveillance cameras in the hopes of discouraging perps. Of course, it wasn’t all just charmingly nutty surveillance stuff here at Stasi headquarters—not everything is clunky tech that we now find oddly amusing. People’s lives were ruined, devastated, destroyed; their careers came to a dead end at the least suspicion. There were prison terms and torture without stated reason (where have I heard that one before?), and information and culture was heavily censored. And the food in the East wasn’t that great, either.

On a higher floor were the preserved offices of the head of Stasi, Erich Mielke. His offices weren’t very grand by Western standards, but he did have a little apartment attached, which was pretty cute. One can now look at this style of furnishing as an example of a very peculiar design aesthetic. I’m sure for some the mere sight of these curtains and old phones would make them shudder, but for many now they embody a kind of totalitarian kitsch.

The style is hardly luxurious—but then maybe these higher-ups saw themselves as modest functionaries who were just doing the noble work of the state, of the masses, rather than surrounding themselves with luxury as would quasi-oligarchs or entitled royalty. I remember visiting Pravda headquarters in Moscow in the ’90s, and the decorator must have been the same guy. In that room there were also no decadent touches—which in a power nexus like that was a little surprising. There is almost an absence of power symbols—no marble staircases, giant chandeliers, or even soft leather chairs. Maybe this austerity was meant to be representative of the higher calling being represented, but in this context that pretension coupled with absolute power became all the more chilling. There was one odd decorative item in the Pravda director’s office—a very long bookshelf that held only the collected works of Lenin. (When did Lenin have time to write all those volumes?)

As the Berlin Wall was coming down the shredding machines in this place went into overdrive. Imagine what an instantaneous change of worldview that must have been—one minute you’re the proud controller of destinies and the next you’re a disgusting worm intent on erasing your own life’s work. I guess the folks who erased the CIA torture tapes and Nixon’s eighteen minutes must have felt the same way. Maybe they all didn’t exactly feel guilty, but they at least knew they and their bosses would be up shit creek if they were caught. Most of the Stasi shredding machines were overwhelmed and got clogged and they had to call for reinforcements. A huge number of documents were destroyed, but there were far too many to shred in just a few days, so there are organizations now that will allow you to locate your file, if it is readable. There is also a group that is attempting to reconstitute documents from the shredded strips of paper—very labor intensive. Here, from our side of the pond, in New York City, is a page from John Lennon’s FBI file. On this particular page none of it is “uncensored”—it appears sort of like a piece of conceptual art.

The people of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, have been attempting in recent years to reclaim the farming lands taken from their ancestors many years ago by the white settlers. The whites have sometimes lived on these appropriated farms for three generations or more, and naturally they now think of them as theirs; they view the land as their homeland now too. The whites accept—so we are told—that the nation should not and cannot be ruled by outsiders anymore, or even by a small white minority, but they see these homes and farms as their own. They have raised children, built infrastructure, and improved the fields. But not just on their own farm. To some extent they have put into place the infrastructure that allowed the whole country to function. But, as the political tide has recently turned and the whites are no longer the political bosses, their right to hold on to 80 percent of the country’s arable land just because their ancestors stole it seems less a viable argument and less likely to continue. Mugabe, who may have come into power showing promise that a self-governed African country rich in resources and with functioning systems might flourish, has sadly devolved into a corrupt and violent despot desperate to hold on to power at any cost. The descendants of the original inhabitants from the precolonial era, along with Mugabe’s greedy and opportunistic self-appointed representatives, have begun to reappropriate the farms by force.

Is this fair? Not exactly, but neither was the appropriation of the land years ago by the whites. Justice, some might say, was simply delayed. If I can steal from you, and you are powerless to reclaim your property or land, even for generations, does it then at some point legally and morally become mine? At some point does the passage of time itself transfer ownership? What point might that be? Ten years? A hundred? A thousand?

Most likely any ultimate attempt at justice will be skewed. Maybe absolute justice, like absolute anything, rarely exists except in mathematics. In Zimbabwe whites will be forcibly removed, improved land will sometimes sadly go unused, and some reclaimed land will inevitably be wasted by the new owners, unaccustomed as they might be to managing such a resource. There will most likely be unscrupulous landgrabs and struggles for property among the new owners. But maybe, after some time, if things don’t get completely out of hand, a kind of balance will be achieved. Some will argue that not even a single white person belongs on this land, and they have a point. But with some compassion and forgiveness perhaps a few of the descendants of the thieves might find a place and a home and even some honor and respect. Almost all of us, of every race, have something to be ashamed of in our history. Sometimes it is close by, within memory, a constant reminder. Sometimes it happened generations ago, and we feel no personal sense of guilt or obligation, but then things change and what was forgotten or buried comes back to life.

I would argue that it is increasingly hard for anyone anywhere to say, “I belong here and you don’t.” Human migrations have never stopped, they’re endless, and mingling is tough, but it can often be fruitful—a source of innovation and creativity.

Will there be a bloody scramble for those beautiful ’50s modernist homes in the Vedado district of Havana at some point? Israel, Palestine, South Dakota, Tibet—all involve some appropriation of land by one group from another. Does one theft of land or property inevitably prophesize a reciprocal theft? Is delayed justice inevitable? Is it even justice?

When does the clock for justice and reparation run out, if ever? Can the victims of the Stasi demand some compensation? Can German Jews reclaim their houses in Leipzig and in Berlin (those that are still standing)? Can the descendants of Russians exiled since the revolution return and claim their beautiful homes in St. Petersburg? The Chinese multitudes, tossed out of their family homes during the cultural revolution by Red Guard hoodlums—compounds where they’d lived for generations—can they now return? Can everyone simply make history go backward when it’s their time in power, and does the associated violence constitute justice?

Is anyone native to anywhere? I think, in most cases, not. And maybe, somehow, that might be where the answer lies.

Now, of course, she realizes what she had willed herself not to see or admit, just as today many people (fewer now than previously) refuse to admit that what the Bush administration was doing was unethical, unconstitutional, maybe even illegal because their buttons were pushed with words like national security, patriotism, terrorism, democracy, small government, free market . . .

Our ability to live in denial and hide from the facts in front of our faces is obvious. I can’t possibly believe that people can perpetrate the horrors they do without justifying them to themselves, or better yet denying their existence entirely—or, as Hitler’s secretary does, claiming that some eggs inevitably get broken to make an omelet. I think someone in the Bush administration may have used the same metaphor. It seems to me that this capacity for denial must have evolved out of a survival mechanism—some mental ability that helps one to focus and to exclude unhelpful news and distracting or diverting information when on the hunt or when courting. The skill and complexity of denial behaviors may have become absolutely necessary, at least at the time that they are needed—though sometimes later another point of view can be entertained and the truth confronted.

Far from being a fault, a deficiency, this capacity for denial was, and still is, a much-needed survival mechanism—one that, perversely, makes us human. Do animals practice denial? Would a dog say, “Who, me, shit on the rug, are you kidding?” and, more important, would a dog be able to convince himself that he didn’t shit on the rug? I think animals can indeed be tricky and deceitful, but whether they can deceive themselves . . . well, we’ll probably never know. Maybe it is this mental skill set that allows us to be as single-minded, and therefore as successful, as we often are.

The fact that demagogues, advertisers, marketing experts, and religious leaders have learned to tap into these powerful innate instincts and behaviors is often unfortunate, but maybe inevitable. Their exploitation of our abilities is regrettable because they are using them exclusively for their survival. Our own adaptation is being turned against us. However, since it is natural that we have these abilities, maybe it is also natural that they be exploited and that some folks will inevitably become more skilled at the art of exploitation and manipulation than others.

However, as powerful and irresistible as buzzwords and the like are, it is sometimes possible to resist them, or at least to be aware when they are being employed—whether for better or for worse. One can at least make a decision as to whether one wants to be or will allow oneself to be manipulated and/or self-deluded, or not. There are times when a certain amount of self-delusion is “good”—when it allows us to accomplish a necessary task, or create something unlikely or new. (If I’m in the middle of writing a song I don’t want blunt criticism, for example.) It might even allow us to have the nerve to speak out, and in those cases denial—of a sort that gives us hope—might be deemed worthy.

The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a “meaning” and that each of us is unique. One can see that evolving a built-in obscuring mechanism for those depressing and inevitable insights might be of practical use. Okay, maybe in a sense we are unique: the huge numbers of available combinations of traits, propensities, body types, and experiences that make up each of us is unimaginably large. Our variety is immense, but still it must be restricted within certain boundaries or we wouldn’t be able to recognize ourselves as types at all. What we are is somehow simultaneously “infinite,” but always similarly shaped. Almost infinite variety within severely restricted limitations.

Maybe what we think of as self, of us as individuals, of each of us with unique personalities and character, also exists in dogs, and might even extend down the food chain as far as insects. Insects with character and personalities? Why not? Why stop with doggies? An insect might be just like me. I, what I call I, might not be unique after all. The range of possible combinations of character traits might extend both up and down the evolutionary tree. There might also be just as many personalities in each species as there are among us humans. Our inner policeman says to us, “don’t even think that” when we stray into a forbidden thought zone like this and begin thinking thoughts that might drive us crazy or inhibit much-needed action—thoughts like, Maybe I’m not unique at all. He sometimes says it for our own good—to keep us from going insane and to allow us to do the things we need to do. As a species we have to have our little delusions.

The other self-deception—that life has meaning—is famously dealt with by religions all over the world. Our susceptibility to this comforting idea is impossible to deny. I would argue that while religions might indeed be a lot of superstition as well as an unfortunate excuse for violence and countless horrors, they might also serve a purpose. It would seem that at the very least they make it easier to go on, to function, to make and do, if one believes that our own (human) lives have a meaning.

I bike around Mitte where the galleries and cafés are now being elbowed aside by luxury boutiques, as they were in SoHo in New York. And a couple of years after I began writing this I now sense that Berlin is indeed being acclaimed as a cultural capital, perhaps even as the cultural capital, of Europe. Despite some areas of towering corporate glass and accompanying wastelands of concrete plazas it does indeed seem as if the impossible can happen—a once vibrant city, a center of European culture, has come back to life.