Seven Lies by James Lasdun

Author:James Lasdun
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781407093529
Publisher: Random House
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

After I left Humboldt, I worked for a government organisation creating posters promoting ‘Peace, Friendship and Anti-Imperialist Solidarity’. The posters were put up in schools, offices, hospitals and other public places. Sometimes they solicited donations for Account 444, a public fund set up to support developing countries, but their main intent was to foster an image of the GDR as a beacon of conscience in a cynical and dangerous world. Given the historic idealism of my countrymen, who enjoy nothing better than the sensation of exclusive occupancy of the high ground in any landscape, moral or otherwise, this was not a difficult task. Even the dissident types I was soon to meet approved of our campaign. It takes a dubious sophistication to object to a poster condemning apartheid, on the grounds that the body condemning it isn’t exactly a picture of health itself. At any rate we didn’t trouble ourselves with such scruples, and other than the faint background suspicion that everything one could do in that land was inherently tainted with futility and fraudulence (our equivalent, perhaps, of the so-called ‘hum of life’, the G-sharp that whines when all other noises stop), the work was free of the more obvious kinds of stress.

Liaising between a state committee – the Solidaritätskomitee der DDR – and the Academy of Arts (whose president was a close friend of Uncle Heinrich’s), we commissioned and produced posters in support of the ANC, the Palestinians, the Laotians, the socialist opposition in Nicaragua, Chile and El Salvador and so forth. Our formula was simple: a compassion-arousing image of suffering in the third world, combined with an allusion to US imperialist culpability. A naively rendered Tree of Life, for instance, filled with delicate fruits in Sandinista colours, would stand with an air of tender pathos, about to be crushed by Uncle Sam’s boot. A small African child would sit stoically, bound in huge chains embossed with the words ‘US Steel’.

After a few months I was assigned to a group working on a series of purely anti-American posters – no pretext of supporting some other country. We showed the Statue of Liberty setting off a nuclear explosion with her torch; we had the stripes of the American flag rendered as the bars of a prison encompassing the entire planet. Anything we could think of that might stir up feelings of hatred for America was considered fair game. Hatred occupied a more reputable position in the spectrum of emotions back in the GDR than it does here in the States. I remember that among the sentiments chiselled on the walls of our assembly room at school were the words of Dr Lange, minister of education in the Soviet Zone after the war: ‘Youth must be filled with hatred for the enemies of our peaceful constructive work.’ There was nothing strange to any of us, therefore, about the idea of devoting ourselves to the arousal of this emotion in our compatriots. Our medium was the substance of righteousness itself. Handling it filled us with an almost luminous moral glow, like some benign form of radioactivity.

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