Work Text:
Leipzig had never been a political City. She was content with leaving all the region’s politics and drama to Dresden, who behaved as it fit a City known mostly for the opera and pretty architecture. Meanwhile, she used to enjoy being one of Europe’s main trade centres, having the whole world visit her once a year and try to show off, for her to admire and judge and compete over with Frankfurt. Her’s was the Spring, his was the Autumn, she was beautiful and green, pulsing lines through her and light over classicistic buildings. No matter what anyone said, she used to think she’d won.
Then the wars happen. A century before that she’d already been a battleground and hated it; hated the death and the destruction, the blood soaking her earth and her children digging the graves. But even half of Europe united rearing up against Napoleon in her southeast had been nothing compared to this. Not when this time, it was her children and only them killed in their homes by bombs. There is no place left undamaged, so many of her children dead and even in her most hopeful of hopes, they’d need years to rebuild.
Her hopes are not met. The truth is so incredibly far from that, she can’t even muster up a cynical smile over a glass of schnapps. In that moment, wounded and unhappy, she sees cruel irony in the way Johann, the short whirlwind romance of a poet in her life, had called her his little Paris all those years ago and hates despairing the same way her older brother had. But her people are unhappy, the streets crumbling, her buildings destroyed after the bombs as the Russians take apart her factories.
The 1940’s are over by the time she stops drinking for more than a few days. She doesn’t like what her sober eyes see. They haven’t fixed her. They haven’t even started. Nothing. She still feels the ache of crumbling buildings in every part of her. And it wasn’t only the bad areas of town. The city centre, her very heart, isn’t getting fixed, no part of her is. None of them are. Halle, her closest friend and twin, has similar problems; only aggravated by the smog of chemical factories all over her, clouding her air, eroding her stone, and feels the same. Erfurt falls apart, Dresden incapable of speaking more than a few words. The opera, they aren’t fixing the opera fast enough and it takes until the late 1980’s for music to play there again, exactly forty years without it. Rostock isn’t even given the time to grieve what had been bombed, again involved with shipbuilding.
None of them even come close to Berlin in their suffering, who both is and isn’t one of them at the same time and is and always will be their capital. They tell him that. He still looks strangely displaced and terribly lost. All of them are strangely, selfishly glad not to be him. He doesn’t want it, but he knows they pity him and all the other Cities that suddenly become guards of a border that shouldn’t exist.
She tries to tell them all that they’ll rebuild, that their people won’t keep the nation separated like this forever, writing passionate letters and giving equally passionate speeches, ignoring the ache of crumbling sandstone and newly-poured concrete. She’s not sure if she really believes her own words anymore as East and West become more passionate about being in the right and less passionate about reuniting.
Then they build the Wall. She understands the ache of having them pour concrete into you where you didn’t want it, but this was an entirely different level. She calls Potsdam to make sure he checked up on him, poor Berlin, and waits and hopes. She’d pray if most of her children still had faith.
Just a few years later, they blow up the Pauliner church, the thing that had been there, right in her centre for over 700 years, the thing they’d built her around, that had been falling apart since the bombs had hit it. They just fill it with explosives and push the button.
She curls up and cries in pain and rage. Halle is there within hours, but she can’t help. Nobody can. They’re destroying old parts of her and trying to recast her in concrete and premade parts and she can’t take it. She can’t do anything anymore. Why does she keep thinking they’ll help her get better again? She’ll just become something new, reluctantly dragged into this age of hymns and grey speckled walls, houses built like Lego constructions. She began this century growing, strong and optimistic, her children building new houses everywhere, outwards and upwards, a central point in Europe’s network of trade, trains entering and leaving her shiny new station. They’re building again, but this time it’s to escape the ruins they can’t fix; ruins which are growing dangerous to live in. She hates this feeling, hates what is happening to her, hates what she’s becoming. She wants to scream at them to fix her again. She knows that in their way, her children still love her, they just can’t really show it the way she’d like them to.
That year, she spends the fair in a flat somewhere in the south, in what used to be a small separate village and got pulled in as she grew, blessedly far away from the new building in a house that hasn’t seen as much as she has. Nothing here has seen that much; her oldest buildings were bombed and torn down, but this house has seen enough not to make her feel lost. Her people move into the premade Lego buildings made of concrete and steel to spend their days digging through her earth for coal, she gets used to their presence slowly but steadily. The Gewandhaus is finished and people start visiting it, it’s a part of her. They’re moving on, patching up the scars. From Lindenau to Crottendorf, from Gohlis to Connewitz, parts of her keep falling apart, falling stones becoming a danger to people walking along the streets she gets used to the feeling just as she gets used to Grünau’s blocks growing in the west. She’s so glad for every single child of hers who speaks up; for the architects who mourn the buildings’ history; for the ones who keep falling for her nevertheless, fighting tooth and claw to stay after university in some cases. She hates how they all distrust each other so much.
She keeps telling her siblings that things will get better. Their children will change things; they hate the situation as much as all of them do. They will. She can’t allow herself to stop believing even as she loses all hope of ever competing with Frankfurt again as the other city becomes a near-American spectacle of glass spires and business success. She’ll be great in her own right again. She still is in her way. She still has half the world visiting her, courting her once a year, still has her rivers and canals and parks, still has her children and her memories.
What makes a City the City it is? She asks herself as they tear her down and rebuild her into something she never agreed to be and writes letters, unbroken so far, holding on just so.
Finally the 1980’s bring what she has been waiting for for decades as unrest stirs and when the decade’s later half turn Monday services into something more subversive, she joins as soon as she starts hearing the almost giddy whispers after the first few weeks. Watching from the shadows, disguised by scarves and glasses as there’s talk about hope and freedom and problems.
She notices him when he comes forward to talk about how he had nearly gotten killed by falling parts of a building in Reudnitz a few days ago. When he starts talking about how they never got to the part of “rising from the ruins”, not really, she lets herself get pulled in. He’s passionate, he’s loud and well-reasoned. He talks about how she herself hasn’t been appearing a lot in the last years, secluding as they let her rot and desecrate her. He talks about how they need to change things, about what they’re doing wrong, how they’re hurting their very homes all over the nation. Leipzig wants to raise him up and venerate him. She wants to play hours of magnificent music on the Gewandhaus’ great organ, she wants to immortalize him in copper the way she has done with Johann the composer and Johann the poet, Bach and Goethe, with Gottfried, the thinker, and all her other famous children. If she can be home to Faust, she can be anything for him.
Later on, she’ll mention him in a letter to Paris, say that if this is what he felt like when he met his Apollo for the first time, she understands parts of it now because she’s never met a human shining that bright, that obviously destined for greatness. She’s not in love with the student speaker, but she knows he’s special. She just does. He means something, to her, to the future. He’s important. For now, she follows him and his friends as they participate in the time-honoured tradition of drinking and talking in one of her student bars. She sits there, again a bit away and listens as they speak, half in code and full of the kind of frenetic energy she hasn’t seen like this for decades if not centuries.
They notice her, of course they do. She does this week after week; they’re rightfully paranoid considering the political climate and their own political inclination. She’s not an IM, doesn’t work for them, she explains, she’s not telling them anything. Nobody will know what they know, she explains, taking a sip of her home-brewed beer. Of course they recognize her.
“Can you even go against your own people like that?” he, their leader, her child in red and gold asks, interested in what makes a City tick when they’ve retreated to a place she knows is free of spying devices.
“Have you seen how many of you appear every Monday?” she counters. “My people are not only the ones sitting in the Dittrichring office, they’ve been letting me turn into this for over 40 years. Most of them don’t even remember what they’re fighting for. This is not the red utopia they and their fathers fought for and they know. They’ve given up on higher ideals. I don’t have that luxury.”
It’s all the explanation they need to let her join. Once again, a revolution has a City hiding in their ranks.
For the first time in years, she’s sure that the hope she’s talking about that night in her letters and calls is real and not just for the sake of the other Cities around her. She calls Berlin and dares to talk about unity for the first time in decades. “People will walk through the Brandenburger Tor again, they’ll use the Reichstag, for the German people, the way it says,” she’s not sure when she started crying but it almost sounds like he believes her for a second.
The next months, she doesn’t stop attending the services and demonstrations. Every time, she meets up with Halle afterwards, filled with tales of her brave, wonderful, lovely children.
The others soon do the same. Rostock chants in the front rows and the picture makes the western newspapers as he disappears into the bowels of some prison or other, tales of his bravery whispered all over the country. Jena hides under a wig and sunglasses the same way she does and keeps in the middle of the masses, unrecognized and boosting their morals. Dresden wants to sing arias for change and waves off those who flee towards Prague happily. Karl-Marx-Stadt starts signing letters as Chemnitz again in a fit of rebellion.
Leipzig can’t believe how the flurry of letters and calls between all of them suddenly picks up. How they start visiting each other more often. She spends weekends in Schwerin, in Potsdam, in Erfurt; talking, hoping, dreaming. They’re moving, the people are taking action. Peaceful meetings and talks in churches where nobody can get them. Clever children, she’s so happy. Then Prague opens to them and they run. She’s used to her children leaving her, it happens frequently, she’s a City of trade, people come and go, there’s a reason she was one of the first to have a main station that big all those years ago, and she waves them off gladly. There’s revolution in the air and many will come back when things are better.
She watches worriedly as her government starts putting up more cameras, as they start considering snipers on her roofs on Mondays, as they arrest more and more of her children, who all go willingly and hope that they’ll be home soon enough. They just want things to go back to normal, having gotten used to this, no disloyalty to the communist cause please, we’ve worked so hard to get here, Genossen. She takes a deep breath and remembers that there are parts of her dying. That they’re carting her children off to prison for wanting to save their City, country and planet. She marches with them that last Monday too, a candle and a banner in her hand, this time it’s obvious who she is as she follows her golden child, her leader, her salvation, furiously chanting with him. “We’re the people,” they shout. “We’re not leaving.”
She breathes easier when there’s no order to shoot. Celebrates with the others in the overwhelming mass of people, all of them hers, all of them her.
While half the country leaves on trains to Prague, yearning for the perceived utopia of the west and Dresden waves them off, last station before leaving, He goes to Berlin on November 9th and she leaves for her weekly visit with Halle where she giddily tells her of her children, her successes, her boy.
“You’re not falling for him?” she asks, knowing that that’s a bad idea.
“No. He’s not mine to fall for, I think. I admire him for what he is and is going to be, nothing more. One day, I’ll have a statue of him somewhere,” she replies, smiling proudly about her boy growing up and taking the world.
That night, they watch TV together as someone, somewhere makes the best mistake possible and the gates are opened. He must just have arrived in Berlin and yet there she sees him in on the screen, beating down the thing that has been torturing her brother for too long.
Her thoughts wander to Berlin and she knows he’s in pain right now. She’s so very sorry. She knows it’s the liberating kind and hopes he’ll be better soon. It’s the first time in ages that she feels like her hopes are not just empty dreams Paris would laugh at her for.
When she finds out that Paris has been asking about him, she does more than write a sporadic letter for the first time in a very long time and calls him to tell him about her boy, her saviour in red and gold, with his gift for words and his compassion for their kind. They both watch him flitting between Berlin and Leipzig, all three of them regularly returning to him in their conversations and Berlin watches them indulgently as they bond over loving the same person in different ways, smiling over them referencing each other in their letters and calls.
None of them share their people’s fervour in their optimism, they’re all too old, have seen too much and know too well that the future won’t be completely happy. Nevertheless, all over the Germany, both of them, the Cities sit back, smile and heave a long sigh of relief. The road ahead of them is long and hard, but they’ll make it, they’ll have to.