From Chapter 1—A Funeral in Berlin
In her heyday, she came close enough to Josef Stalin to kiss him. In her dotage, she was a crumpled piece of cloth peering from a pile of blankets in a wheelchair.
One March day in 2002, she struggled out of her wheelchair and shuffled to a ladder propped against a bookcase in the Berlin house where she lived alone. She climbed to look for a book on an upper shelf, and crashed to the floor.
When she died that night, an encyclopedic collection of memories died with her.
Not only had she known Stalin, but she had met Lenin and drunk tea with Krushchev. She had hob-nobbed with dictators of the communist East Bloc states and even married one—Walter Ulbricht, the son of a Leipzig tailor, who rose to become the most powerful person in East Germany.
Lotte Ulbricht, the nearest the German communist movement had to a grande dame, was buried with the party’s equivalent of the twenty-one gun salute on a cloudy spring Thursday, April 18, the day before her ninety-ninth birthday.
She had lived behind lace curtains in the gray, three-storied cement house she once shared with Walter at Majakowskiring 12 in Eastern Berlin. If anyone had suggested that the white porcelain polar bear and seal on her front window sill were examples of middle-class kitsch popular in the capitalist West, she would have been indignant.
This stubborn old lady refused to see visitors, apart from former party hacks, and was defiant enough to have the name “Ulbricht” displayed on the front-gate letterbox. This attracted unwanted mail. One anonymous letter read, “You shriveled bigwig pig, why don’t you drop dead, you ancient lump of shit, you old East German sow. We’ll fix you!”
If you waited outside the house for long enough, you might see an inner set of curtains move slightly. . . Lotte was at home, watching.
Her East Germany no longer exists, but reminders of it are everywhere: in the abandoned brick Wilhelminian buildings, in the absence of neatness and order, in the drabness. Away from Main Street, it has a threadbare gloom, an emptiness, and a sullen resistance to the tinctured tidiness of the West. In spite of the modern Western-built cars and the neon lighting, the East remains another country. It is sometimes like looking down a street of ruins, a street where nobody comes any more, a ghost strasse. In Lotte Ulbricht’s own street, Majakowskiring, a once-elegant oval boulevard, the pavements are uneven, the roadway is pitted, and the lawns overgrown. And when Lotte chose to be buried at the Weissensee cemetery, she knew she would feel at home lying in an anonymous grave hemmed in on both sides by high, crumbling brick walls. In her East Germany, the workers’ and peasants’ state, dilapidation was part of life.