Free Berlin Cantata by Jeffrey Lewis

besieged. I believed that Zionism was an inauthentic, doomed reaction to circumstances which late capitalism brought about and that West Germany exclusively, not the East at all, deserved to inherit the guilt for the war and the slaughter of all, Jews included. I was not blind to the seams of the GDR, but each time I observed them, I discounted, and explained, and recommitted myself. The hypocrisy could be discounted, for instance, by the supposed greater hypocrisy of the West. The corruption could be explained by the corrosive effects of the Western conspiracies to undermine us. The regime’s harshness was necessary because our enemies were real and strong and ubiquitous, and only when they let up could we afford to relax our vigilance. I embraced such opinions until the end, that is, at which point, deprived of the lying, autocratic structures of authority which supported them, my beliefs – already straining, as I’ve indicated – collapsed utterly. This is not a flattering picture of myself, but it accurately describes the self-loathing around which my disillusionment wrapped itself. By 1991, I had been living for eight years at the East German Writers Union retreat in Velden am Moritzsee, not far from Potsdam. I was supposed finally to be putting to paper my autobiography, but I was paralyzed by my disillusionment. Why had I come to the GDR at all? My old explanations seemed as convenient and lying as everything else. By any account, it had been an unlikely journey. I felt the waste of my life. But who could I blame? It was then I met Electra Papaiannis, through the suggestion of a former colleague of mine in the Writers Union to whom I had confided my despair. Electra was a plump woman who favored loose clothing and heavy jewelry. She gave the immediate impression of being a Roma, which was of course reinforced the moment you learned of her profession. Electra conducted séances. Of course she was not a Roma, she was a Greek whose father had landed in a Düsseldorf restaurant decades previous. I had the vaguest ideas, from certain absurd films and articles, what a séance was. But I had lost both my parents in recent years, after decades of the faintest contact, and along with all else that had gone wrong, I missed them. Electra proposed to me that she might be able to help me. Now if you had told Simona Jastrow the devoted Socialist that a Greek woman in a shapeless dress could put her in touch with her dead parents, she might have written little notes to the proper people about all of you. But I was no longer that Simona Jastrow. I was Simona Jastrow who was devoted to nothing, who had nothing, who was lost. Here you see my vulnerability, here you see how doubters could attack me. But I freely admit it all. I had nothing to lose. This is when people do everything worthwhile in their lives.
    There. At last it’s done, or at least begun. The story of myself. My documentation. Mission accomplished, for the eager support the defunct Writers Union gave me over the years. You know what I say to all of it? Bullshit. You know what I really want to write about? I’ll tell you what’s really on my mind. I’d like to scratch out every word of my past. I know what other people say about me. I know all of it. Do you think I don’t know? Of course I know. I’ve known all along. The one shining, perfect example: Anja Mann. She’s confronted me with her hauteur. I told her, I said to her, to her face, I said, “Anja, at least I admit. At least I come clean. Everyone wrote notes about everyone else, and if they say otherwise, they lie.” She says to me, “I never wrote notes.” Not her, not the great Anja, the great civil rights leader, the taunter of Honecker and the rest. Bullshit. She probably did, in her sleep, with the sluts of the regime she slept with. I know these things. Why am I a leper, why am I maligned? Malign us all, but then shut up. Another perfectly good