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Secret
Father by James Carroll Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Legacy James Carroll returns to fiction with his
latest novel, Secret
Father. Written with two narrators, the structure of the book involves
the revelation of what really happened to a trio of teens in Berlin just
before the wall was erected. Readers can count on Carroll to delve into
multiple levels of meaning and understanding as the story unfolds. The deep
bonds between fathers and sons, as well as their deep conflicts becomes
revealed through memorable characters. At times, Carroll can become too
preachy, and the multiple narrators aren’t really differentiated in voice.
They bring separate perspectives, recollections and memories. Here’s an
excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 4 (pp. 67-70): What
my father saw in me as need was simple readiness. Yet I am now a little past
the age that he was then. I have my own grown children, and I begin to see
things from his side as well as mine. Teenagers have a way of making parents
both wise and crazy, and so, naturally, my own teenage years look different
now. In my case, alas, the crazy reasons to worry were real. If my youthful
naivete had been only that, but the context made my actions thoughtless beyond
measure, and if
they had ended
tragically; they would have
been unforgivable. For a long time, they did seem so. It was only your
father, before he died, who made a final forgiveness possible; only he, given
what had happened, who could have offered it — to himself as much as to me
and Kit. Someone had said to the three of us, "Don't you be the thing
that brings a hair-triggered weapon out of its holster." But we were
that thing. My father and I are alike in understanding history
as the frame within which our quite personal story unfolds. We are telling it
all these decades later because once again Berlin has been in the news,
beginning with the long-overdue breach of the Wall that brought us all
together again. The Wall went up, in the first place, not long after the
fateful two days in which everything happened. Oddly, the literal breakthrough of the Wall on
November 9, 1989, the end of an era if ever there was one, occurred on the
fifty-first anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi savaging of Jewish
shops and synagogues. I say oddly because Kristallnacht was of course
the beginning of the era, but also because, speaking personally, the Shoah
and what led
up to it has been a focus of my work. I write for the Atlanta
Constitution, and have published three books on politics and history, the
most recent an account of artworks stolen from Jews, how the great museums of
the world took full advantage of the genocide. I am conditioned, perhaps, to see the shadow of
that past everywhere, and so, regarding Berlin, the coincidence of dates
struck me less as odd than as inevitable. The flukes of history make us love
it, but also fear it. That first diabolical Novemberfest seemed fittingly
reversed when hundreds of thousands of young Germans, grandchildren of the
perpetrators, took to the streets to smash not glass but drab concrete. They
danced on both sides of the Brandenburg Gate, monument to Prussian glory. But
Prussian glory had been swamped by the twentieth century, which only goosed
the frenzied happiness of the young democrats who scaled the Wall, of the
accidental graffiti artists who splashed the cement barrier with whatever
paint came to hand, an anarchy of color released upon the gray monotony of a
prison that had passed itself off as half a city. The destruction of the Berlin Wall, as it happened,
was also the destruction of a wall in my memory, the events that divided our
lives into the before and after of who viewers and who we became. And because
your father was there with us at the start, helping to create the people we
are, it is crucial that you know of him as he was, taking this remembrance as
a measure of what he then accomplished with his life. We misunderstood his
reaction all those years ago, thinking it foolish, when, as history shows, it
was noble. You were too young last year ever to have your own
memory of the Wall coming down, so let me tell you. Tens of thousands of men
and women rushed through the hole that opened when the Volkspolizei
chose not to fire at the first doofus to hoist himself up to the ledge atop
the Wall, jitterbugging and calling back to those who'd egged him on, "Aufkmnmen.'Atfflwmmen!"
Within days, the once omnipotent Erich Honecker resigned as East German party
chief, Hungary and Czechoslovakia declared their borders open, and Mikhail
Gorbachev, watching from Moscow, shrugged. And once again, after the rude
interruption that lasted three decades, the massive tectonic shift from East
to West resumed, the largest movement of people ever to occur in Europe. That movement had
begun in 1944, with the mad flight of panicked Prussians, Silesians, and
Sudaten Germans ahead of the onrushing Red Army. “Feet,” as they say in
Atlanta, “do your thing.” At war’s end, the migration quickened as if the
central plain of Europe had tilted on its side from the Urals toward the Atlantic,
spilling westward women, children, and what men survived. Between 1945 and
one night in August 1961, almost five million Germans fled from the East
through Berlin, the boldest of them marching under that same chariot-crowned
Brandenburg Gate. The gate was the emblematic transit point marking the
continental divide, but at the time of our May Day visit to the city, a few
weeks before the Wall went up, there were something like eighty places where
the momentous border crossing could be made. I read later that three thousand
East Germans, mostly young and skilled, were then making it every day. After
August 13, there were seven crossing places in Berlin, and they were
ruthlessly controlled by Vopos whose authority was as absolute as
the armor of Soviet
tanks with engines idling
not far away. Republikflucht was
defined as a major crime against the Socialist state, and guards were
authorized to prevent flight by shooting to kill, which they did more than
two hundred times. The
Wall became the defining symbol of the Cold War, for us in the West as well
as for your people. In the rhetoric of Western leaders from John Kennedy to
Ronald Reagan, it was simply evil. Yet to citizens throughout Berlin,
beginning early on, the hulking concrete and wire construction, running 103
miles through the city and in a full circle around its western half, was
informally known as the Peace Wall. Your father told me that at the time of
our reunion. In the West, there would be a journalistic obsession with the
"death strip" as the very symbol of demonic totalitarianism, but in
fact the barrier represented a practical solution to a vastly destabilizing
problem. The Wall stopped the East-West refugee flow in its tracks,
effectively saving the eastern provinces of the nation for an eventually
reunited Germany, while defusing the terrifying confrontation that had turned
Berlin into the Cold War "flashpoint." In one day, each side
implicitly redefined its commitment in Berlin, with the Soviets yielding
their claim to the whole city and with the Allies equally abandoning the
East. The Wall did this. If the Soviets had not thrown it up, there were
reason why the Americans could have. Indeed, despite all their public
protests, Americans not only valued the Soviet Wall, but had, in deep secret,
encouraged it. What a country. That surface enemies were subtle partners in
maintaining what was necessary for peace is one of the great untold stories
of the Cold War — and it is the hidden assumption of the story my father has
begun, and that I pick up. The clandestine collusion between Washington and
Moscow eluded us at the time, of course, but it was very much to the point of
what happened when I joined Ulrich as a counter-refugee, bucking the flow to
go from West to East. What know-it-alls we were. We knew nothing. Subtle collusion between Washington and
Moscow does not mean that their confrontations were less than terrifying, and
the spring and summer of 1961 were, until the Cuban missile crisis the
following year, the worst of it. It is hard to remember now, with Russia in
social and economic free fall, but m those days the Kremlin seemed the center
of a nation of evil geniuses .At the slightest whim of their madness, so we
felt, they could blow us to smithereens. Only weeks before we took off for
Berlin from Wiesbaden, for example, the Soviets had demonstrated their
superiority by launching the first man into space. The name Yuri Gagarin was
on everyone's lips that month. And only weeks later, Nikita Khrushchev would
humiliate John Kennedy at their summit in Vienna. A shaken Kennedy came home
from that encounter to announce on television it was time to build bomb
shelters— a month's anticipation of the drab concrete of the Wall, but this
concrete was to be poured in the cellars of American schools, factories,
places of business, and homes. For the first time, a U.S. president was
openly warning of nuclear attack, and in response, we the people began to
stock Up on canned goods. "Berlin is the testicles of the West,"
Khrushchev declared. "When I want to make the West scream, I
squeeze." Secrets that were kept are revealed. A
legacy is passed along from one generation to another. Understanding develops
over time, and with perspective. All these insights and more can be savored
in Secret
Father. Steve Hopkins, September 23, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the October 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Secret
Father.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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