A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

V THE LEGEND OF THE BERLIN WALL—AS PRESENTED BY A MOLE

Dear Members of the Learned Society, Distinguished Guests,

Many, many generations of Moles ago, near the place where we are right now, there stood a massive concrete structure called the Berlin Wall. The well-known Mole Legend tells us that it was erected at several periods during ancient times, starting in anno domini 1961. When it was finished in anno domini 1975, it was 3.6 meters high and 140 kilometers long. As a collector of old Legends, and being interested in archaeology, I was curious to find out how much truth (if any) this Legend contained. For example, I find it particularly interesting that Men used to dig tunnels under this very Wall, as if they were Moles themselves. Was this only an invention of our ancestors? Apparently one such tunnel is said to have been 145 meters long—an admirable achievement and length, even by our standards. A Mole like me would need some seven to ten days to dig it, but then it would not be 70 centimeters high, as this one supposedly was. We Moles don’t need such high passages, as we would call them, because, quite obviously, we are much smaller than Men. Also, it was not the habit of us Moles to “escape” from one side of the then existing Wall to the other, which, according to the Legend, was evidently what triggered the digging of the tunnel in the first place. Living in the Underland, even then we Moles used to move everywhere, politely greeting our neighbors from what Men from the Overland used to call the “Other Side.” Of course, we never cared much about their different sides, but while investigating this part of the Legend about the tunnel, I slowly came to realize why they did. Men did not descend into our world without a reason.

Why did this long tunnel fascinate us Moles? I guess that we Underland creatures felt some kind of solidarity, even pity, because to dig with clumsily built bodies and without proper tools to make up for such a shortcoming must have been an exhausting job. Moles are by nature equipped for such work; we have paws adapted for digging. But poor Men must rely upon various kinds of substitute paws, like shovels and a variety of frightening, noisy machines that—for the very specific reason of secrecy—were not available to those who dug the legendary tunnel under the Wall. It had to be dug by hand, and therefore our forefathers must have felt sorry and tried to help Men by digging in front of them, making the soil more porous—or so the Legend goes.

Allegedly, Men started to dig this tunnel in anno domini 1964, soon after the Berlin Wall was erected. Except that it was not a concrete Wall right away, but a wall made out of barbed wire. As you know, normally, when we hear people digging, we run away. They produce vibrations that are very disturbing to us. Since we don’t see very well, we are very oversensitive to sounds. We are used to silence, and to the ordinary sounds of Overland life, which we experience as a dull and hushed noise. But on that occasion the sound of their digging was almost as inaudible as ours—although, in my experience, Men are too prone to chat—and the Moles were hardly disturbed by it. I guess that our old ones were grateful for that. If I remember correctly what I was told as a youngster, and I believe that I do, the entrance into the tunnel was in a backyard toilet in the then Eastern part of Berlin. One had to descend to a depth of twelve meters! The exit hole was in the cellar of a former bakery in Bernauer Strasse, situated on the Western side. My grandma told me she heard that Moles from the surroundings would come together in order to marvel at the diggers and their commitment, while they were busy filling push-carts with earth and then taking them up to the cellar and emptying them there. According to these Moles, it took the diggers six long months to accomplish this admirable job!

It was particularly tough when the tunnel was finished and the first few people went down in order to make their “escape.” If they are not miners, Men do not go down to the Underland, and when they must, their first reaction is to panic. We know that feeling from another kind of experience—from ending up there in the Overland by mistake. It happened to me once when I thrust my head out in the wrong place—actually, in an excavation in the middle of a street with heavy traffic. I just popped out for a moment, and was immediately blinded by sunlight and deafened by the sounds of the passing cars. I still remember what a shock it was; it took me days to recover from it. I imagine that these Men descending to our Underland must have felt something similar. Passing through that tunnel must have been an extremely traumatic experience for every single one of them. Men in general are very dependent upon their eyesight; in the tunnel they could not see anything, so they had to carry some sort of light-casting device. They were afraid of suffocating, and their hearts were beating too fast. In some places they had to crawl almost like snakes, which to Moles witnessing the scene must have looked funny. There is a story about one old Man, probably the oldest in the group, who evidently suffered from claustrophobia. He fainted and had to be carried back to the toilet. But in spite of this unpleasant accident, he tried once more and succeeded, so big was his wish to leave. Another person had a heart problem and, in the middle of the tunnel, had an attack and thought that he would die there, underground. He started to yell and cry. Others in the group were petrified, fearing that guards posted along the Wall to prevent just such events would hear him. As they had advanced too far and there was no way back (Too risky? Too complicated? I do not know, but it was impossible for this reason or another.) one of the escapees put his hand over the sick Man’s mouth to prevent him from yelling. He almost killed his suffering companion. Evidently, the escapees were ready to sacrifice this unfortunate person’s life in order to save the group. If their attempt to escape had been discovered, they would have all gone to jail for many years.

In order to fully comprehend this part of the Legend, one has to know that in ancient times these Men living in the Overland were ruled by a great fear of guards and all kinds of uniformed people, as well as Men without uniforms but in powerful positions. To “escape”—i.e., to migrate without permission from the Supreme Authority called the State—was considered a grave and highly punishable offense. However, there were rumors that a certain number of Men managed to obtain such permission and could leave legally, but most of them were old and sick. The Legend does not deal with this specific issue in more detail, but it seems that they were exported just because of the reasons mentioned. It is hard to guess why the Other Side would have wanted Men in such condition if not to demonstrate its charitable intentions. But if these specific categories of Men could have served some other unknown and unimaginable purpose, this knowledge is lost now.

There were thousands of specially trained soldiers and dogs posted all along the Wall. There were 116 watchtowers in order to prevent any attempts at escape, which were anyway numerous. On this point the legend is amazingly specific: some 5,000 men managed to make it to the other side, while 72,000 were jailed for trying to escape. But there is still, to this very day, a dispute about the number of killed escapees, and various versions speak of either one hundred or two hundred. Still, because most Men were not free to leave that Overland country, they feared the police more than the soldiers posted at the Wall. In particular, they feared a kind of secret policeman whose job was to spy on ordinary Men committing any kind of “subversion” (?!) and report on them to the same Supreme Authority. Such spies were called Stasi, and their particular quality was that they were numerous and looked just like ordinary Men, so that you couldn’t tell one from the other. Consequently, as our ancestors noticed, the biggest fear of the escapees in the legendary tunnel was that one of these Stasi might infiltrate their group. Or, perhaps one of 189,000 of their “informal employees.” I must say I do not believe that there could really have been such imminent danger. This looks more like a picturesque addition to the Legend, as it is hard to believe that a Man would go into a tunnel with the sole intention of spying. Incidentally, I also learned that Men use the term “Mole” to describe such a double agent—that is, a person pretending to be a member of the group of escapees while actually working for the police. Needless to say, dear colleagues, I find that usage highly inappropriate, if not insulting.

The Legend of the Berlin Wall lives on because we Moles remembered it and passed it on to our children as a cautionary tale about how strangely Men could behave and how little we know about them. But there are some questions raised in connection with this remarkable endeavor. It seems puzzling why these Men, exactly fifty-seven of them, were so desperate to risk their lives in order to reach the cellar of a former bakery. What was hidden there? Clearly, the answer had to do with the Wall. But why was the Wall there in the first place? I mean, those two walls, of course. Because we tend to forget that there were two Berlin Walls, although the Legend mentions only that the second one was erected later on—with a strip of land in between tellingly called the “Death Strip.” It was deadly only for Men, of course, because according to some versions, there was wildlife there, such as rabbits, mice, birds, and insects, even cats, not to mention our own population. It is said that in those days we even used to mate there. Although safety is always our first priority, we could easily disappear into the Underland in the case of shooting. Unlike Men, for example. Or rabbits, for that matter.

Why that second, parallel Wall was built was something we pondered over for generations. As if one single such construction would not have been enough to prevent people from crossing over? We know that Men are great builders; they like to build all sorts of structures. We therefore assume they built that gigantic Wall in order to protect themselves from their powerful enemies. But even from our underground perspective one could tell that, in their case, there could be no other, more dangerous predators threatening them. It would be strange to have built a Wall for reasons of security. Man is a species without natural enemies, a quite remarkable fact when you come to think about it. Therefore, my hypothesis was (and later you will see why I am using the past tense here) that these two Walls, separated by a strip of wasteland some one hundred meters wide, had no other logical purpose but to divide their hunting territory. “The two walls must have been there because of hunting,” I thought.

Now, what on earth—or, as we Moles would say, what under earth!—was there on the Other Side? What kind of treasure did they want to hunt so eagerly?

In the middle of my research I met Andreas, an elderly, learned Mole who lives in what used to be the West side; as you are aware, for several generations there have formally been no sides. He happened to be the proper person to address some questions to about ancient habits in that part of the Overland. Andreas, of course, was acquainted with the Legend. “Tell me, please,” I asked, “have you found indications of why some people from the East side of the Wall wanted to go to the West?” He looked a bit surprised by my question. “Well, Tillman, have you never heard of the banana issue!?” I had to admit that I was not aware of that aspect of the Legend (by the way, it looked less and less like a Legend to me, the deeper I dug into it). And no—I had never heard about bananas. “What are bananas?” I asked Andreas. “They are a delicacy. You should imagine a banana as an exquisite, extremely succulent, tasty kind of earthworm. Even the mere mentioning of bananas makes Men’s mouth water,” he said. “Oh, I do understand that, the mere thought of a special kind of fat earthworm—and my favorite ones are megadriles from the Tubificidae family—makes my mouth water as well!” I exclaimed, happy to have learned something new.

In the old days, before the Berlin Wall went down, bananas were a very popular food among Men. “But in those days,” Andreas continued, “unlike other popular foods, there was something particular about bananas. While on the West side of the Wall (the banana side, so to speak) Men did not especially appreciate them, probably because they could indulge in them every day; on the nonbanana side they were literally dying for them.” Then he explained to me something crucial: The Men who did not appreciate such fine food enough all lived within the Wall—they were, so to speak, walled-in in West Berlin. In other words, during ancient times Berlin was a kind of prison, albeit a luxury one with plenty of megadriles—I mean, bananas! Bananas seemed to abound there, as they were sent to the prison from somewhere else, where the prisoners’ kinfolk lived. “But it doesn’t make sense that Men in a prison should have such good food like bananas, while those outside, who surely had more access to hunting, would be prepared to risk their lives in order to get it,” I remarked to Andreas. “Well, dear Tillman, don’t forget that we are dealing here with human affairs, strange to us already by definition,” he reminded me.

After this meeting I decided to look more profoundly into the enigma of bananas. I had a premonition that it might be the key to understanding why the Wall had been built. So I looked here and there and found out from varied sources that at that time bananas were so important that Men even cracked so-called banana jokes. The most popular one goes like this: Two Berliner children are speaking to each other over the Wall (but let me remark here that this was hardly possible; the Wall was much too high!). The little boy in the West says, while eating a banana, “Look, I have a banana.” The boy in the East answers: “Yes, but we have socialism!” The boy in the West counters: “We, too, will have socialism soon.” But the boy in the East says triumphantly: “Tough luck, then; you won’t have bananas anymore!”

Obviously, you had either bananas or “socialism”; the two of them didn’t grow together. But what was this socialism? “Another kind of food?” I asked myself. Based on available sources, I soon came to the conclusion that socialism must have been not food but a kind of pestilence that prevented bananas from growing in the Eastern part of the Overland.

I have to admit that the Legend about the Berlin Wall is still cryptic and confusing concerning some crucial points. But, as Andreas would say, so is most of what goes on in the Overland. In trying to think logically about this enigma of bananas—and logic is what we Moles care most about—it seemed that Men on the nonbanana side of the Wall (although I have to remind myself it would be proper to use the plural here) did everything in their rather limited power to reach the banana side. To achieve that aim they had to fight both an internal enemy, such as fear, as well as external ones, i.e., guards and the Stasi. The reason for this seems to be that Men were going crazy about these fantastic and—due to the pestilence—rare earthworms. Again, if I were to pursue a Mole’s line of reasoning, I would have to conclude that Men built the Wall(s) in order to protect themselves from that pestilence called socialism that was on the Eastern side. But the Legend tells us just the opposite! Those who built the Wall(s) were those marked by pestilence and the lack of bananas—so what were they protecting?

After having pondered a while, I thought that there could be only one answer: The Men on the nonbanana side built the Wall(s) to protect the prisoners and bananas from socialism. They surely demonstrated extraordinary care for the others, a noble characteristic of human beings. Regrettably, I cannot claim that we Moles would have done the same.

Then I had to look for Andreas again, as the two of us had another logical problem to solve. “If the building of the Berlin Wall(s) was really a protective measure against pestilence, as I believe it was, why would somebody infected by socialism try to escape into the prison, risking infecting the prisoners? Would that not be extremely irresponsible behavior? By the way, I suppose this banana hunt is the only known case of a population trying to break into a prison, not out of one,” I told him. But this time he was not very helpful. “There is not much hope that a Mole—that logical, rational creature—would ever be able to completely understand irrational, emotional, confused human beings and their deeds, Tillman,” Andreas nodded. I was not satisfied with such an abstract answer. “Isn’t it bizarre that prisoners on the banana side claimed that they were free, while those on the nonbanana side tried to jump over the Wall(s), or crawl under them, just because of their wish to move and eat freely within the prison? Again, here we have the unique case of prisoners claiming they feel free,” I insisted.

“It is not as bewildering as you believe,” Andreas said. “Imagine that you live in a territory you call a prison, but you have the possibility to get out of it if you wish, passing through—never mind how!—a tiny strip of land in the foreign territory populated by the enemy. You are not a prisoner because you can leave whenever you want. Isn’t that so?” “Yes, indeed,” I had to admit. “West Berlin was such a place,” Andreas said. “Although half the city was within foreign territory, it was still connected to a bigger, free one.” He did not explain any more about that free world, but it was a bit clearer to me why Men wanted to escape and ended up first in the prison, which was not a prison because, in the strict sense of the word, you could leave it by certain restricted routes. “And what were they searching for even beyond that West Berlin prison?” I asked Andreas. “More succulent earthworms, of course!” he replied.

After that I had no other option but to conclude that, in these ancient times of the Wall(s), what Men defined as freedom was moving from one banana place to another.

In my further research into this Legend, which more and more seemed to me to be based upon at least some historical facts, I learned that, indeed, there are further proofs of the strange behavior of Men. I mean, material evidence that cannot be disputed. For example, Men had other means of getting out of the nonbanana part of Berlin, not only through tunnels as I had thought at the beginning. They would also fly off in a birdlike machine. Or escape in a fishlike machine, if one preferred diving to flying. I heard from one Mole, who knows a Mole, who knows another Mole who heard about a Man flying such a machine, which resembles an eagle (we know a bit about that cursed marauder, the archenemy of our rabbit friends). Starting from a far-off banana place, he landed in a field in the nonbanana Overland. There his sweetheart was waiting for him. He grabbed her, as an eagle would have grabbed an unlucky Mole, and flew away with her into the sunset—as Men would probably have put it poetically. Presumably, they lived happily ever after, but this supposition belongs more to the realm of fairy tales, not to my research.

Then something occurred that made me completely change my mind about what the Legend is and what the real story is, i.e., history.

One of my acquaintances was recently snooping in the corridors of a huge dwelling near where the Wall(s) used to stand. Knowing my interest in the topic, and especially knowing my archaeological inclination, he reported to me that there he had seen a place with a lot of artifacts that ought to interest me. “A very educational place,” my acquaintance said. “That is why so many Men come to see it, presumably to learn how to escape.” Well, out of sheer politeness I did not comment upon his conclusion, although it crossed my mind to tell him how wrong it was to say such a thing. Where would Men escape to now, when the Wall(s) no longer exist and the prison called West Berlin was abolished generations ago? But I kept quiet, because it was obvious that he was pretty uninformed about human affairs and their longing for freedom. Of course, I immediately went to that place myself. I was very excited about the possibility of seeing physical proofs that the Legend about the Wall(s) was in fact not legend at all.

Even if my intention is not to exaggerate, what I happened to see there was beyond belief. In short, I saw a whole collection of devices that Men in ancient times used to transport themselves from their free Overland to the desired Berlin prison. This collection proves the existence of the Wall(s) beyond any doubt. There were huge machines on wheels called trucks, which were used to crush the turnpike at the border crossing in Friedrichstrasse. And a homemade chairlift! A father sent his small son over the Wall(s) by using this invention. Unbelievable as it is, I also saw a hot-air balloon. Imagine, in anno domini 1979 two families escaped by using it to climb twenty-six hundred meters! There was a cable drum that smuggled people, too. I was also most impressed by ordinary cars. It was amazing how a gigantic creature, such as a grown-up male or female Man, could squeeze himself or herself into a small trunk, and thus became invisible to the border guards. One kind of car was built so low that it actually passed under the horizontal bar at the checkpoint, transporting three people. Even the tunnel I just told you about is documented there! That very place, called the Museum at Checkpoint Charlie, is in reality a public registry of means for escape. Now, by putting two and two together, I arrived at a definite conclusion: 1) the Wall(s) existed; 2) Men indeed tried to get from one side to the other; and 3) it mostly took place from the East side to the West. In the registry, at least, there is not a single documented case of a person escaping from the West to the East side of the Wall.

Last but not least, I also found out that a mysterious structure 1,316 meters long, called “the Monument” (?), that can be inspected even today at a specific location close to the river Spree—is a remaining piece of the original Wall(s)! This is perhaps the proper moment to thank you, dear colleagues, for your proposal that in our Annals I should be credited as the Mole who proved the Legend about the Berlin Wall(s) to be true. I am aware that this is a great honor and a big inspiration for my future work.

One could, of course, ask how it is possible that such an important place as the registry was not discovered before. As an explanation I can only say that chance and coincidence often play an immense role in the history of discoveries.

Looking further into this, now definitely a historical matter and not only a legend, I should add that I was also able to establish how the 140-kilometer-long Wall came down, except for that small part that remained standing. Logic would tell us that one day prisoners must have decided that they had had enough of their dull life. But, unfortunately, here we Moles are dealing with the particular—I’d dare say illogical—logic of Men, which means that it happened just the other way around: Those outside decided to invade the prison. Is it really possible that seventeen million souls were choosing to move into that rather tiny West Berlin? Yes, this seems to be what really happened. Men outside the prison—free Men on the East side of the Wall(s)—came to the unusual idea of escaping to the prison in order to lay claim to all the bananas! I know how strange it must seem to you, but (to paraphrase Andreas) it is typical of Men and their sudden and unpredictable changes of mood. Moreover, there are proofs that the prisoners agreed to this obvious plunder.

One day they all met at the top of one of the Walls (closer to the West) and embraced each other! On that memorable day, the ninth of November 1989, it is documented that they hugged each other and cried a lot. Although it is not clear to me why, it must have been such a happy occasion for everyone. As a result of that emotional, even hysterical (although it is called historical) meeting on top of the Wall, it seems likely that it simply collapsed under the weight of all these millions and millions of bodies. This must have been a very melodramatic event, with many victims, but—another surprise!—victims have not been mentioned at all. Maybe this was covered up on purpose, in order not to spoil the happy event. However, it is established that the happening was a very noisy one; a terrible thud could be heard in the whole Underland, and it scared to death many of our ancients. That might be yet another reason why the “Legend” about the Berlin Wall is remembered so vividly by so many generations of Moles.

We now know that the fatal meeting on the Wall, the one that made it collapse, was named “reunion.” On that occasion, dignitaries from both sides signed the bilateral “Banana Treaty,” which solved the problem once and for all, to everyone’s satisfaction. Finally, seventeen million deprived inhabitants, not only from East Berlin but also from the whole free Overland, had achieved the right to consume bananas on equal terms with the (former) prisoners. No more need for tunnels or digging, flying or diving. No more need for Stasi interrogation rooms, about which some of our elders had told stories, although we considered them morbid fiction. And everybody from the West could enjoy the Staatsoper at Unter der Linden, the Pergamon Museum, the Hotel Adlon, and other fine institutions of the former nonbanana world.

Though, in light of the discovery that the Wall(s) existed it doesn’t seem important, I continue to ponder over bananas. Where did all these bananas come from? And in such enormous quantities that everyone could eat them? This doesn’t seem to have been a problem after the collapse. Newcomers to the banana world discovered that bananas grew in places called Supermarkets, together with an abundance of other fine foods, even finer than megadriles from the Tubificidae family—or whatever stands in for them in the Overworld. They soon discovered that the beauty of such Supermarkets consisted in the possibility of moving from one food item to another; you were even encouraged by posters called advertisements to do so. There were such enormous varieties of food there that, at the very beginning of their stay in the West, newcomers didn’t even have names for some of them. There was a fine worm called caviar and another called cheese, and there was some very posh water with bubbles called Champagne, but it is hard to understand exactly why it excited Men so much. There were all kinds of dead animals in the shape of “prosciutto” or “salami,” and lots of fine, dead fish and birds, and perhaps even nice tasty mice, caterpillars, and a crunchy grasshopper or two (but now I am daydreaming)…

However, Men would not be Men if they would not complicate their lives, as they are of a species not guided by ratio. Judging from their behavior it is clear that they are in constant need of supreme beings, some kind of super Men called Gods. This need is usually referred to as “religion.” Traditionally, Gods are old Men with white beards who often claim to be invisible. It is, therefore, interesting to notice that the religion newcomers found on the banana side had nothing to do with these old, bearded, invisible Men. Rather, this particular type of religion was founded on an irresistible and therefore powerful (although foolish!) desire to possess things. And by this I don’t mean only food—that would have been rational!—but all sorts of things. The newcomers learned that this ruling religion, the one they had not experienced before, was called “Consumerism.” This was the big secret of the escapees, who had been ready to risk their lives in order to join its believers—a desire for bananas was only one aspect of it.

The newcomers came from the part of the Overland where religion of any kind was rather unpopular, if not forbidden. But in the former prison of West Berlin, churches of Consumerism were not forbidden at all. On the contrary, they were everywhere, situated along the main avenues as well as way out toward the periphery of settlements. They were brightly decorated, lit edifices, seductive in their appearances. To the admiration of newcomers, one could get everything in those huge churches (called Shopping Malls) celebrating Consumerism, anything at all without even a prayer. But there was kind of a trick that this religion played on its believers. They were free to enter a church but not to get out of it! From what we all know about religions in general, a person has to fulfill a set of rules in order to become a member of such a congregation. But in this case, it was (again!) just the opposite. This is how it works, and it has not changed, from November 9, 1989, to this day: Every Shopping Mall (as well as even the tiniest Supermarket) is supervised by slot machines called cash registers. These machines are positioned not at the entrance but at the very exit of the church. When a believer approaches the machine with a basket full of desired goods to quench his or her thirst for possessions, the machine scrutinizes the person in question. I imagine that the reason is to perform some sort of test of faith; it lets you pass and get out only if you are a true believer. That you have to demonstrate by either pushing a plastic card into the slot or by giving symbolic paper or metal tokens to the person, usually a female, sitting behind the cash register. Men who fail the test have to give back all the fabulous goodies they collected, and then they get very, very sad. Sometimes even uniformed assistants (lower priests?) come and take such persons away. To comfort them, I suppose. There is speculation that these tokens are so powerful that they could even be used to buy indulgences for sins, but this is hard to imagine. I would assume that, if sin exists, there must be a hell, and a paradise too, of which no proof has been found. Therefore, I assume such speculation must be unfounded.

I was also interested in what happened to the dangerous pestilence called socialism (curiously enough, sometimes also called Communism, but I could not make out any substantial difference; this, however, in my opinion, deserves further clarification). Did not everyone get infected by it when the Wall(s) collapsed? Or was the world suddenly somehow miraculously cured of it? Well, first of all, soon after the invasion (or reunion), it turned out that socialism was not a pestilence at all. This was only a myth produced on the banana side, although it seemed to be true that bananas could not be obtained where socialism ruled. Socialism seems to have been a political, economic, and social order; its particular characteristics were lack of genuine elections and the aim to achieve equality of all Men but under the rule of only one. For example, before the time of the collapse of the Wall(s), that person was called Comrade Honecker. But everyone who lived during the period of socialism was called Comrade, so we could not be sure that this really was his first name. Comrade Honecker was well-known for kissing mouth-to-mouth with another old Man also called Comrade. You can see that even today on a painting on that remaining part of the Wall. It may well be that this was the habit of those days. I heard that Men call this way of kissing a life-saving method, and it is perfectly possible that elderly persons were saving each other’s lives in this way; why not?

Anyhow, as it was not a pestilence, socialism could not have infected the entire Overland. The young generation of Men born after the collapse of the Wall(s) seems to know little about it or still believes (like us!) that it was only another Legend. But there are some from their grandparents’ generation, and even their parents’, who got sentimental and invented fairy tales about what allegedly used to be a “better life,” times when equality ruled (equality or egalitarianism are the terms they seem to use for a lack of every kind of megadrilles, haplotaxida, i.e., food in general). Equality in hunger? In lack of bananas? This might seem absurd to you, but the doings and beliefs of Men should no longer surprise us. It is clear to me that they must have invented such tales for the very obvious reason that I described earlier, the fact that they were not qualified for the new church for lack of tokens.

Having arrived at the end of my presentation, it is perhaps important to add that I also found some artifacts connected to the political, economic, and social order that ruled on the other, i.e., Western, side of the Berlin Wall during those days. It was then, as it is still, called democracy. It means the governing of the demos, which is to say—in the Old Greek language that disappeared even before the Wall was built—the rule of the majority of Men. During the times of the Wall(s) there were rare individuals from the Eastern side who escaped to the Western side just because of love for democracy. I think it was appealing to Men because it was closely connected with an idea of freedom that had less to do with bananas and Consumerism than with so-called ideals. Today democracy governs in most of the Overland. However, I assume it must be hard to put it into practice. When I try to imagine such an order applied to us Moles, it looks to me like no decision could ever be taken, regardless of the beneficial result such an order would yield. I am therefore sure that there must be some technique unknown to us through which democracy can be efficiently applied. But all I managed to find out was that some Men had more power than others, although properly elected, and that they impose their power upon others from top to bottom, in a kind of pyramidal structure. But to tell the truth, they usually don’t rule long. And it happens that even such an improved system as democracy, sometimes results in the rule of just one person, who then brings about a huge disaster called fascism. That happened a long, long time ago in the part of the Overland where we are now. In fact, we are holding our conference at the very same place where that particular Man—his name was Adolf Hitler—allegedly committed suicide because he could not bear his own defeat. He was defeated in the Big War by the united forces of banana and nonbanana countries, a fact as intriguing as it is puzzling. Needless to say, he must have been a weak character.

Still, in spite of this unfortunate event, Men must have considered the democratic system much better, as they almost completely abandoned socialism. Today most of them simply don’t care about any political system or politics (this is what they call the fight for power to define the rules under which they live together). I dare say that nowadays they try to survive in a harsh world ruled not so much by Comrades or any other personality or personalities, but by a totally impersonal superior force called the Global Market, one of the by-products of democracy and capitalism. This phenomenon is hard to describe, as I, predictably, do not dispose of enough material yet. But it is said that it is bigger than all the Shopping Malls added together, so big that it encompasses the entire Overland, and perhaps even the Underland. From what I have heard, the Global Market is a mechanism which enables everything, and I mean literally everything, including human beings, who can be bought or sold; poor ones can become rich overnight and, vice versa, rich ones can become poor (although this happens less often). It looks like some new kind of miracle centered around possessing and tokens. And if you don’t have any tokens, you are down and out. Apparently it doesn’t help to pray for mercy, as the Market appears to be merciless.

One more thing: I hear from Moles living in distant places that there are tunnels being built in faraway territories, such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and others, mostly ending with -stan (this ending seems to have some secret meaning). Even if they are supposed to have both democracy and bananas now, Men there are not pleased and want to leave. So they dig and dig, and try various other methods of coming here, believing (wrongly) that what awaits them is paradise. But obviously not many tunnels have reached us yet. If it were so, we moles would be the first to know.

I am ending my presentation with—I dare say—incredible information: In the meantime, somewhere in the deserts of the Middle East—as well as in the Never-Never Land called America—huge walls were built at their borders. But it is simply hard to believe that, after the Berlin Wall, Humans would repeat the same mistake again. If so, the only thing we Moles can conclude is that there is no help for them, because they really are their own worst enemies.