Leseprobe

129 “Things can follow one after the other only for as long as you are alive in order to extract a splinter from a child’s foot, to take the roast out of the oven before it burns or sew a dress from a potato sack, but with each step you take while fleeing, your baggage grows less, with more and more left behind, and sooner or later you just stop and sit there, and then all that is left of life is life itself, and everything else is lying in all the ditches beside all the roads...” 1 Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation Potsdam, summer of 1945. Three older men meet in Cecilienhof Palace. They lead the nations that have just defeated Hitler’s Ger- many. We are all familiar with the photo of the Big Three—Churchill, Truman and Stalin—sitting in comfortable wicker chairs in the garden of the Potsdam residence. They are not just deciding Germany’s future; they are also deciding how to divvy up the world anew. It is a world torn at the seams by global conflict and by the utter barbarity of National Socialism. The decisions made at Potsdam are only possi- ble because all pre-existing limitations have been smashed by the war of conquest and annihilation that Germany unleashed. But some- thing else is clearly afoot here. The war in Europe has recently ended, and victory over Nazi Germany is not the only focal point of the conference. The old rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, which temporarily went dormant during the war, has reawak- ened and now looms over these summer days. Potsdam is serving as a prelude to a new conflict, one that will be known for decades to come as the Cold War. For some, this means being mired in a deep freeze between two ideologies; it means the Iron Curtain. For many other parts of the world, though, it means countless and bloody “hot” wars—a fact erased by the Cold War’s insidious terminology. These gentlemen have therefore come to Cecilienhof to gain concrete advantages, not merely to sit in judgement of Germany. Each wants to claim a piece of the pie. They eye one another suspiciously, and their entire entourages follow suit. They become global masterminds of a sort, playing a never-ending game in which they enjoy cigars and whisky while dividing up the world along new lines of geopolitical, strategic and ideological interest. It is not a crucial point to these three men that millions of people are affected by their mapping exer- cises. The millions are all just pawns and collateral damage—terrible though that thought is—in the power politics of the Big Three. In this sense, Potsdam represents a coda. It is one of the last conferences in the modern world where superpowers hash out their spheres of interest. This tradition, which originated in the early modern period, reaches its peak during the age of imperialism and lasts well into the twentieth century. At these conferences, borders are arbitrarily drawn, corrected, and moved again and again. In the end, countless lives are disrupted. On account of the decisions made at Potsdam, at its music-laced soirees and festive dinners, millions of Europeans lose their homeland forever. Andreas Kossert ← Escaping from approaching Soviet troops by horse and cart, early 1945