Mea Culpa

She was our tour guide as we walked the cobblestone streets of Dresden, Germany in 2018. I never knew her name, but I remember we were the same age and also what she looked like: about 5’2”, cropped salt and pepper hair, spiked on top and cut a little above her ears.

Her clothes were Euro-athleisure in style, black sweater with matching leather patches on both her shoulders and elbows, sharply tapered gray pants, gray hand bag with an extra tote slung across her back, and sensible black leather walking shoes.

She wore neo-vintage eyeglasses similar to mine. Come to think of it, she could have passed for my sister by a different mother.

The only pop of color was her flame red top. Fitting, since she had once been enough of a firebrand to attract the unrelenting stare of the Stasi, the East German secret police.

She was fluent in German, Russian, and English. The first two were required for all children growing up in communist East Germany, and the latter was an elective. She wanted to learn more languages so she could realize her dream of someday traveling the world as an interpreter. Her love for Western culture and music was hardly a state secret (The Beatles were her favorite).

Those kind of aspirations and inclinations got attention, in her case, the wrong kind. Teachers, neighbors, friends, classmates, even family members, were interrogated at various times as to her words, attitudes, actions, and intentions. Many dutifully informed on her, probably hoping that their own transgressions would remain undiscovered, overlooked, or pale in comparison to hers.

The Stasi began to follow her and started a file.  Over time, hers became very thick.

When she was old enough to declare her intentions and career preference, the East German government told her “Nein!” Her overlords assigned her to a do-nothing-job where for years she sat staring at the wall clock in a windowless office that for all intents and purposes was a jail cell.

For an intelligent and open-minded woman like her whose gaze extended far past her nose and beyond her own borders, it was pure torture. Still, it was better than getting shot in the back of the head.

If you can breathe and think, there’s hope.

She was in her late-twenties when the Iron Curtain fell in 1989. All former East German citizens were allowed to examine the content of their Stasi files, and when she read her fat, two-volume set, she nearly lost her faith in humanity.

But she gathered herself and plotted out a future, thinking that the window for gaining the requisite skills and experience to become a translator was essentially closed. As tourism increased, she figured her best chance of engaging with the outside world was to stay put and let it come to her. She would take the proceeds from her tour guide jobs and travel abroad when she could.

Our guide told us her story over the course of the afternoon as she spoke of Dresden’s centuries-old history as a center of learning and culture which was laid to waste by Allied air forces late in World War II.

The rain of firebombs fell at night, intensifying the terror for soldiers, citizens, and Allied prisoners-of-war held captive there. Among them was a U.S. Army Soldier named Kurt Vonnegut who would later write the anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five and channel his own post-war trauma and existential dread through the eyes of time-traveling soldier and optometrist, Billy Pilgrim.

With the help of the United Nations and countries across the world, Dresden was rebuilt, rising from the ashes of war and spreading its wings once again as a hub of culture, learning, and peace. And there we stood in a circle in the city’s square, beneficiaries with no rightful claim, speaking, hearing, and witnessing truth with no fear of censure, imprisonment, or death.

She told us the story of an elderly British man who approached her one day on a tour and asked if he could hug her and tell her his story. He had been a bombardier in the RAF who had flown in missions over Dresden. In the closing days of his life, he had come to witness the rebirth of a city he had helped destroy but not kill, and make amends.

As he hugged her, he sobbed and said, “I’m so sorry.”

She held his shoulders, looked him in the eyes, and replied, “It’s not your fault. We were wrong!”

At the next break, I approached her with an apology of my own. I told her of my deep regret over our country electing a manifestly horrible human being and unfit president who was attempting to drag us into the past, one that seemed increasingly like 1930s Germany.

She smiled and said, “If you only knew how many times I’ve heard that over the past year. It’s okay. I believe your country, like ours, will fix it. We Germans, of all people, know how something like that could happen.”

So little did we know.

I’ve thought about her a lot over these past few days with all the talk of files, what’s in them, and whether or not to release them.

I wonder if 50 years from now our country will still be here or what it will be like. Will everyone have a file, and if so, what will be in them?

Perhaps a tourist visiting the “United States” will approach a tour guide with a mea culpa of their own.

Maybe the guide will respond, “It’s okay. I believe your country, [like/unlike ours], will fix it. We Americans, of all people, know how something like that could happen.”

It is a great and tender mercy to not see the future.