Sermon
"Why I Put on the Uniform"
Claudia Ziebis
October 31, 2004
I will take the time remaining and tell you why I put on the military uniform in the first place. It’s an intensely personal story; but, in sharing it, I hope to give you something to think about as you go to the polls.
I was about 13 when I decided to wear an American military uniform. I was in Berlin at the time. My parents and I had gotten a pass to see my father’s family in East Germany. Part of my father’s family lived in the German Democratic Republic. Part lived in the Federal Republic of Germany. The “Democratic” republic was the communist one. The “East.” Visiting the east was made easier in the early 1970s as the government of the Federal Republic began to pay the Democratic Republic to allow families to travel to the East to visit their relatives. In other words, they paid the communists a bribe to be decent human beings. So we found ourselves among dozens of divided families making their way to the checkpoints in the Berlin Wall.
Looking back on that trip, I doubt anyone was more naïve about what lay beyond the Wall than I was. I didn’t know I’d be entering a kind of never-never land, a warped fantasyland. I suppose the fact that the communist east used “democratic” in its name was a clue. But it was a clue that didn’t register. Not that I wasn’t a reasonably intelligent child. I was one of those kids that read the encyclopedia for fun. But I was a kid, and there were many things that I knew from books that I didn’t understand. So when my Dad gave me a little lecture, the kind of father-daughter talk where he talked – I listened, and asked me to refrain from saying or indicating anything that might make people in the east uncomfortable, I’m sure I said I understood and thought how stupid does he think I am? But I didn’t really understand what lay beyond that Wall.
The day before we entered the “Worker’s Paradise,” as East Germany called itself, we did some sightseeing and walked along the western side of the wall. Frequently we passed white crosses hung there. Each cross recorded someone who had died trying to escape the Democratic Republic at that spot; some had no names, just gender and date of death. Of course I felt emotion at the sight of those crosses. I knew history and politics, but I had no real understanding.
At dawn the next day, we shuffled in line into the checkpoint, passed the barbed wire, dogs, guns, soldiers. As I stood before the huge counter and reached way up to hand the guard my passport, a glimmer of understanding came.
When I felt the tenseness radiating from my father as we stood silently, side-by-side, rigidly impassive before the long table where the soldiers pulled apart the gifts we brought; when they sifted through the coffee cans to finger through it and carefully examine the inside of the cans themselves; when I read the sign listing items “verboten” posted on the wall opposite: when I read “Zeitschriften,” literally “timely writings” – news – that’s when understanding dawned.
They were not looking for weapons or drugs or money – well, they were looking for those too – but it was news, news that was so valuable, so forbidden. Newspapers, books, Speigel, Frankfurter Allgemeiner, the Reader’s Digest. More valuable than explosives, more precious than a man’s life. The world I was entering was built on what people wanted to be true. Facts, contradictions, objectivity, newspapers were lethal threats.
I had come into a world where reality took a backseat to wishful thinking; where what human senses perceived and logic dictated was not considered true. A society where the people with power ruled as though they sincerely believed that if they said something often enough, loud enough and got enough people to say it with them -- it would be real. Contradiction was dangerous. Reality was dangerous. News was dangerous. This was the German Democratic Republic. It was a democracy because everyone said it was.
After we went through the rat-maze that was the checkpoint, we found ourselves sucking-in the air on the other side. There were more relatives than I had expected. Cheek-pinching, bear-hugging relatives. For the first time in my life I was in the midst of what seemed to be a fairly large, back-slapping, teary-eyed, hug-everybody family. I’ll spare you the happy family details. And it was a happy family… but… but.
Sometime before that day I had read a short story, one of those Hitchcock-horror type stories about a cocktail party where all the people are eating hor’dourves and drinking their Manhattans, enjoying themselves; and on the floor there’s a dead body that no one acknowledges. They just act like it’s not there. All that day, I kept thinking about that story. As we trudged around seeing the sights, seeing the places Dad knew as a boy, hearing the old stories and whatever happened to so-and-so. All I could think about was that story. All I could see were the things I couldn’t comment on. All I could think about were the things I couldn’t let anyone know I thought. And the only two people who I knew realized the dead body was there too were pretending so well not to see it, so very well, that every now and then I began to have doubts as to whether they saw it at all.
I had to build a wall in my mind between what I thought and what I expressed verbally and non-verbally. I could not reveal that I knew the dead body was there. And it was so much like a corpse, this dead-corpse of a world where everyone said things were perfect and just as they should be. Crumbling, gray buildings; people communicating volumes with no words; old, old cars; old clothes. Bomb craters, heaps of rubble. Time stood still in the Democratic Republic. World War II was yesterday -- Armageddon was yesterday and there was no tomorrow.
For the citizens of the Democratic Republic saying the wrong thing to the wrong person could mean the loss of a job, a home, custody of one’s children, contact with parents; it could mean imprisonment. Nothing could disturb the slumbering fantasy world of the Workers’ Paradise – Zeitschriften sind verboten – and no one could be trusted with the secret that you didn’t see a Workers’ Paradise around you. It was a world of whispers and loud patriotic songs.
After dusk only the nucleus of the family was left in the little old house my great aunt lived in and the atmosphere began to change; voices dropped; whispers began. I felt the dead body finally, finally might be acknowledged. But our dads sent us “children” upstairs so that I could be shown “schoolwork.”
I think if the men had known what would pass among their adolescent girls in that small room, they would have rather that I had heard the voices in the dark downstairs. I was not accustomed to my mental wall. It was not strong.
I flipped through a science textbook. One that talked about how coal was a “clean burning fuel” and how fortunate the citizens of the Democratic Republic were that they had a practically inexhaustible supply of it. After all, American children in Los Angeles were dying of asthma caused by the smog of their oil-based industries. I was in a house with a dusty basement coal-bin, with windowsills covered in grime from coal-smog, with a garden of flowers dusted with the gray-brown soot of coal fires. The dead cities of the east with thousands of coal furnaces spewing brown clouds into the air were anything but “clean” and smog-free.
Something I said or something in my face must have registered my dismay. Maybe I pointed out the illogic of what I was reading, maybe I pointed out that if there was no evidence that could possibly be presented to refute the claim that coal was the cleaner burning fuel -- then that claim was not science and didn’t belong in a science book. Whatever it was, I remember struggling to collect myself and repair my mental wall.
But then came the history book. The one with the part about the Wall. The wall with the guns and the dogs, and the mines and the watchtowers. The wall that was built to …keep out the capitalist armies and the capitalist slave-workers all wanting to get into the German Democratic Republic… Immigration had to be controlled. Such a little country could not absorb so many people.
My mental wall disintegrated. My mind was not well disciplined. I was not strong enough. There were harsh words, pacing, gestures, tears, balled fists, an argument. And suddenly, there was just exhaustion for each of us. There was despair and there was fear.
And now I understood. I wasn’t the only one struggling to build a wall in my mind. But my wall had only to last a few more hours. Their wall had to last a lifetime. And it had to be as thick and as sturdy as they could build it. They had to believe the Democratic Republic was a Workers’ Paradise. If they didn’t will themselves to believe that, their misery and bitterness might betray them – their well-being, their happiness and even their survival depended on their walls. And human beings are remarkably adept at finding happiness and surviving.
I understood.
Just before the next dawn we arrived back at the checkpoint. As we got there, a truck pulled up and a few Soviet soldiers got out. I watched them as we passed, and I remember how intently I focused on them. That moment was cold and still. If I close my eyes I can still remember them just as they were – so sharp and vivid is the memory. I can smell the damp of that morning, and I can feel the accusation that overwhelmed me. This mess, this dead corpse of a world, was “all their fault.” As I turned my head and looked forward again, I saw an American in uniform. Standing there at the end of the fenced corridor. Standing for sanity. For a world where senses and logic dictated what was real. For a world without walls. For a world that was alive, very, very much alive. A world where grownups did not whisper in the dark. And I was going to wear that uniform. In that instant, I decided to wear an American military uniform -- I would stand for that world too.
I went into the German Democratic Republic a 13-year old kid who dreamed of being the next James Harriett when I “grew up.” I came out knowing that I wouldn’t be a country vet writing books about dogs.
But I was wrong about something -- it wasn’t “all their fault.” The mental walls were there long before the Wall I walked through. That horror, the Berlin Wall, would not have existed if the people who built it had not had generations of practice building walls in their minds. The destruction of the physical wall was a great and noble goal, but the job is unfinished -- the harder fight is the one to tear down the walls in our minds.
Think clearly.
Struggle to think clearly. Never believe that if you say something loud enough, often enough, or get enough people to say it with you, it’ll be real. Never deceive yourself. Never confuse wishful thinking for reality. If you cannot think of a way to prove yourself wrong, then you have not found what is real. And reality is worth fighting for – it’s what a real democratic world must have. Accurate information is the lifeblood of real democracy. And the uniform I wear must, must, always stand for real democracy.