Time Out of Time

I was perched, fully clothed, on Erich Honecker’s toilet seat, hoping for the night to end. My friend Isa was turning fifty and she’d invited every Berliner of her acquaintance from the over three decades she’d lived in the city to her birthday party. But it was 3 a.m., and the attendees seemed to have gone past their second winds, onto third and fourth winds. Beer after beer after gin-und-tonic after bottle of mineral water were gulped. There were over one hundred guests, more than at many weddings I’d attended.

The year was 2018, long past then German Democratic Republic (GDR) President Honecker’s 1989 resignation and the opening of the wall between East and West Berlin a month later, but Isa was helping to organize PR for the World Para-Athletics European Championships taking place in the Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn Sportpark, built in 1951 to train the Soviet sector’s best athletes. She wanted a big, splashy venue for her big birthday celebration, but she also didn’t want to pay a big, splashy price. Her employers agreed to let her use the top-floor celebrity suite of the stadium if she did all of the setup and postparty cleaning herself.

Hours before, I had found myself first in shorts and a T-shirt, hanging a disinfecting bar at the back of that toilet bowl, helping prepare for the festivities. It was murderously hot. Over the preceding decade or so, Berlin’s summer temperatures have soared, which isn’t a surprise given climate change, but is unwelcome given the city-wide dearth of air-conditioning and other means of cooling. The Sportpark also had no air-conditioning units, or even GDR-era ceiling fans, to bring down the interior heat. Beads of sweat from my forehead plinked into the water as I cleaned.

The bathroom was not spectacular, to my mind: a white porcelain toilet, matching sink, and bidet, all with chrome fittings. But to Honecker and his guests in the 1980s, it might have seemed the height of GDR–Central Committee luxury, set apart from the rest of the stadium’s facilities, opening off of a private salon that probably had held a sofa and chairs and tables for intimate conversations and toasts away from the rest of the stadium’s crowds.

When we gathered, in 2018, there were no sofas or chairs or tables. The stadium was empty of any furnishings because it was slated for demolition the next year (in a twist, the plans to renovate were delayed and it still stands). Although I could imagine Honecker and his cronies in the official spaces, I couldn’t see how they actually looked back in the pre-1989 world of East Berlin. As the party got underway and reached its drunken apex, I found a place to lie down outside on a concrete floor, still warm from the day’s sun. But as the night’s chill took over, I hid in the bathroom, the only place with a seat to sit on, listening to Germans laugh, yell, and sing to “Single Ladies.”

My friend was having her party in a stadium that had once seen superb athletes train for global competitions, while I was lost in my own past, remembering a time in which I didn’t understand who I was competing against—myself, my peers, or my own husband.

Before arriving in West Berlin, I was a college student, a political-science major. I took classes from scholars and statesmen. In one seminar, former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft talked with us about nuclear détente; in another, former national security advisor Anthony Lake unpacked US foreign policy during Vietnam. Senior year, I interned at a Washington, DC, think tank, which led to a job offer that included free tuition at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. But I was also dating a cadet at the US Military Academy. Like me, John was a political-science major, and we met at a Model United Nations conference.

When we decided to get married, we agreed he would accept an assignment in Colorado, where I’d accepted a job in academic publishing. But in 1985 he was given the option of an assignment in West Berlin, and he took it.

I knew West Berlin was not just separated from East Berlin, but inside East Germany, or the GDR, which had grown out of the Soviet Union’s allotted quarter of Germany from the 1945 joint occupation, formalized in the Quadripartite Agreement in 1971. And I knew West Berlin was surrounded by a wall, that we would be more restricted than East Berliners traveling in the GDR or to other Iron Curtain countries.

What I didn’t know, and maybe couldn’t have known, is that what would restrict me was not a border or a wall or a government, but my own status. In January 1986, I entered Berlin on a military passport—because I was on official military travel—that identified me as Family Member 03, Dependent Wife.

The US military did not invent the concept of “dependent wife” any more than it invented the concept of the “camp follower,” which might be the first phrase used by European residents of the North American territories for a woman who chose to tag along with soldiers for purposes of sex work or romantic attachment.

Or perhaps just for human kindness. The West Point Cemetery has a sign designating the grave of Margaret Corbin, one of the women who perhaps inspired the story of “Molly Pitcher,” a kind of catchall term for women who would rush to the aid of Revolutionary War combatants with water when they called “Molly, pitcher!” Over the centuries, the US Army and US government went back and forth on enlisted soldiers being able to marry, as well as what rations and other benefits any army wives could receive. It wasn’t until World War II that the War Department began offering allowances and housing to the wives and children of all ranks on active duty, having decided “the army takes care of its own.”

The old saw is that if the army wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one. It persists because it’s true. An army isn’t meant to cope with spouses and kids. And if it’s going to cope with them because they exist no matter what, at least they can be left behind living their nonessential lives while the combatants do the necessary work of protecting civilization.

I’m all for our army providing support for families; I wish for more of that support, not less. But until we landed in West Berlin, I didn’t understand that this support is not a given. To be honest, I didn’t understand army life much at all. The only version of army life I’d experienced was the one lived by John and his friends who had grown up as children of uniformed West Point professors. These families inhabited large, stately red-brick quarters with views of the Hudson River and its Highlands. Due to its geographic isolation, West Point has a bucolic, small-town feel. At the time my now in-laws lived there, it offered everything from a swimming pond to a bowling alley to a veterinary clinic, everything the academy presumed families needed.

Not only was West Point designed as a haven for military families, it was an intellectual citadel, staffed by officers who were academics, with higher degrees from elite universities. Once wholly devoted to the study of engineering, by the late twentieth century, West Point offered a well-rounded education that included the option of majoring in a humanities discipline. This was not the army of “grunts” and oil-stained fatigues in motor pools that I would encounter in Germany and later at other stateside posts; it was an army of intelligentsia in which studious department chairs were as revered as four-star generals.

The army wives at West Point I met before my marriage were, in a sense, faculty wives. I was in awe of my own professors and their families, and imagined that these couples at West Point led lives like theirs, a failure of the imagination for which I’m still paying. While my future father-in-law had taught computer science, my future mother-in-law had raised three children, belonged to several volunteer organizations, and run the family’s social calendar.

On the occasions when I was invited to a dinner party or other gathering given by John’s parents or his faculty advisor, I studied everyone closely. Who seemed well dressed and who seemed frumpy? Whose table settings were quietly elegant and whose were a little hasty? I’d bought a copy of The Army Wife Handbook and I learned from it that these things mattered. They mattered so much, the book said, that any misjudgment might affect my spouse’s career.

I grew up as and was educated as a feminist, but I also grew up on the other side of the mountain, which might as well have been the other side of the railroad tracks when it came to social class. I wasn’t so much fascinated by the military world as I was by a more genteel world, one in which college degrees mattered more than vocational training and the wider world mattered more than running into your best friend from kindergarten at the supermarket. I fell in love with John, but I also idealized his world. I rebelled against convention, but I also thought I could balance the better parts of it with life as a modern woman.

As one-time military spouse Lily Burana wrote in her memoir I Love a Man in Uniform, “Being married to the military is not always fun, and is not always safe. But when has hardship ever dampened conviction? Nothing steels your sense of purpose like a challenge or two.” Without much knowledge of what being married to the military means, I thought that my steely sense of purpose had to do with challenges to myself and my own dreams. I hadn’t reckoned on what John’s dreams meant for me, because I thought his military service had a hard deadline.

Once he had graduated and been commissioned as a second lieutenant, my husband owed the army five years of service for his West Point education. Because he was in the top tier of his class, and won its political-science department’s overall award, I assumed that he planned to follow in his father’s footsteps and pursue an academic career. I daydreamed about how I would decorate our first West Point quarters and how, at some point, he’d be out of the army and I would also have a PhD and we would get jobs at a bucolic, family-friendly college somewhere interesting, raising our children and guiding undergraduates into equally serene, fulfilling lives.

According to my husband, I never discussed any of this with him. But he has a poor memory. And he has allowed his political-science award, a silver water pitcher engraved with his name and graduation year, to turn fully black with tarnish in a corner of our garage.

We were married on December 28, 1985, a date set so that I could accompany my new husband on that military-travel flight to Berlin a few weeks later. On Christmas Day, my mother-in-law-to-be presented me with a dark-green apron that read “Army Wife: The Toughest Job in the Army.” It was her way of welcoming me into the fold, but also alerting me to my responsibilities.

I both loved and loathed the gift. I had stumped for Mondale/Ferraro, volunteered at a local abortion clinic, and annually warbled peace ballads at Pete Seeger’s Great Hudson River Revival. Fellow writer and army-spouse Simone Gorrindo also admits to an upbringing as a progressive, Bay-area peace protester. Her 2024 memoir The Wives has her describing herself as growing up with a father who had a “pacifistic” core philosophy: “and I’d inherited it, whole cloth, straight from the protest song that shouted out from our record player: War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.”

But maybe, just maybe, I could have the best of both worlds: an academic life, and a love of a husband whose training gave him integrity and purpose. John was handsome and trustworthy; he was also funny, brainy, and affectionate. How could I reconcile a life in the diabolical military-industrial complex with the values I’d embraced in college? Maybe it was this simple: I fell in love. Somehow that love acts as a Vaseline-smeared lens, blurring ideological and political differences.

At my military wedding, held in the lofty Cadet Chapel, I walked arm in arm with John under an arch of sabers held aloft by six second lieutenants. Just as we passed the final pair, one of them—whom I knew well—turned his to its flat side and hit me on my satin-covered backside. “Welcome to the army, Mrs. Patrick” he said, with a wink.

Before I knew it, another pair of lieutenants was meeting us at Tegel Airport and saying “Welcome to the US Army, Berlin,” but after that, they didn’t talk to me. They had a lot of information for John before his first duty day, so as we sat over an inexpensive Chinese lunch, they focused on him as I rolled and unrolled the paper from my chopsticks, trying to pretend, through my jet lag, that I was listening too.

Most of us repress something, though it’s rarely as consequential as Christa Wolf turning traitor to her artist friends. What I repressed, while we lived inside of the Berlin Wall, was my own ambition.

Two weeks later—two weeks spent in a minimally furnished guesthouse room with all of the charm but none of the camaraderie of a youth hostel—we were given the keys to our first apartment, at the southern end of the American sector. The brutalist buildings ranged from four to eight stories and were so unappealing that I wanted to cry. But I’d already cried my tears in that guesthouse. Now, I thought, it was time to go about making a home.

Until we walked into the third-floor stairwell apartment door, we couldn’t see that the view from the apartment’s south-facing windows was the the wall itself. We could see our side, their side, and the no-man’s-land in between, regularly patrolled by vicious-looking dogs. We could also see, almost directly, into an East German guard tower, just as brutalist in materials and form as our new building, but perhaps without as much thought from a group of architects.

If I stood on our concrete balcony, I could look at the tower and see the guard inside. I remember that the first time I did so, my heart caught in my throat. Could that guard see me? Could he see all of us, every day, if he wanted to? Could he see my husband in his battle-dress fatigues leaving each morning? Could he see me waiting for the bus that ferried us north to buy groceries at the commissary? Did he watch the high-school softball games held on the athletic field right below our apartment?  

Where did he go when his shift ended and a colleague took his place? Was he young or old? Married or single? I imagined, especially after my first trip or three into the sanctioned parts of East Berlin, that all East Germans lived in high-rise Brutalist buildings similar to ours, but much, much worse, more like the ones that I’d read about in Soviet Life and other periodicals than anything akin to the cozy, interesting apartments of our West German acquaintances. I pictured cramped rooms with several family members sharing beds, kitchens with coal-burning stoves and dented kettles, lumpy sofas and propaganda calendars.

Because their lives had to be much worse than ours. We were there to make sure the Iron Curtain stayed in place and never encroached on our territory, that of the Free World. If we didn’t want their way of life, it had to be worse. Miserable. Even though I believed in freedom for every citizen in the GDR, I also believed, through my education and acculturation, that every citizen in the GDR longed for what we had on our side of the wall: freedom, choice, luxury.

My best friend from college’s mother was German, and so my friend introduced me to contemporary authors from both sides of the divided country. Walter Abish’s How German Is It; Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi; The Tin Drum by Günter Grass and other novels helped me understand the struggles Germans had with both their country’s wartime legacy and its postwar division. But Christa Wolf’s 1968 novel The Quest for Christa T. changed my view of East Germany, allowing me access to the consciousness of a creative who had lived through World War II as a teenager and then in the GDR as a young woman and committed Socialist. Since we were allowed so little contact (preferably none) with East Berliners and other East Germans, reading Wolf’s fiction was my first encounter with the inner life of the people who lived on the other side of the wall I could see from our apartment.

After six months in West Berlin, most of which I spent in the military language lab gaining conversational fluency in German, I was offered a full-time job as an editor of US Army, Berlin, regulations. A job meant my own income. If very few Berlin military spouses knew German, even fewer were employed. The unwritten contract between soldiers and their spouses (at that time, almost entirely women) was based on the idea that the soldier provided a salary and benefits (including housing), while the wife provided a home, a soft landing after days or weeks or months of training. In 1986, deployment often meant assignment to a Cold War outpost like West Berlin or South Korea; the United States was not officially at war.

Many of my peers were wholly satisfied with this arrangement, like Michelle, another lieutenant’s wife, who took me to IKEA—we still have the Billy bookcase I bought that day. Those women spent their days keeping house and their evenings cooking for and catering to their husbands, to a greater or lesser extent of contentment. I remember Michelle telling me, when her husband’s unit went “to the field” for a few weeks, that it was one of her favorite things because it meant she could just eat butter cookies for supper and relax. I will never forget the look of ecstasy on her face, how her entire body softened as she told me this. I was so newly married that I didn’t understand that in any marriage, not just a military one, you might look forward to a break from your partner and the stress of being part of a married army couple.

I had my own cookie binges when John’s unit left for field exercises, but I also had reading binges. When he was away on maneuvers, I didn’t need to cook or keep up with the laundry, so I could spend my evenings catching up on the books my friend sent by the boxful, including the 1979 paperback of The Quest for Christa T. Wolf’s novel concerns the unnamed narrator’s reminiscences and thwarted attempts to find the titular friend of her youth. They grow up together in Nazi Germany and wind up living in the GDR but lose track of each other. Eventually the narrator learns that her friend Christa died at thirty-five from leukemia. Wolf’s narrator has lived through war and peace and huge governmental change, but she longs for her friend.

Longing for an old friend: That was something I could understand, that anyone could understand. Wolf’s characters weren’t cardboard figures moving in lockstep from ugly apartment towers to ugly factories and back again, always obeying the Ampelmännchen (the comical traffic-light figure who wears an old-fashioned hat and remains a popular logo for Ostalgie, the term used for nostalgia for the old days of East Berlin). These were people who had real experiences and bonds.

It hadn’t yet occurred to me that among people in a place labeled “enemy” there might be not just dissenters but human beings.

A few weeks after we arrived, we were invited to a battalion-wide cocktail party, the first time I would meet John’s and other company commanders, their battalion commander, and any spouses. I wore a cocktail frock and wound up severely overdressed—most of the other women sported simple skirts and sweaters.

I remember moments both awkward and humorous from that evening, but what I mostly remember is how I, who had just held the spotlight as a bride, became invisible. My husband the second lieutenant was the brightly plumed songbird and I was his drab, dull mate. Everyone was excited to meet him, ask him about his education and training, ask what he thought of our new city, while I was given brief handshakes and briefer smiles. No one asked anything about me, where I came from, where I’d gone to college, what my plans were, what activities I enjoyed.

Before this party, I’d experienced many difficult emotions, including depression, rejection, and an intense and complicated courtship. But I’d never felt less than fully human, like an appendage or household pet. Was this going to be my life from now on? Who would I talk to, and how would I ever fulfill any of the ambitions that bubbled through my brain like some mad scientist’s test tubes? 

Military spouses aren’t the only ones who trail their mates. Spouses of new doctors, clergy, academics, and many corporate types also find themselves uprooted and moving to new, sometimes far away communities. Those spouses may also find themselves overlooked by their partner’s colleagues and bosses. One difference, in the late-twentieth-century milieu of army posts in Germany, was that there were very few opportunities for military spouses to make friends outside of our small communities, and even fewer opportunities for those of us who wanted to work.

Not long after that first battalion drinks party, I was invited—instructed, really—to attend my first officers’-wives’ coffee. In 2024, groups of spouses segregated by rank scarcely exist in the US military, but in 1986 West Berlin they were a staple of the command hierarchy. Once a month a unit’s spouses gathered at one woman’s home for hot beverages, snacks, information about everything from crises to shopping expeditions, and, of course, gossip.

I use the term “gossip” loosely, since we all knew, in the words of the World War II saying, that loose lips sink ships. In Cold War Germany, even if you thought, for instance, your husband was simply buffing up equipment for parades, he might be involved in some kind of intelligence work. The conversation centered on the few things most of the women shared, chief among them weddings, housekeeping, and children.

At twenty-two, I’d known a few pregnant women, but most of my friends were also twenty-two and busy staying on birth control so they could go to graduate school, build careers, and travel. I knew little about the process of gestation, less about labor, nothing at all about infants. Everyone sat on sofas and rearranged dining-room chairs to sip weak coffee, take “just a bite” of cake, and talk about their worst childbirth stories.

“I never ever thought I’d recover from that episiotomy!” exclaimed one captain’s wife. “The OB didn’t even tell me he was going to cut me. It hurt for months and months.” Others chimed in with details of their own episiotomies, all of which sounded traumatic. I felt a bit faint, not because I was prudish about anatomy, but because I hated the thought of blood, tissue, and stitches. I forked up a large portion of chocolatey “Better than Sex” cake. These were war stories from a battlefield I hadn’t yet visited.

Only a year before, I’d spent hours and hours talking with my college classmates about Walter Benjamin, modern British poetry, and Reaganomics. We’d also talked about what was for dinner that night, who was going to aerobics class, and what to do for spring break, but we had the time and leisure to turn things over and over again, privileges we took too much for granted. I hadn’t realized how short the era could be for women to have those kinds of conversations.  

John and his colleagues didn’t necessarily discuss critical theory or talk about the concept of “prisoner’s dilemma,” but that’s because they were actually engaged in the real work grounded by those ideas. They were allowed to engage in that real work, encouraged even, and given the chance to continue learning about it and progressing through the ranks as far as they could go. Meanwhile, one of my military-spouse friends was perfecting her recipe for a make-ahead chicken casserole, while another worried that she’d gained too much weight and started a “cabbage soup” diet that made her a very gassy companion. Everything—everything—revolved around “the men” and their comings and goings and laundry and showers and promotions and salaries and favorite beers and preferred athletic teams.

“Lucky you!” my mother-in-law exclaimed as we sat at the airport in January 1986. “He’s taking you to Germany!” She was no doubt thinking about her own flight to that country in 1960, my father-in-law just promoted to captain, their first child a toddler. All I could think, although I did not say so, was that I was perfectly capable of moving to Germany on my own if I so wished. I didn’t need a man as catalyst.

But maybe I did. Maybe I was complicit in my own captivity. And maybe that captivity, like a coliseum filled with gladiators chained up awaiting their next opponents, included my real competition: my fellow army wives.

Sometime last year we watched the Netflix series Kleo, about a young woman of the same name whose family ties to the highest levels of the GDR (Erich Honecker’s wife, Margot, is her aunt) bring about her career as a spy. Once the Berlin Wall comes down, Kleo discovers she’s been set up, and she sets about exacting revenge on her betrayers.

Kleo lives in her grandparents’ peaceful villa, real estate in keeping with her grandfather’s high military rank. The villa is decorated in a slightly wacky, although authentic, style, replete with heirloom Biedermeier pieces too delicate for the large-scale wallpaper prints, as if Wes Anderson had created sets for a movie in East Berlin. The episodes reminded me of Christa Wolf’s writing. Like Kleo—at least, Kleo at the start of the show—Wolf was an unrepentant Socialist, one who wholeheartedly believed in the East German dream. She was also, unfortunately, someone who had spent time in the early 1960s informing on her fellow creatives, actions that she claimed to have repressed when her deeds were disclosed in the 1990s.

Most of us repress something, though it’s rarely as consequential as Christa Wolf turning traitor to her artist friends. What I repressed, while we lived inside of the Berlin Wall, was my own ambition. I knew I didn’t want to compete over throwing dinner parties or decorating, but I had no idea how to escape my boundaries and pursue a writing career.

One of the restrictions placed on those of us who lived in Berlin under the umbrella of the US Command was that, in order to travel outside of the Iron Curtain, we either had to drive six hours on a designated highway at a designated speed, fly out of a particular airport on a specific airline, or take a trip on a specially designated railroad. The Duty Train, as it was known, departed from the Berlin Lichterfelde station between 8 and 9 p.m., making its very slow way overnight past the checkpoints until reaching the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof at the uncomfortable hour of 6 or 7 a.m. The Soviet military controlling “the corridor” that included all three checkpoints must have wanted to make it as difficult as possible for anyone connected with the Western allies to leave Berlin.

To board the Duty Train, we had to have our passports and military identification cards, as well as reservations—not easy to come by, since everyone wanted to make the most of weekends and leave time to travel in Western Europe. Once inside and safe in a sleeping compartment, we’d have our documents checked by US military police, who would instruct us to pull down the blackout shades on the windows. “Those must be kept down until you pass Checkpoint Alpha,” they’d caution. After they exited the cars, several elderly German men would push metal trolleys up and down the aisles. “Cooofffeee, teaaaaaa, marble cake!” was their refrain, a reminder that, if you hadn’t brought your own snacks, bad caffeine and cellophane-wrapped carbohydrates were your only friends.

On one trip, by myself, headed to visit a friend in Paris, I couldn’t sleep. In the middle of the night, as the slow train made one of its required stops in East Germany, I dared to peek out of the rigid shade. I saw large dogs, tall black boots, swishing skirts of wool uniform coats, the stuff of John le Carré novels and my fearful nightmares. I put the shade back. I wasn’t sure if I could handle more.

In 1988, my friend Catherine—ironically, a friend from the hometown I’d fled for college and marriage—convinced me to take a trip to Vienna with her. If I had done what I was supposed to do, I would have taken the official Duty Train from Berlin to Frankfurt, then gotten a train from Frankfurt to Vienna. But after two and a half years of doing what I was supposed to do, I rebelled. I decided to take a regular train directly to Vienna with Catherine, traveling on my civilian passport.

That train would stop in several East German and Czechoslovakian cities before reaching Austria. I felt goosebumps as we rode through so-called “enemy” territory. At Dresden, a young couple, a man and a woman, entered our compartment and took seats across from us. Her name was Bärbel. His name was Max. They were so normal. If I’d remembered or cared about my various military-spouse and civil-service training sessions, I would have stopped to think: Are they so normal? Or did they somehow know I was connected to the US forces? Were they engaging with me in order to find out more?

We probably started talking because someone wanted the window open, or because someone offered to share a bag of snacks. At the time, due to my language-lab work, my German was at a high conversational level, and Catherine’s was fluent. The four of us were soon engrossed in subjects ranging from the silliness of Vienna’s Prater amusement park to the dangers of pesticides.

I didn’t remember. I didn’t care. I just wanted to be a twenty-five-year-old on a train with a friend, exploring Europe. I just wanted to talk with some fellow passengers and learn something about the kinds of lives I so rarely got to see. I was curious. I was rebellious.

Maybe I was also clueless, but nothing dramatic happened that day, or afterward. I did ask questions about how and where the East Germans lived, what kind of furniture they owned, what they cooked for dinner, where they’d gone to university, all sorts of questions that sound nosy to me today but at the time just seemed like idle chitchat, even idler because we all assumed we’d never see each other again. Catherine, in Berlin to attend music school as a violinist, discovered Max played saxophone. While they talked music, Bärbel and I talked politics.

I can tell you a little bit about our conversation, things like we both loathed President Reagan’s foreign policy, we both had concerns about natural resources, that kind of thing, but what was important about it lay in how hungry I was to have that kind of discussion, one that was wide-ranging and well-informed, not restricted to news from the Stars and Stripes paper or the Armed Forces Network. It was the kind of dialogue I’d dreamed about having when I learned that John and I would be moving to Berlin, and found so little of among the people we lived in close quarters with in the American community. I certainly never had the same kind of talk in trips on the Duty Train.

John and I left West Berlin in July 1989, flying to Vienna for a week’s vacation with my voice teacher and his family before returning to the United States. On November 9, 1989, we awoke to early-morning phone calls from our friends still in Berlin, shouting that the wall was open, that people from both sides were swarming to greet each other. Germany would be reunified. A country and its capital city, East Germany and East Berlin, would cease to exist.

I’ve returned to Berlin four times in the past thirty-five years and I’ve seen a different city each time. On New Year’s Eve 1989, it was triumphant. In the fall of 1991, chastened and tense, East and West facing reunification challenges. Berlin in 2006 was glamorous and sleek, while in 2018, the city felt much quieter and more reserved, perhaps in part due to the growing right-wing support in Germany’s eastern regions.

I wish I could return to Berlin every year. Part of why I haven’t done so has stemmed from my continued and largely subconscious commitment to my own captivity as a good military spouse. Why should I get to visit this incredible place on my own when John has to work, or doesn’t think we have the money for travel, or wants to go somewhere else instead?

What holds us to systems that don’t want us? The East German regime didn’t want artists like Christa Wolf, even when they took part in the regime’s darkest tasks. Even an artist who has compromised herself can wind up changing her allegiance.

The army didn’t want wives in general, and certainly not a wife like me, who constantly questioned the institution, both at work and at home. Most companies know that disgruntled employees can sour their peers. When I put a bumper sticker on our little VW Golf that read “Be All That You Can Be: Work for Peace,” John insisted that I take it off. “Other people will think it’s bad,” he said.

Why did I have to care what other people thought?

The truth is, I didn’t just want to find another way. I wanted to have it both ways. I wanted to be able to espouse my beliefs while also benefitting from a system built on very different beliefs.

I thought Berlin had nothing to teach me, when it actually taught me everything. That is the dark side of a spoiled youth. I thought I was opening all the doors, refusing to admit that I had support and privilege and more than a little luck to use as keys.

When I told our younger daughter how rough I’d found it as an army wife, she said, “You knew what you were signing up for.” She wasn’t correct, but her comeback made me think about how little anyone knows about what it means to be an army wife besides those who have been one. Not even our army “brats” understand the heavy load “milspouses” carry.

Much has been made in recent years about how much emotional labor women and femmes handle in our relationships. Take that emotional labor and add to it frequent solo parenting (some milspouses I know, especially in these past two decades of war and conflict, have been solo parents for years at a time), separation by hundreds and thousands of miles from family and friends, scant employment possibilities, and the heart-squeezing knowledge that your active-duty soldier could be sent into danger with very little notice, and you have a recipe for stress, anxiety, depression, and more.

And yet, we stay. We stay for love, and loyalty, and reasons we can barely whisper to ourselves in the dead of night: What would I do if I left? Where would I go? Who am I without this marriage? What about our children? It’s the dark side of a life touted for its service, patriotism, and community. We have to care what people think, especially when we’re far from other resources, because those people become our resources.

I had signed on willingly, even if I didn’t understand what I’d signed on for. People like Wolf, born in a town that was once in Germany and is now in Poland, living in a Germany that was once a republic, then a reich, then a Soviet Socialist Republic, must have felt like they were experiencing constant whiplash.

If I was going to accept the full humanity of East Germans, as well as my own full humanity, I was going to have to accept the dark side of both too. It isn’t enough to smile at Wolf’s memories of having a glass of wine at lunch with a friend and say, “Oh, they were people too!” Like army wives, East Germans had complicated lives. If you were approached by the Stasi to provide information on fellow artists, it doesn’t mean you were frankly told something along the lines of “Give us these names or we will kill everyone you love!” It might have started as an amusing anecdote about a colleague shared over a glass of wine at lunch.

It might have started over a glass of beer pulled from the pretty pastel ceramic tap in Erich Honecker’s stadium party rooms. No matter the era, Berlin is a city filled with secrets, lies, and spies, through a combination of geography, politics, and culture. Many of the people at my friend’s party were born after 1961 and either lived behind the wall or didn’t know a different Berlin until late into their twenties, just like those of us sent there as soldiers and spouses in the 1980s.

As I sat on Honecker’s porcelain throne, contemplating a very expensive Uber ride back to my friends’ house on the other side of the city, I also contemplated my relationship to Berlin. It was my first home as a young adult, as a married woman, as an army wife. It was a place through which I had to define myself: “Home is where the army sends you.” It was a place where I was able to live in comfort thanks to my husband’s service and status, and then even further comfort thanks to my ability to gain a good job.

I thought Berlin had nothing to teach me, when it actually taught me everything. That is the dark side of a spoiled youth. I thought I was opening all the doors, refusing to admit that I had support and privilege and more than a little luck to use as keys.

Christa Wolf never rejected democratic socialism. I have never rejected our national defense. I thought the East German system was flawed. Many people think our national-defense system is flawed. If I learned anything from living in Berlin when it was a divided city, I learned that everyone thinks they want to be on the free side, partying until late, but not everyone wants the responsibility of cleaning up the resulting mess.

After we left and moved back to the United States to start our respective graduate programs, John seemed to forget all about having lived overseas, while I couldn’t think about anything else. He was focused on building a career as an army lawyer and receiving the right promotions to secure his military pension, while I could think of nothing besides when we might be able to return to Europe. We never got that chance. Even after hoping for an assignment to Würzburg in 2000, we remained stateside. They sent John back to Central Texas, a place where various “Bloom where you are planted” samplers I saw made me wither like a hothouse rose on a sunny windowsill.

What saved me, as usual, was reading. In 2010, New Directions published Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Visitation. My aforementioned college friend, who specialized in academic books that often involved literature in translation, also recommended Erpenbeck. “She’s brilliant,” said my friend. “This book says more about Germany than the thickest volume of history.”

I’ve loved all of Erpenbeck’s work, including 1999’s The Old Child, 2017’s Go, Went, Gone, and, of course, Visitation. But it wasn’t until 2023’s Kairos that I felt resonance, heavy and real. A very young woman and an older married man, both GDR residents, engage in a long affair that leaves them both dissatisfied. Katharina, at nineteen in the late 1980s, believes that fiftysomething Hans, a writer, will fill her with capital-K Kultur and sophistication. Instead, he fills her with his-and-hers self-loathing.

To some critics, the Greek Kairos signifies just the right time for something, leading them to discuss how the end of the GDR and Germany’s reunification follows Katharina and Hans on a sad trajectory. But my definition for Kairos, derived from literary studies, is the concept of “time out of time.” Erpenbeck was writing about an affair because, like a forty-year dictatorship, an affair exists in a strange vacuum that comes fully alive only between its beginning and end.

Like Erpenbeck’s female protagonist, I was terribly young when I went to live between the walls that defined the first years of my marriage. Recently, a friend who spent quite a bit of time at our Berlin apartment when she wanted to escape from graduate studies at the London School of Economics, came to visit me in Washington, DC. We met at a bookstore coffeeshop and talked in circles for a couple of hours before she got to her point.

“That time in Berlin,” she said, hesitating, after we switched from coffee to wine. “Was it all a dream?”

I knew what she meant. She wasn’t trying to say that Berlin was magical, or that there hadn’t been hardship there, whether for me, or for East Germany. She was trying to articulate, thirty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, how weirdly artificial the divide between East and West Berlin felt, how strange it was for us to stuff ourselves with delicious food at East Berlin establishments like the Restaurant Ganymed or Die Goldener Gans and pay pennies on the dollar, or what it was like to stroll along a suburban street and find yourself staring at the wall.

The day after my friend Isa’s birthday party, I walked the scant two blocks from her house to the Mauerweg, The Wall Trail, which is the pleasant and pastoral paved path around the once-divided city. Wildflowers proliferate. Butterflies veer here and there. You might never know that you are ambling along what used to be a deadly zone.

What Jenny Erpenbeck and I understand is that the Mauerweg at Lichtenrade is far from the first site of grief and pain in that place. Scratch just a tiny bit and you’ll find the history of Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp where the Nazis tortured prisoners. In Visitation, Erpenbeck used fiction to excavate a seemingly pleasant Berlin-adjacent lakeside home back through its layers in history, demonstrating that even the rigidly organized Nazi evils were far from the only evils, tragedy, and torment that home had seen.

Everyone wants to own something. A country house. A nation-state. A spot on a bench at the train station after a long day’s work. An identity as someone’s spouse. Even in a socialist regime, no one believes that there’s enough to go around. We’re constantly playing games of musical chairs, rushing to claim our seats and knowing that as we do, someone will be left standing.