From Alle Oder Keiner (All or No One)

Abstract

In retrospect I think I must have seen her first at Schonefeld, at one of the check-in counters, as Ruhle and I and the rest of the German delegates, from Koln, Braunschweig, and Essen, were standing to the side; we had just met and introduced ourselves and were waiting for our boarding call, in German and English, rather than how it used to be in German and Russian or some other Slavic language, even if the flight was in the opposite direction-to Barcelona via Prague on CSA, the tickets you could get for unbeatable bucket-shop prices at a travel agency on Uhlandstratge run by the West-Berlin Socialist Unity Party, cheaper than the twenty-four-hour direct train, a Vietnamese man sitting next to me on the plane, a reddish-gold badge with the image of Ho Chi Minh on it pinned to the broad lapel of his suit, stoically spooning breaded fish off the aluminum foil: two-hundred-sixty marks roundtrip, or to Rome on Interflug for almost as little: once you were out of hard-currency territory or had the right passport the state-owned airlines would transport you for practically nothingnow all of that was over, gone under, swallowed up by the competition, they even renovated the airport here to conform to Western standards, with moving walkways and cocktail bars in the terminal, and no more unnecessary frisking at the security gate, or attentive reading of notes half-forgotten in a pants' pocket, I think I remember having seen her there already, in front of the new check-in counters, after Rihle had introduced me to his colleagues as a member of his research team, on tiptoe, her arms around the neck of a man whose appearance escapes me now, except that he was a little taller than she was, briefly affirming their relationship, that they would still be together, and she was wearing, if this is really what happened, her black raincoat and washed-out jeans, and had, but this I'm sure of, medium-length, reddish-brown hair, lovers, taking leave of each other, putting off their leavetaking even longer, a commonplace in airports, at train stations, before the open tailboard of ferries. Then I stopped paying attention to them, the boarding call came, and our group, together with our luggage, briefcases, and duty-free bags, began moving forward. Supported by funds from international organizations-Unesco and the EU-the Bucharest conference was intended to provide, in addition to its regular program, Romanian government officials with a view into the workings of West European forensics; they had set up special panels at which academics and jurists would be available to discuss their respective countries' legal procedures for determining a given defendant's capacity for criminal activity. In the plane I sat beside a young psychiatrist who had just finished his dissertation at the Essen Institute and had once read something of mine, an article on obstacles in assessment procedures, which he brought up, apparently interested in my work; he was scouring court proceedings from the fifties, which, he said, knitting his brow and laughing caustically, were both theoretically and terminologically sheer nazism, so much crap about spiritual inferiority and hereditary asociality, about genetic causes for mental deficiency and psychopathological malice, you wouldn't believe it if it wasn't there in black and white, and in terms of personnel, it was pretty grim then, too, all those people who managed to keep their teaching jobs after the war and continued educating generations of students, not all that different, I said, with the psychologists, who either became hard-nosed behaviorists or went off to develop their race theories in the jungle, shooting pictures of darkskinned natives. His boss and Ruhle were talking with each other in the row in front of us, we could see the backs of their heads, and occasionally a face in half-profile when one of them turned to look at the paper the other was holding. We were served Romanian wine with the meal, a remarkably good wine, we both agreed, as if that fact needed to be confirmed, was hardly to be expected, to the contrary, although it wasn't anything in particular, a vague impression gleaned from television images, press reports, and half-forgotten information learned at school, and which colored one's perceptions, one's taste, the same as with subjects of experiments who've been given only certain data, negative or positive, telling them that someone is insane as opposed to relaxed, or that a color is garish rather than pretty; what did we know about Romania, a dotted outline on a political map and, of course, the grotesque dictatorship of a party secretary who together with his wife ended up slumped at the base of a wall, riddled with bullets, broadcast in a blurry video image. …