A Syrian Communist Alone in Berlin

What does it mean to be a communist in Syria? Away from the clichés of appearance – the shaggy hair, the scraggly beard, far away from the red scarf and Ziad Al-Rahbani’s “Abu Ali Music’ and the classics of Shiekh Imam, far deeper issues are contemplated, with daily recurring debates about dialectics and analysis of ‘the national question.’ Some hollow quotes from Marx and Lenin and yet more quotes from Ziad Al-Rahbani’s shows and plays; all these are aspects known to everyone.

Even criticizing these aspects will never exempt you from accusations of being merely a “wannabe” communist, with criticism of these aspects of Syrian communism becoming in turn a new characteristic itself among older leftists, though the communism of these older leftists who lived through the Soviet Union era, runs deeper and the quotes become more eloquent, with a greater frequency of citations of Marx and Lenin and a more notable knowledge of Russian and Latin American literature In all the previous cases, the Syrian communist– especially before the revolution – will always be surrounded by others who share the same views, having the same conversations and debates daily, with no external input or new ideas to bring any sort of progress to the debates.

As a communist, being surrounded always by fellow communists gives you a sort of psychological shelter; here you can easily speak about Lenin and Marx and criticize any religion without any fears of facing “The Others” meaning in this context the whole society and its scorching sun. This mandatory auto-isolation that the Syrian communist imposes on himself makes him a prisoner of theories– more especially when we are talking about those born and raised as communists.

These theories become, after a while, indisputable truths, and anyone who attempts to question or criticize them can automatically be accused of ignorance or hostility to Marxism for many different reasons such as class affiliation, ideological or religious bias or societal motives. Whatever the assumed reasons, our comrade will never take all those Imperialist efforts seriously. The most spirited defense of these theories would appear when talking about the Soviet Union, where every single communist in my country believed that it was a paradise for the poor and the working class, dismissing any reports of corruption or poverty there as being no more than feeble attempts at deception disseminated by imperialist powers to besmirch the purity of this workers’ paradise.

Coming from such a fertile environment for credulity, it was a shock to find myself – the eternal communist dreamer – without my comrades, alone in Berlin, the city which just 25 years ago represented the peak of the clash between the Socialist Eastern bloc and the ‘Capitalist-Imperialist’ Western bloc. Suddenly finding myself cast adrift without my ‘dialectic’, without the quotes of Marx and Lenin and the music of Ziad Al-Rahbani, it was unsettling to be confronted by the naked truth. I found myself living on Bernauer Street only a couple of meters from the famous Berlin wall, in what was previously known as ‘East Berlin,’ long lauded in Syria as the earthly Paradise of the proletariat and working class Utopia, where I could open my window to peer out at West Berlin, the home of colonial imperialist capitalism, etc.

Berlin was for decades bisected by that ugly wall dividing the homes in that single neighborhood, as in others, between East and West for decades, from just after World War II up until 1990, with power in the different sectors of the city having been divided at the Yalta conference of 1945 between the then-Soviet Union on one side and the US, UK and France on the other. Thus the situation remained for decades until the momentous uprising by the people of Berlin in 1989 that smashed the hated wall, leading to a meeting of representatives from the four aforementioned powers in Berlin in 1990, when all four agreed to give up any political power for their countries in Berlin or any other part of Germany.

The last time we debated this issue in Syria – a debate which we never had the time or luxury to resume after the Syrian revolution began in March 2011, consuming all our available time and energy – it was decided that, by giving up its presence in Germany, the Soviet Union was betraying the proletariat and the sweat of the laboring class. This, we decided, should be considered an act of appeasement to the imperialists and a major blow to us as communists. Back then, if anyone had told me that dozens of residents of East Berlin perished in a desperate attempt to escape to the Western half of the city, I would have simply dismissed this as another attempt by imperialist haters to slander the greatest societal experience in recent human history.

Alone in Berlin and far away from that bubble of ‘Red isolation,’ however, I found myself solemnly standing in front of the wall here in Bernauer Street which is still filled with heartbreaking photographs of families jumping from the windows of their apartments in a desperate attempt to escape to the West of the city. In this area, the streets are dotted with metal plaques marking the ends of tunnels dug by residents in more efforts to escape to ‘the West.’ There are countless photographs and memorials to people who lost their lives attempting to escape.

The wall itself consisted, during that period, of two barriers separated by a ‘death strip’ sown with landmines and dotted with guard towers; even now, a quarter of a century after the wall was torn down, the scene has a strong sense of the terror and subjugation imposed by that hateful edifice, with the sense of oppression still quite overwhelming. Initially when I saw the memorials to the escapees and heard about the heritage of oppression, corruption and humiliation in what was known ironically as the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik or DDR in German), I was disbelieving; the most pressing question that came t me was, how could anyone want to escape from this earthly Paradise? I had lived for so long with accounts of the blissful life enjoyed by residents of the former socialist states of East Europe that it was hard to believe that this had simply been an illusion, a lie.

In reality, people were risking their lives to escape this ‘Paradise’ and ‘Utopia of equality’ for the ‘capitalist inferno’ and home of ‘greed and avarice.’ Twenty-four years since the reunification of Germany, it is clear that what was destroyed in 1990, in addition to the actual Berlin wall itself, was the wall of fear and oppression. Despite the long efforts to repress the human instinct for freedom and prevent sunlight from entering, the reality is that people abandoned the ‘Red Paradise’ in their droves and in the end the dawn came and the daylight could no longer be shut out, however greatly it was hated by the fearful and ignorant.

Profilo dell'autore

Mohammad Abu Hajar

Mohammad Abu Hajar è un attivista, giornalista e musicista siriano. Ha fatto il master in Economia politica alla Sapienza - Università di Roma. Scrive dal 2007.
Mohammad Abu Hajar is a Syrian activist, journalist and musician.
He had his master's in political economics from Sapienza university of Rome; he writes since 2007.
محمد ابو حجر، ناشط، صحفي و موسيقي سوري حصل على درجة الماستر في الاقتصاد السياسي من جامعة سابينزا في روما، يكتب المقالات منذ عام 2007

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