Called upon by the prosecutor, Horst Wessel’s mother held aloft his bloody uniform. She prayed for the day when Germans would take vengeance on the Jews for this and many other crimes. Frau Dr. Benjamin laughed ironically.
The Fascists did not forget her. Their so-called “Führer” was said to have her name on a list. Frau Dr. Benjamin remarked: There must be so many other names on it, I’ll be old by the time he gets to me!—The truth was that every time she saw them marching in the streets, or, worse yet, heard them singing their “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the bottom dropped out of her stomach. But our line in those days was that the quicker those brutes came to power the better, because they would bring capitalism’s contradictions to a head.
Whenever she lost a trial, she had one very particular thing to say to her client. It was not the so-called “consolation” with which a bourgeois lawyer seeks to wash his own hands of what the fired trade unionist or the hungry thief must now suffer—or, if it was, it was consolation sharp as a razor. It inculcated hatred; it simplified and abstracted the case to its socioeconomic essentials; it directed energy toward the future. What she said was this: I’ve come to recognize that questions of law and justice are at the same time questions of power.
4
Like good Communists, we’ll pass over the irrelevantly personal aspects of her marriage to Dr. Georg Benjamin. Their son Michael (born when the Reich absorbed Austria) is likewise of no concern to us; we’ll merely note that in the end he fulfilled their expectations and studied in Moscow.
As soon as the sleepwalker came to power, she found herself in imminent danger of being taken away. All the same, she kept bravely defending the workers, following the maxim of Comrade W. Ulbricht that the Communists must be the ones who know Fascist labor law the best. Georg feared for her, but she told him what she used to tell her mother: I myself have a head to think with! Naturally she soon lost her right to practice her profession.
Her husband was a Jew, and his fate ordinary: arrested in May 1933, sent to KZ-Lichtenburg, released for Christmas, resumed legal and illegal political work, rearrested in 1936, sentenced to six years’ hard labor, which he completed through contact with the electrified barbed wire of Mauthausen.
Do you want to know who stands ready to help us Germans now? There can be but one answer: SMAD, the Sowjetische Militäradministration.
Watching the open boxcars of women, children and old men hoping to escape the Slavs, she bided her time. They had black ruins for their food and grey sky to drink, but they rode the silver rails of hope: If only they could get to the American zone before the Reds crossed the Oder! The widow Benjamin stayed quietly at home.
Then came that visit to the man with four wristwatches, as a result of which (I quote the legend exactly) she was asked by the commander of the Berlin city precinct Stieglitz to organize the judicial system, and was thus made District Attorney. That was in May. (She paused to smile on camera for Roman Karmen’s new film, “Berlin.”) By September she was already Director of Cadre Development. The radical removal of Nazi and reactionary elements was a main focus of her department.
5
The plan of the zero hour activists: Since East Germany doesn’t even have trade unions yet, our first task will be to complete the bourgeois revolution of 1848. Then we’ll smash the monopoly capitalists and Junkers who created Nazism.
No elections, of course. Hitler had elections.
Hence we’ll fly in the Ulbricht Group40 from Moscow, form our working committee of the two proletarian parties, then create a broad-based antifascist bloc, which we’ll winnow down bit by bit until only we are included.
Next step: the democratic land reform, commenced in our very first autumn—I mean collectivization, with loudspeakers, searchlights, threats and happy fireworks. After all, the producers of national wealth are the only ones who deserve full citizenship. Whatever mercy we might have possessed was interred beneath the greenish-beige dirt of Auschwitz.
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A pregnant young woman whose husband SMAD had just sent East asked her, perhaps a little wistfully, what she thought of the developments in the American sector, and the new District Attorney contemptuously replied: Over there, it’s not creation of the new, but restoration of the old.
7
Almost every other German avoided that barbed-wire-topped fence at Karlshorst behind which General Zhukov operated. Comrade Ulbricht loved to go there; only then did we see him smile. (The collectivizers beg him to intercede with the Russians, who keep dismantling everything and shipping it eastward, even the machinery we’ll need for collectivization. Comrade Ulbricht replies: This meeting has nothing to do with dismantling.) As for the Red Guillotine, she rushed to Karlshorst nearly twice a week. She had a pass. She was pale, shining-eyed, roundheaded—there was something almost deformed about her. She’d come to hasten that decisive moment when the firing squad approaches the stakes, one man bending over each victim with a pistol ready for the coup de grâce. Sometimes she failed to get her heart’s desire, but at least she could send them forever or almost forever to one of our Eastern zone’s jails, which we’d begun to call the yellow misery.
The Fascists kept saying, up against the wall, up against the wall, and after a while one wanted to put them up against the wall, or tie them to chairs at the base of some sunny rubble-hill, the firing squad now in position. Instead of feeling sorry for her country, she was sickened and angered by the myriad pale white upraised arms like antennae from each marching caterpillar of German prisoners.
I myself am reminded of the scene in the Nibelungenlied when Kriemhild agreed to dry her tears and marry again only when the envoy promised to take upon himself anything needed to avenge wrongs committed against her.
8
We Communists have long since exposed the lie that law can be universally applied. If A. exploits B., then equal freedom for A. and B. means that A. will continue to exploit B.
This is why we require a new socialist legality to overcome bourgeois legality.
Law is the instrument of the working class.
It has not always been this way. It will not always be this way. Socialist legality is dynamic. But in the first stage, removal of the bourgeoisie, law must found itself on dictatorship of the proletariat. After the old regime’s exploiters have been rendered entirely extinct, socialist legality will have done with violence and move to the second stage, a single-tiered legality for an entire people, a people now led without question by the working class, as for instance in our beloved Soviet Union.
And how do we achieve this second stage? Comrade Benjamin knows the answer: Develop the best forces of the people.
9
By 1946 she’d become the leading influence in the Central Administration of Justice. She was still slender then. I’ve seen her gripping the foliage-hung rim of the lectern at a women’s conference; she wore a dark dress. Wasting not a moment, she began training people’s judges and people’s prosecutors—for example, the slender, pale yet steady old man in the leather cap who sat every day on a stool by the courtyard, scraping the dead mortar off salvaged bricks; his workbench was a plank stretched across three towers of bricks, and he never looked up. When we called on him, he looked up then; when we raised the issue of class hatred he began to grin. The Red Guillotine grinned back; she flattered him that he belonged to the truly revolutionary element. He didn’t need to study the essence of jurisprudence in order to be a people’s judge!
She began to be called first the woman without mercy, then the Red Hilde of Wedding, and soon, the Red Guillotine.
Explaining to us that law must correspond with the progression of civilization, she began to apply our Constitution’s Article Six, Paragraph Two against corporate criminals and imperialist agents.
10
Once upon a time, Comrade Margot Feist, bearing flowers, congratulated the worker Wilhelm Pieck on his presidency, and we progressed happily ever after. The fruit trees of Potsdam were bearing again; the stagnant wat
ers of the Spree Forest were no longer troubled by artillery shells. We’d kept the church at Neuzelle open. A drunk with a beer belly watched it for us. All the same, conditions for building socialism remained sub-optimal. For instance, the Constitution still looked backward, not forward. Moreover, we’d classified eighty-nine percent of the industries of Leipzig as inoperative. (This meeting has nothing to do with dismantling.) And the food supply would be erratic for at least the next two years. After all, what had been sown in our fields but land mines and artillery shells? Workers accordingly deserted their places of labor to hunt for something to eat. What choice did we have, but strictness?—A woman gets six years for selling eggs in West Berlin—another victory for Party-minded justice. Spectators dare to express their pity. But the Red Guillotine explains that to achieve socialism we must eliminate so-called “civil rights.”
All magic spells fail without belief. We enforced belief. In place of ruins we offered the wide white monumentality of Stalinallee, arched, windowed, black and white, fading magnificently into the East.
11
Thanks to the losses justly inflicted upon German Fascism, in our new zone we found ourselves burdened with a female-to-male ratio of one point three five to one. The result: sexual exploitation. The remedy: uncompromising legal struggle, enacted by our own Red Guillotine, to bring about absolute equality for women. It seemed to her more than ever that the only hope, not merely for her—what did one being matter?—but for all of us, lay in some realm of future dawn, and that to find her way there she must dynamite her way out of the past.
But at a meeting when we were discussing the necessary changes which must be made in the Constitution itself, a delegation of doctors dared to interrupt us with the demand that we permit German women raped by the Red Army to obtain abortions. Comrade Ulbricht replied: The Germans should have thought about that before they launched Operation Barbarossa.
Comrade Benjamin, you’re a woman; surely you can understand! We appeal to you!
I stand by Comrade Ulbricht, replied the Red Guillotine.
But, Comrade Benjamin, you were there yesterday when those two Mongolians raped Resi Nordlund in the street. We saw you pass by! And you feel nothing?
My feelings are of no relevance, said the Red Guillotine contemptuously.
She was only eleven years old! Are you aware that she died? And all that Russian officer did was fire into the air . . .
We brought it on ourselves. I refuse to discuss this case any further.
That child brought it on herself?
I have nothing to say about the individuals involved in this case. As Communists we must be realistic. Legislation follows the Party, doesn’t it? The Party follows Comrade Stalin, doesn’t it? Do you think that Comrade Stalin’s in a mood to let us accuse the Red Army of anything?
(The Russian officer had run out of bullets, shrugged and turned his back. The Red Guillotine looked on for a moment. She passed the test; she retained her reputation for impartiality.)
And so we stood firm; that was the only practical way to build the future. Our new zone became a vista of rubble-hills bristling with workers! We organized labor parties; we got the water mains working again. The Red Guillotine spoke at another rally before the bulletpocked pillars of a Nazi shell: a great banner, an upraised hand, the words FOR FREEDOM AND HUMANITY, AGAINST THE REVANCHISM OF BONN! Her watchword: Thorough cleansing of the entire public sphere.
On 20.9.47, in the German State Opera House, we played Beethoven, and then the Second Party Congress of the Socialist Unity Party commenced. Our future: toasts to international friendship, long lines of flag-armed tractors in our German fields, laughing Pioneers running downhill in triple file, white smoke from our new factories and smiling delegates.
12
In the spring of 1948, our Soviet oracles announced that denazification had been completed in the East German zone. We were happy then! Perhaps the Red Army would go home. But in September, revolutionary realism, explicated by the big black telephone, compelled us to dismiss the pipedream of a so-called German road to socialism. Some argued with this just and necessary decision. The Red Guillotine proved them to be implicated in the American-rooted Slansky-Rajk conspiracy. As her legend so prettily puts it, she showed the ability to continually evolve in accordance with her ever-increasing responsibilities while simultaneously shaping the new judicial system of our socialist state. And what if denazification hadn’t quite been completed after all? Among her circle, love was disdained; at best it expressed itself silently. Georg Benjamin had been a good man; she’d trusted him; he believed in what she did and therefore understood her; wasn’t that sufficient? But after they’d reduced him to an inky skeleton which grimaced at the electric wire it sizzled on, he haunted her as one lover haunts another. She could not save him, but she could punish them.
She mobilized the Party Control Commissions to sift out traitors: Titoists, revanchists, etcetera. The only ones who weren’t traitors were the men with shovels, the women clambering on brickheaps. As the Red Guillotine explained it to her people’s judges: Since man develops his personality primarily in work, in addition to the right to work there also exists the right to a job which corresponds to one’s talents and abilities. Which job might that be? Whichever one we assign to you.
She was closely involved in drafting the criminal legislation of 1948 which protects our economy against all parasites, barterers and investors. Six years for selling eggs? Why not twenty? I see her hand in SMAD’s Order 160 against sabotage. After all, as Comrade W. Pieck announced in the Third Party Congress in 1950, the Socialist Unity Party is a party of legality.
She instructed her people’s judges: The important thing is to apply the laws in a new democratic spirit. And so we charged seventy-eight thousand individuals with political crimes in 1950 alone (that was the year our Stasi came into being.) The necessary result: There no longer remained any classes or sections which could live at the expense of others.
13
In the last two months of 1950, eleven spies were shot by SMAD; then six more—Jehovah’s Witnesses and other hired killers of the American imperialists—got condemned for American espionage.—That is your signature, is it not? hissed the Red Guillotine.
But even now, too many of our judges failed to understand that every verdict is a political verdict! There can be neutrality, no “objectivity,” in a court of law. That is why we now named Comrade Benjamin Vice-President of the Supreme Court. She proved capable, says the legend, of disciplining enemies of the new republic with unrelenting severity.
Why haven’t you admitted that you were in the hire of the British Secret Service? she shouted.
No, I wasn’t at all aware that there was anyone there, replied the defendant weakly; I’m afraid that he made a poor impression in our courtroom.
You didn’t know that at all, although you did sign this receipt!
But that’s merely an everyday business document—
Don’t evade in that fashion. Don’t put up a front as if you were stupid. You were doing business with monopolists whom we’ve already arrested. There. I’ve said it. And you were going to your appointment with the British Secret Service, right? Yes or no? screamed the Red Guillotine.
He sought to wriggle out of it; he wouldn’t answer correctly. Within the hour came the sentence of death, which she imposed for the unity for the German people and the freedom of the entire world.
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On 23.5.52, three months after Humboldt University awarded her an honorary doctorate, our Law on the State Prosecution Service finally allowed us to control the decisions of judges and prosecutors directly. Beneath a lamp’s white mushroom she signed another death sentence with a gleaming silver pen, her hair braided up on top of her head, books on the shelves in the background, a round stone gleaming in the ring; she signed with drooping eyelids and clenched lips like a woman doing some household task.
As soon as the Anglo-American crypto-Fascist clique rejected Comrad
e Stalin’s moderate proposal for a united neutralized Germany, the Red Guillotine showed them that we saw through their despicable actions. This time she’d surely render harmless her nightmare that there might actually be a nest of Nazis in the ground, some of whom were silently playing Skat in a logwalled bunker, with their death’s head caps resting on their knees and their rifles leaning against the wall; one of them hunched over a crystal set with his headphones on and a map on the wall beside him; he was giving away our state secrets to the reactionary Adenauer, the traitor Tito, the traitor Schumacher and the American imperialists. In my opinion she was strangely elegant in her dark suit with the white button shirt beneath, the triangular pin over her left breast; in the name of the people she presided over the trial of the contemptible Wolfgang Kaiser, who’d committed the crime of establishing contact with a so-called “human rights organization” in West Germany. He attempted to justify himself—but not for long. With what we Germans call a Lustschrei, a cry of pleasure, she proved that his intention had been to plant bombs and poison cigarettes. We decapitated him on 6.9.52—a natural outgrowth of our democratic antifascist tendencies.
She attended the vast Party Conference in July, when we set out formally to build socialism in our Germany; we also agreed on the necessity of further hardening our line. In this spirit, the Red Guillotine passed our first new constitutional legislation. Then she had to rush off to condemn more saboteurs.
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