A Picaresque Tale: East Germany's Last Act

The Berlin Wall was opened up in the late evening of November 9, 1989. This was an event that was totally unexpected, from Washington to Berlin to Moscow and places beyond. It happened, according to the press and later official statements, due to a press conference during which a prominent member of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party's leadership, Günther Schabowski, made a remark indicating that citizens of the East German Republic would henceforth be allowed to travel freely to the West. Within the hour, thousands appeared at the checkpoints where West Berlin could be entered. The border guards, without instructions from their superiors, felt compelled to open the gates, and West Berlin experienced a deluge of citizens from the eastern part of the city. The events of that chaotic night have still not been completely sorted out. What is certain is that this event heralded the end of the Communist system in Central and Eastern Europe, including the former Soviet Union.

There were rumors at the time, and they still are believed by many, that the opening of the Wall had been planned and instrumentalized by the infamous "Stasi," the secret police of the former GDR. The Stasi (acronym for Staatssicherheit, i.e., State Security) combined in its operations all the activities the CIA and the FBI are responsible for in the U.S., conducting espionage in foreign countries, as well as counter-espionage and the control of domestic elements that were regarded as detrimental to the state. By the 1980s, the GDR had become covered by a dense network of official and unofficial agents who reported even the slightest signs of potential opposition to the Stasi, which in turn was responsible to the ruling Party and its government, whose members it also spied upon. To many observers it seemed implausible that such a major step as the opening of the Wall, which amounted to the total reversal of previous official politics, should have happened without the Stasi's connivance. And it didn't escape attention that five days before the Wall was opened, during the amazing mass rally which assembled, on November 4, 1989, 750,000 East Berliners on Alexanderplatz where they demanded democracy and an opening of the borders, one of the supposedly spontaneous speakers was Markus Wolf, head of the Stasi's foreign espionage service. Be that as it may, there has not been any conclusive corroboration of the many rumors about the Stasi's hand in the opening of the Wall and the collapse of East Germany's Socialist system.

In 1995, the young East German author Thomas Brussig took up the rumor in his novel, Heroes Like Us, published by Volk und Welt, and gave it a viciously satirical twist. His book became an immediate success, a popular best seller as well as a critically-praised literary event. Within the year, it was adapted for the stage and premiered on April 27, 1996, at the Kammerspiele, the smaller house of the prestigious Deutsches Theater in Berlin, under the direction of Peter Dehler. Brussig's hilarious story, as brilliantly performed by the actor Goetz Schubert, again became a resounding hit. The novel has been translated into many languages; the American version was published in 1997 by Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, in a fine translation by John Brownjohn. The stage play has been seen in more than 50 productions all over Germany. The novel has been compared to Günter Grass's The Tin Drum, Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik, and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. The reader of this stage version will have little difficulty in spotting the features which reminded critics of those seminal examples of the twentieth-century novel.

When Thomas Brussig and Peter Dehler adapted the text for the stage, they took considerable liberties with the novel's meandering narrative. They condensed the story, reduced the number...