A CIVIL SERVANT OF THE GERMAN state not only has to be a loyal citizen but also a citizen in good health. Hence before my appointment as a professor at Humboldt University I had to testify, in a personal details form, that I was politically and medically worthy and fit to become a civil servant for life.

The one part I could answer truthfully; for the other I had to lie.

Ironically, I did not have to lie about my political past. The Berlin senate, almost identical to the former senate of West Berlin, did not care about former Maoists or other ‘enemies of the state’ of West German provenance – all they were paranoid about were the ‘communists’of the former GDR. No problem with that for me. The type of Marxist- Leninist organisations to which I had belonged were anti-authoritarian in their origins and as opposed to the authoritarian regime of the GDR as to ‘Western capitalism and its state lackeys’. While the West German authorities had spied on us in the 1970s and barred us from their civil service as so-called ‘radicals’, this was of no interest anymore in the 1990s. The main enemy now was the former Stasi.

I had to lie on the medical side, or rather, tick a ‘no’ instead of a ‘yes’ where asked if I was suffering from any infectious diseases such as HIV.

When years later I enquired from the Berlin AIDS council if this false reply might have been reason to dismiss me, I was told: No, the question itself was illegitimate. And the status of being HIV positive is not an illness.

Indeed, I was not ill and did not feel ill at the time. And yet it was unfathomable on that day, when I sat at that desk at Human Resources of HU, this awe-inspiring institution, filling in that ominous questionnaire, that I would last the eighteen years to my retirement.

There was another twist of historical irony on my way to becoming a Humboldt professor. I was initially number two on the shortlist for the position. Number one was a colleague from the East, who had been for many years professor of African literature at the University of Leipzig. He was a renowned scholar among East European Africanists and a specialist in Swahili literature.