A Sorrow Beyond Dreams Read Free

arms; 6.35, motto ofthe day; 6.40, gymnastics; 8–12 p.m., Radio Königsberg: Richard Wagner concert followed by entertainment and dance music.
    “How to mark your ballot on 10 April: make a
bold
cross in the
larger
circle under the word YES .”
    Thieves just out of jail were locked up again when they claimed that the objects found in their possession had been bought in department stores that MEANWHILE HAD GONE OUT OF EXISTENCE because they had belonged to Jews.
    Demonstrations, torchlight parades, mass meetings. Buildings decorated with the new national emblem SALUTED ; forests and mountain peaks DECKED THEMSELVES OUT ; the historic events were represented to the rural population as a drama of nature.
    “We were kind of excited,” my mother told me. For the first time, people did things together. Even the daily grind took on a festive mood, “until late into the night”. For once, everything that was strange and incomprehensible in the world took on meaning and became part of a larger context; even disagreeable, mechanical work was festive and meaningful. Your automatic movements took on an athletic quality, because you saw innumerable others making the same movements. A new life, in which you felt protected, yet free.
    The rhythm became an existential ritual. “Public need before private greed, the community comesfirst.” You were at home wherever you went; no more homesickness. Addresses on the backs of photographs; you bought your first date book (or was it a present?)—all at once you had so many friends and there was so much going on that it became possible to FORGET something. She had always wanted to be proud of something, and now, because what she was doing was somehow important, she actually was proud, not of anything in particular, but in general—a state of mind, a newly attained awareness of being alive—and she was determined never to give up that vague pride.
    She still had no interest in politics: what was happening before her eyes was something entirely different from politics—a masquerade, a newsreel festival, a secular church fair. “Politics” was something colourless and abstract, not a carnival, not a dance, not a band in local costume, in short, nothing VISIBLE . Pomp and ceremony on all sides. And what was “politics”? A meaningless word, because, from your schoolbooks on, everything connected with politics had been dished out in catchwords unrelated to any tangible reality and even such images as were used were devoid of human content: oppression as chains or boot heel, freedom as mountaintop, the economic system as a reassuringly smoking factory chimney or as a pipe enjoyed after the day’s work, the social system as a descending ladder: “Emperor-King-Nobleman-Burgher-Peasant-Weaver/Carpenter-Beggar-Gravedigger”: a game, incidentally,that could be played properly only in the prolific families of peasants, carpenters, and weavers.

    That period helped my mother to come out of her shell and become independent. She acquired a presence and lost her last fear of human contact: her hat awry, because a young fellow was pressing his head against hers, while she merely laughed into the camera with an expression of self-satisfaction. (The fiction that photographs can “tell us” anything—but isn’t all formulation, even of things that have really happened, more or less a fiction?
Less
, if we content ourselves with a mere record of events;
more
, if we try to formulate in depth? And the more fiction we put into a narrative, the more likely it is to interest others, because people identify more readily with formulations than with recorded facts. Does this explain the need for poetry? “Breathless on the riverbank” is one of Thomas Bernhard’s formulations.)

    The war—victory communiqués introduced by portentous music, pouring from the “people’s radio sets”, which gleamed mysteriously in dimly lit “holy corners”—further enhanced people’s sense of self, because it