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The German Democratic Republic, or more informally East Germany, existed from 1949 to 1990. During this time, the “noble experiment in socialism” deteriorated from an ideal to an oppressive state run from Moscow and kept in line by the Stasi, its own secret service.

The GDR sat on the border of the Iron Curtain and the democratic West, under the threat of nuclear weapons from both sides. WWIII seemed imminent, meaning that as well as shortages of freedom and food, its inhabitants had to live with a permanent, underlying anxiety.

Review

“Orwell said, ‘Those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future.’ If you see the future, are you still imprisoned by the past? Clairvoyeur applies supernatural to an anxious time: post-war Dresden. Navigating a punishing bureaucracy, aided and hindered by second sight, this East German Everyman is anything but.

Westwood, having previously nuanced two world wars, now visits post- WWII GDR — grittily real — not with an alternate history, but with an alternate reality. On a deeper level, Paul not only sees the future and remains mute, but also the massed Willy Lomans of that beleaguered city, country and time.”

—Gaoler, Amazon reader

Sample chapter: © David Andrew Westwood 2021, all rights reserved. No part of this text may be reproduced without written permission from the author.

20               
RED WOODSTOCK

In 1972, when I was twenty-five, President Nixon and Premier Brezhnev signed the SALT I treaty, achieving détente: parity by prohibiting the manufacture of nuclear weapons by both sides. We in the German Democratic Republic, who lived in the middle of an avenue of missiles just waiting for some idiot to let loose, gave a collective sigh of relief. This, plus the end of the Vietnam War (at least as far as U.S. involvement was concerned), meant a general stepping-down of hostilities.

That left the outside world’s focus on the excrescence of the Berlin Wall, so the following year, trying to reinstate the GDR in the estimation of the international community, Erich Honecker decided we should host the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students. Nine days of seminars, sports events, art exhibitions and music performances at 95 sites across the city. Its catchy theme was For Anti-Imperialist Solidarity, Peace and Friendship. It subsequently became known, at a bit of a stretch, as the “Red Woodstock.” It was a Woodstock without the open fields, without naked dancing, without hallucinogen use, and very definitely without helicopter deliveries of cocaine for the performers. But for the GDR, it was radical.

A few million visitors from outside were expected to flood East Berlin, and the Stasi needed to beef up security. As well as mobilizing the Free German Youth they recruited students from universities, including mine. At first I wanted nothing more to do with the Stasi and was determined not to get involved, but then I gave the matter deeper thought. Classes would be canceled anyway, and as part of the security team I would be free to attend any of the events. The aspect that swayed me the most, though, was that I would get to meet a lot of young women.

* * *

They gave us identifying blue FDJ shirts to wear, trained us with scripted responses to deal with right-wing extremists, and showed us examples of the kinds of subversive material we were to confiscate. Meanwhile the local Volkspolizei scrambled to corral all the sex workers and mentally ill they could find, and arrest or evict thousands of “asocials” and “hooligans” from the city for the festival’s duration.

Alexanderplatz, East Berlin’s decade-old plaza development, was almost unrecognizably transformed for the event. I remembered it mostly from earlier visits as a sprawling, sterile and somewhat intimidating expanse of brutalist boxes, but now it was all bright banners and flags, packed with multinational visitors in colorful clothing. Cuba was “our friend,” and its rhythms seemed to dominate the air, infecting everyone with a party-like giddiness. The GDR was stressing international cooperation to the point of overkill.

Angela Davis, spokesperson of the “other America,” strode in, surrounded by members of the Black Panthers in dark glasses and berets and looking, as I’m sure they fully intended, like their own independent army. She and her black halo of an Afro proved a big draw wherever she went — after all, she was that rarest of birds, an American Communist. I looked in on one of her debates, but quickly became bored by the dry subject matter and moved on.

Yasser Arafat was another prominent visitor. While West Germany was providing reparations to Israel for WWII genocide, East Germany took the stance that all the Nazis had been West Germans, and instead provided support for the Palestinians. I avoided his talks too.

A couple of times I came across Dean Reed performing. He was an actor/singer — handsome in a wide-smiled American way — who liked to be called “The Red Elvis,” and wrote (and played incessantly) the festival anthem, “We Say Yes,” a heavy-handed polemic peppered with lyrics like “oppressors,” “lies,” and “murder.” He acted as if he were an international star, but I suspected he was only known in Germany, and only by rabid leftists.

A line of women in long white dresses caught my eye, and I stared in wonder as each bride paired with a groom and marched up the steps to a flower-bedecked stage, where a minister waited. Confused, I consulted my brochure, which described how fifteen young couples had been selected from across the GDR to marry at the Festival. It seemed the East German authorities were using the event to parade their commitment to the institutions of marriage and family in front of our international guests. The crowd surrounding the stage broke into wild applause. I thought the whole thing bizarre.

* * *

According to my program, over one hundred groups and soloists from forty-five countries had been invited to participate. I managed to catch South Africa’s Miriam Makeba and her team of talented musicians, and felt transported to some other kind of world by her soaring and evocative voice. It made everything I’d heard up to then seem like fluff. This was what was meant, I saw now, by “soul,” and provided me a glimpse into a wider world of music than I’d ever suspected existed. Soul was an ingredient I realized socialism sorely lacked.

I was curious to hear leftist West German bands like Floh de Cologne and Lokomotive Kreuzberg, though they didn’t turn out to be what I expected. Floh’s “songs” were really political rants shouted over rhythmic hooks, one of which made fun of how capitalism hurt West German workers: 

“In the GDR, however, almost everything is forbidden … hospital charges, rent increases, teacher shortages, accumulation of wealth in employer hands … and everything else that makes capitalism so attractive for the workers.”

Leaden sarcasm and song lyrics somehow did not work well together.

Lokomotive Kreuzberg staged what they called a “Politrock” performance billed as “James Blond: In Pursuit of the Wage Robbers,” a labored parody of a spy thriller with a secret agent disguised as a worker pursuing a case of stolen salaries. 

This was more performance art than rock and roll. At twenty-five, I preferred the East German bands like the Puhdys, Renft, and Panta Rhei, but I knew they were too raw and unpredictable to ever have been allowed to play by the Festival’s Political Songs Forum, which was required to vet each song before the event. In the GDR, bands, and even D.J.s, had to be licensed, providing a censorship of even pop songs.

More interested in being entertained than preached to, I drifted away.

* * *

It all turned out, surprisingly, to be an exhilarating time. At first, anyway. People spoke openly, and the police could do nothing about it without looking like fascists in front of this mass of visitors and their cameras. A tent city sprang up at the foot of the Berlin TV tower and became a nexus of avid political discussion, drunkenness, and, judging by the aroma, pot smoking. In the city parks lovers found secluded, and sometimes not-so-secluded spots to act on their desires. (I know I didn’t imagine this, because nine months later there was a flurry of births of Weltfestkinder, festival children.) Half-dressed people cavorted in the fountains. Dissident singer Wolf Biermann, whom I knew had been banned from performing because of his disparaging lyrics about the GDR, was camped beneath the World Clock playing to a big crowd anyway. 

Things were spoken that I’d never thought I’d hear without their triggering immediate arrest. I couldn’t believe it. This was a whole new atmosphere that I had never before experienced. For the longest period I could recall I forgot my disability, and lived like a normal person.

Until I wandered past the vast expanse of the Alexanderplatz station windows. Here I was confronted by the vivid reflections of the mass of young people standing or sitting in front of them, and all their accelerated destinies. Death, in countless postures, cavorted past my mind’s eye like some kind of jerkily animated Hieronymus Bosch painting. A couple holding hands and jumping off a cliff, a baby suffocating in its crib, a girl falling from the window of her apartment building, a man shot in the back while escaping across The Wall, a man nodding off at the wheel and crashing his car into a bridge support, a child electrocuted by a faulty wall socket, a woman with food poisoning … no human brain was meant to absorb that quantity of oblivions, or perhaps the word should be oblivia. 

I unwittingly assimilated it all and became overwhelmed. Tottering to a bench I sat, head in hands, trying not to go mad. I considered killing myself just to turn it off -- anything to purge this macabre gumbo. I never despaired of my condition more than at that moment. 

“What’s the matter with you? Are you drunk?”

I squinted up to see a Volkspolizei sergeant glaring at me.

“No, sir. Migraine.”

“Then leave. You’re making a bad impression.”

I took his advice. I went home, polished off a small bottle of whisky and blacked out.

* * *

The following day, I was warily avoiding any glass when a woman I assumed was Cuban — golden-skinned, dark-eyed, and the Fidel Castro cap was a dead giveaway — waved to me, and I walked over and introduced myself.

“I am Mercedes,” she said, and grinned. “A good German name, huh? You live here?”

“Yes. Well, not in Berlin, in Dresden. Nearby. You?”

“Havana.” She pronounced it Habana. “With the cigars.” She patted her safari jacket pockets. “They wouldn’t let me bring any, I’m afraid.”

I laughed. “What brought you all this way?”

“I am secretary of the Young Communist League of Cuba. So I get to travel sometimes. Did you know? Our countries are the same size.”

“Cuba.” I envisioned palm trees, beaches, rum cocktails. I pictured big, exotic flowers. “What’s it like?”

Mercedes shaded her eyes and looked around. “Not a bit like here, comrade. Maybe you can visit one day.” She looked at my shirt. “You are with State Policía?”

“No, no. I’m a student. Architecture.”

“Ah. Well, maybe you get a grant to come study our buildings, yes? A lot of it’s colonial, but it’s still fascinating.”

“I’d like that, Mercedes.”

She fished in her satchel and took out a card. “Here — write to me. Maybe we set it up.”

* * *

At the tribute to Soviet soldiers killed “liberating Europe from Fascism” I met another woman, Prospère, in a dress patterned so boldly in yellow and orange (with matching headdress) that bees were attracted to it. Her skin was black with aubergine highlights. I asked where she was from.

“Brazzaville, Republic of Congo.”

“What brings you to the Festival?”

“I would like to go to school here. Law.”

“Why — is the Republic of Congo communist?”

“Of course. You have not heard of us?”

I must have blushed. “I’m sorry. I—”

“That’s all right. We are small, a young country. But we are growing. You go to university?”

“Yes, architecture.”

“Do you know anyone at the Education Department that might get me a grant to study?”

“No, sorry. But I’ll see what I can do.”

We exchanged addresses. Things were looking up.

* * *

On the third day a woman approached me who looked as if she had been magically transported from the original Woodstock four years earlier — long, straight blonde hair parted in the center, headband, pink-tinted octagonal sunglasses, and bellbottoms. She grabbed me by the arm, swung me around, and asked if I was some kind of policeman. Her German pronunciation was atrocious, and I suspected she was British or American. I tried to explain that I was a student supplementing the security contingent, but she wasn’t really listening. I quickly realized she was stoned out of her mind.

She tugged me toward a nearby park. I wondered if we were to make love.

“You Ossis are so uptight,” she reprimanded me, and handed me a roach in an alligator clip. “Here — have a hit of this.”

We ducked behind a tree and I thought what the hell, and inhaled a double lungful. Nothing happened at first, but then I could see why it was called “getting high.” I felt lighter, and things appeared different, somehow both humorous and subtle. Either my brain had expanded or my skull had shrunk half a hat size. I forgot what I was supposed to be doing.

“What you need here in East Germany,” she said before heading off into the crowd, “are comedians. Comedy is freedom of speech in action.”

Comedians? I thought, as I watched her disappear. That was another thing socialism lacked, as well as soul. East German humor, if you could find it, was of a peculiar sort. It was a careful parody of normal discussion or reportage so apparently sincere that it was hard to tell whether it was real or ridicule, and so skirted prosecution. We used a Russian word for this, too: stiob. But outright satire and mockery? Far too dangerous.

I was drifting away in a red-eyed fog, making a mental list of other things we lacked, when an older FDJ member grabbed my upper arm.

“Pull yourself together, man!” she hissed. “You represent the State!”

Luckily some nearby disturbance claimed her attention, and she let go of me to deal with it. I was suddenly swamped with a lofty overview of the entire area, from which I could map spots that were hazardous — reflective glass and water — and proceeded to roam within my safe zone. My consciousness expanded farther with the objectivity of an orbiting astronaut, from which height all the borders of mankind seemed petty. 

I became aware of the variety of people attending, a glorious cross-section of humanity, all races and creeds. Who cared about socialism versus capitalism? This was what was important — to come together and converse using the universal language of music. Only connect. Why couldn’t life always be like this? Why did we have to be turned against each other? What was this us and them anyway? Wasn’t it time to get beyond these childish divisions?

I tried to find another Miriam Makeba performance to suit my new expansive mood, but she had left. At least the Cubans were still playing; their infectious rhythms making the air itself pulse. A numinous evening light flooded the plaza, and I felt I had reached some other level of personal evolution. This is what the world could be like. Surely if we could accomplish this once, we could try to make it permanent.

* * *

But it had to end. As soon as the Festival was done the fun was over too. The instant the last visitor was ushered back across the border next day it was business as usual. No pot, no frank debates and confrontive songs, no freedom of expression. The banners were yanked down, an army of workers swept Alexanderplatz clean of its colorful confetti, and our old gray life resumed. We had been a Potemkin Village for a few days, and now it was as if none of it had ever happened. The carnival had left town. Our Summer of Love had turned into a Week of Lies. I handed in my blue shirt and felt a fool for having worn it. More, I regretted having been simple enough to think the Festival meant things in the East were changing for the better.

I tried to correspond with the women whose addresses I’d obtained, but either they never wrote back or their responses were intercepted at Stasi HQ and placed in my file.