The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 2

by Peter Weiss

  The train traveled slowly along the narrow bridge into the station, with a high-pitched tooting of its signal horn it had emerged from the tunnel under the southern hills of the city, rolled across the sluice’s retaining wall, past the fishery harbor, the floating fish market, the crowded, gabled façades of the houses of the old town, along the canal and the steeply ascending walls of Riddarholmen, at Klara quay the red and white striped boom gates had been lowered, between city hall and Tegelbacken the automobiles and trams were backed up, the sleepers creaked under the wheels of the train, the iron side panels of the bridge rattled, pedestrians on the narrow sidewalk next to the tracks leaned back against the railing, looked up toward the windows of the carriage gliding by above them, behind which the passengers stood, arriving from Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, a wet snow was falling, the ice lay gray on the fjord, the flounder drifted about in the chopped up channel and around the white steamers of Lake Mälaren sitting by the wharf, the water looked black, a filthy sludge covered the cobblestones on the street leading down to the square with the building housing Tysta Mari. The two women at the boom gate could also see the signs on the train, hear the whistling from the platform, the rattling of the luggage carts, the drawn-out sound of the train braking. Bischoff herself was supposed to travel through here soon as well, in the opposite direction, accompanied by plain-clothed police officers; she asked herself whether her chaperone could really be so oblivious to what it meant for her; the police matron had spoken about her upcoming trip with such nonchalance, as if she were discussing the homeward journey of a tourist. As the gates rose with a ring, the cars began to move and the trams—current collectors hitting the sparking cables—to advance, she could have thrown herself to the side, make off, maybe find a spot to hide between the market stands at the back of the Klara shorefront or in one of the boats that were moored there; but she knew she wouldn’t do it, she had given the matron her word of honor as a condition for the stroll. Before she was to be extradited, the privilege had been bestowed upon her of getting to know the city, of which she had only seen a little, since shortly after her arrival she had been transferred to the prison for those on remand. But, since she was in Stockholm, the matron had said, she could hardly be denied the beauty of the city. They had headed down the street from the prison on Bergsgatan. It was dreary, clammy, but that didn’t matter, said Bischoff, she found the city beautiful nevertheless, by which she meant the freedom which she had been loaned for this day. It was pleasant to walk through the streets, to look into the shop windows, to brush past other people, and she agreed with the matron that the view of the buildings with their battlements and cupolas over on the cliff tops of the southern part of the city and of the round medieval towers and the palaces of Riddarholmen was without compare, and part of that beauty was also the anticipation of being able to glean something about the political situation from newspapers. The oblivious friendliness of the police matron, who wanted to give the prisoner a souvenir picture of the city before her deportation, had initially dismayed her, but then she accepted her mix of courtesy and barbarism as a quality that the present moment produced among those who believed they had nothing to do with the upheavals surrounding them. It had in fact seemed to her at times during the three weeks she had spent in custody as if her minder were not capable of imagining what awaited her, a fugitive Communist, in Germany. Then she would be made uneasy again by the discrepancy in the character of this woman, who approached her with an almost helpful demeanor, and at the same time was cooperating with the Gestapo. Perhaps she did have the right to break her word to the police matron—who, though she had taken on the responsibility for returning her to prison, was also willing to hand her over to the enemy—and to use the next available opportunity to escape this mortal danger. She had arrived in Stockholm in late December, had immediately reported to the Red Aid office on Mälartorget, and was put up by a Swedish comrade. She had reached Sweden illegally via a circuitous path from the Soviet Union and hoped to then return to Germany to resume her work in the underground. She knew that, by legalizing her presence in the country as a political refugee, her personal information would end up with the German authorities. On the fourth of January, she had given in to the urging of her comrades, who were inexperienced in the conspiratorial struggle, to register herself with the police. Five days later police officers picked her up from her apartment. There are two gentlemen here, they want to speak with you; this sentence, with which her comrade’s mother approached her, did not surprise her. She was used to these kinds of encounters. The interrogation began immediately, even before she was taken to the police headquarters. To the question of how she had entered the country, she responded that she had taken the ferry from Copenhagen to Malmö, where she’d chosen the exit for Scandinavians. She didn’t mention the fact that during the last three years she had lived in the Soviet Union. Questioned about her entry to Denmark, she responded that she had crossed the border from Schleswig-Holstein. The authorities worked quickly and effectively. After a few days, the police commissioner Söderström had found out that she had worked since nineteen thirty as a stenographer for the Central Committee of the Communist Party, then in the agitprop division, and, from thirty-three, in the secretariat of the illegal Party. This information had been passed on to the German investigators by Lass, a former member of the Communist Youth Association. The interrogations in the remand prison then concentrated on her work during the past five years, but she refused to provide information other than that she had stayed in hiding as an opponent of fascism. She spent the waiting period—already certain that the German agencies had demanded her extradition—in the fortress-like building behind the police station, with its windows barred from the inside, in a spacious, clean cell, which had a fold-up bed, a leather sofa, table and chair, but no washing facilities. Her meals were brought over from a restaurant. She even received malt beer. She was the only political prisoner in the women’s section; in the washroom and the common room she only ever came across women who had been arrested for vagrancy, as it was called, for prostitution or for having had abortions. These women were not alien to her, she was happy to have this chance to get an insight into the society which projected such a harmonious appearance to the outside world, she was among fellow travelers, whose hardships within the Swedish welfare state was no less dire than the misery she knew from Berlin. She was thirty-seven years old, politically active since her earliest youth. In nineteen fifteen she had become a member of the Association of the Socialist Working Youth, and then a Communist. Her father, a Social Democrat, had also originally stuck with Luxemburg and Liebknecht but had later rejoined the Social Democratic Party. You lot with your dictatorship of the proletariat, he once said, to which she countered that there were only two dictatorships, that of capital and that of the proletariat, and that she chose the latter. But she owed her political education to him. She remembered how on the fourth of August of nineteen fourteen, as the war bonds were approved, he had wept and said over and over that the workers would resist. He remained active, in the left wing of the Party. While she was still a child, she had learned what house searches and detentions were, had walked through police barriers with a briefcase full of compromising material. When she looked back on her life up to that point, she saw it as being entirely in the service of the Party. This day in Stockholm too entered into an unbreakable chain of commitments. There was no sacrifice for her. The illegal work was a natural consequence of all her earlier activity. She had jobs to carry out, and this took place anonymously, inconspicuously, silently. She had not seen her husband for almost five years. Head of the Junge Volksbühne and the Syndicate for Working Culture, he had been sent to the Wehlheiden penitentiary in Kassel after his arrest in thirty-four. If she considered personal impulses, it might have been the thought of being nearer to him that had contributed to the wish to once again be put to work in Germany. She didn’t even carry a photo of her daughter, whom she had left behind in the Soviet Union. She could picture
the fourteen-year-old clearly, and she did this with complete calm, knowing that she was safe, in the children’s home in Ivanovo. It surprised the matron that her charge looked so normal, not at all how she imagined a revolutionary. Back in the prison she had noticed how the detainee tended to her clothing, her personal hygiene; she had expressed her surprise about the fact that a person who behaved so properly could be a Communist. Communists, so she had heard, were filthy, treacherous, and thieving, a danger to the country. Bischoff had always made an effort to look after her clothes: her blue suit, which she had owned for years and wore often, looked new. But it wasn’t just that she knew that unkemptness makes you suspicious; it was also a result of her belief that as a Communist she always had to present herself as exemplary, and that part of that was cleanliness. She was level-headed and attentive because she was aware that, at all times, her fate depended upon how she reacted to any incident. She always had to be training her eyes, had to be able capture what was happening around her with a single glance. Nothing was without a cause, and she could be afraid of nothing. Suddenly it became impossible to flee again. It was as if she had been tasked with carrying out an educational mission, however small, during her time with the matron. She mustn’t let the matron down and confirm her belief that Communists are traitors and liars. They had left behind the city hall, the tower of which sought to conjure up a Venice of the North; they had arrived at Tegelbacken, observed the front pages of the newspaper stands next to Tysta Mari; Bischoff wanted to know what the headlines said, but listened patiently as the matron explained to her how Mari’s surname had been Lindström, and how she’d owned an inn at the beginning of the previous century on that street, the one leading to Saint James’s Church. She had curly blond hair and was soft, peaceful, and quiet. Then Bischoff asked what was written there about Barcelona; that the assault on Barcelona has begun, said the matron, that the outer suburbs have been seized by Moroccan troops. Bischoff wanted to know more, but to avoid making the matron suspicious she agreed that they should carry out their tour of the city first. The matron bought a newspaper and took it with her, in order to read from it later, when they stopped at a café. Though Bischoff demanded no understanding from the matron for her situation, she well understood her companion. She respected the matron’s determination to allow her, the prisoner, to share in something that for the matron was valuable and fascinating. While Bischoff walked along beside her through the streets of the newspaper quarter, past the big windows behind which bands of paper raced through the rollers, she could imagine what this city was for someone who lived and worked here. The matron had a connection with these buildings, these alleys and squares, with all their signs, symbols, and monuments, the city was a component of her life, it contained her own past, and for her it was brimming with history. But if the matron was unable to convey more of this wealth to her than mere general facts, it might have had to do with the sudden feeling that her charge would never be able to make a home here, and that she was actually giving her a farewell tour through the city. In order to relieve herself of the unease, the feeling of shame, she said she was sure it would all turn out for the best, she had also read the letter from the German authorities, in which they gave their assurance that the extradited refugees would receive just treatment. Bischoff had stopped. She sensed only that she couldn’t allow herself to be surprised, that she couldn’t lose control. She glimpsed past the matron into one of those bare, uninviting, brownish ale houses, numerous in that quarter, in which printers with blackened hands, a few old people, men in shabby clothing, sat at the wooden tables, detached, with vacant expressions, as if in the waiting room of a train station. She would gladly have entered, but her guide would have none of that. On the way to Brunkeberg she spoke of a battle that had been fought there between the Swedish farmers and the Danish occupying troops. There must still be a lot of skeletons and helmets and weapons lying in the earth beneath the buildings, thought Bischoff. The name of the military leader, Sten Sture, didn’t ring any bells. The sight of the telephone tower, on the other hand, which rose high above the roofs, and of the vegetable market on the square, brought her closer to the city and made her forget the fleetingness of her visit. The hulking iron construction, with masts encaged in filigree metalwork on the four corners, and below, by the fountain with the wide handles, in the trampled snow, the women at the stands with their faces all wrapped up; to her, this contained something of the matter that made up the character of a city, and she tried to explain it to the matron. The women were stomping in their clunky bast shoes, their faces were ruddy, their breath rose in a fog, they weighed their wares on their handheld scales with small copper weights, placed winter apples, turnips, potatoes, and fresh lettuce from the greenhouse in paper, and above them this metal framework loomed, this emblem of technology which was able to bring together the voices from across the whole world through buzzing wires. She wasn’t sure if the matron could follow what she was saying. As they continued walking, she gave her another example to illustrate what she understood as the social fabric of a city. In the prison cell there was no pencil, no writing paper, a form of punishment that breached the rules applying to political prisoners. One day, a couple of builders had been working in front of her window repairing the façade. They had waved at her a few times, had found out why she had been locked up, and when she asked, they had passed her a few sheets of paper and a carpenter’s pencil through the ventilation flap. That’s how I got this worn out, flat stub of a blue pencil, she said, which the workers let me have, it went without saying, they didn’t ask about bureaucratic provisions, I needed the pencil and they gave it to me, out of natural solidarity. The snow was now falling thick and soft, the façade of the castle appeared as a broad and dark reclining mass, with diagonal bastions leading up to it; on the right, the parliament building loomed imperiously; the National Bank was tacked on to the back; that the two colossuses were so deeply enmeshed, embraced each other so intimately, was a perfect reflection of the nature of these institutions. The columned portal to the building had an Egyptian air to it, from which the building that formed the seat of government broadened into the distance. The chambers of the Council of State were also located in these rows of buildings, which left between them a narrow gorge that extended into the old town. Down below, in the café, under the rows of windows already lit up in the morning, devouring the crumbly, sweet pastries, she was again beset by the thought of how little time she had left. The matron had opened the newspaper. To begin with, there had been an orderly retreat on the Catalonian front. While Tarragona was being evacuated, the Republic had launched a counteroffensive in Brunete. The Italian troops had retreated, and just as gains seemed to be within reach for the Republicans, German reinforcements arrived, tanks, air squadrons. Yes, said the matron, in Paris there were demonstrations demanding the opening of the Pyrenean border, with a cry of weapons for Spain. The Socialist International in Brussels had also demanded that the embargo be lifted. But the workers’ movement was powerless in the wake of the dispersal of the most recent strikes in Paris, in November. Daladier was able to hold to his blockade policy unchallenged. Chamberlain, having returned from negotiations in Rome and an audience with the Pope, supported him, and also, he has been put forward as a candidate for the Peace Prize. Peace, that meant the pact between fascism, the Falange, the Holy See, and English and French high finance. Bischoff wanted to know more about Barcelona. The matron read aloud that, following heavy bombing raids, the populace was preparing to defend the city, in rain and thick fog. Barricades in the streets, siege conditions in the entire Republican sector. Then came a detailed report on the gala of the Swedish-German Society in the winter garden of the Hotel Royal. Among the more than a thousand attendees, many diplomats and high-ranking officers had been present. They had finished their coffees, they should continue their stroll. They walked along the narrow street through the floating flakes. Now and then cries rang out from the rooftops, a guard stopped the pedestrians, and shovelfu
ls of snow fell onto the piles at the edges of the alleys. They walked between walls of snow toward the harbor; cranes and the hulls of a few larger ships could be made out in the milky drift. The view won’t reach far today, said the matron, but they traveled up in the lift anyway, the roundabout at the sluice sank back down, the crossbeams of the iron tower glided past, at first trams, automobiles, omnibuses were still visible below, a horseman on a raised pedestal with outstretched hand, then, in the flickering, there was nothing but formless shadows moving about. In the narrow cabin, Bischoff was standing right in front of the woman operating the lift; her face was furrowed with deep creases, a woolen scarf wrapped around her head; with clammy fingers polished a leaden gray by the coins, she stuffed the money into her conductor’s purse. You have to imagine how the waters and islands open out when the view is clear, said the matron as they reached the drafty gangway. Bischoff listened silently to the matron’s attempts to conjure the panorama out of the snow, and the more they were enveloped by blindness the more magnificently the matron wanted the picture of her city to appear before the prisoner. Bischoff thanked her, it was almost as if she were the one who now had to do the consoling, yes, she said, she could picture everything clearly, on the left the arches of the Västerbron, on the right the forested hills of Hammarby, behind the islet with the castle, Djurgården, Ladugårdslandet, the industrial areas around the Värtan strait, Lidingö. When the matron asked about her family, probably only in order to express compassion, in her way, Bischoff grew cautious. It could be, she thought, that this rambling promenade was all in the service of one thing, getting her to open up, getting her talking, for her to reveal something about the things that she had kept from the interrogators. For a second she felt nothing but rage toward her minder. Up here in the snow, there was nobody else around. She could have thrown the police matron over the edge, walked away. She wondered if the bait of freedom had been held out in front of her to beguile her into revealing herself. Had she once again made the mistake of being gullible, just as she had a month ago, when she listened to advice that flew in the face of her better judgment. She still hadn’t learned her lesson. Hadn’t resisted contact with emigrants during the days before her arrest. She had come to the attention of the police through their chatter, she was certain about that. She had walked into their trap because she had been willing to have a false sense of freedom dangled in front of her for a few hours. A risible idea anyway, that one person could give freedom to another. Freedom was something she had to grab with her own hands. She stood across from the police matron. She was around Bischoff’s age, was somewhat taller, more powerful, had light brown, marcelled hair, an oval face, with fine features, a soft gaze, was dressed tastefully, clothes made to measure, came from a good bourgeois family according to all appearances. And yet if her posture betrayed a slight rigidity it was because she was pressing her hand on her shoulder bag, almost as if she were ready to grab for a firearm. But Bischoff had never noticed this capacity for dissimulation during their encounters in the prison. The matron had apologized to her for the light that was left on in her cell at night, and for having to glance through the peephole every now and then because some detainees have, as she explained, attempted or committed suicide. She had also expressed her embarrassment about the prison library, which only contained religious and patriotic writings, had given her, because she was not permitted other reading material, a dictionary, so that she could at least study languages, as if these might be of use to her in anticipation of her deportation. There would be no reunion with loved ones for her in Germany, she said. And at that moment the matron wrapped her arm around Bischoff’s; it was impossible to ascertain whether this was a gesture of intimacy or of caution, lest the prisoner make an attempt to throw herself over the railing into the blurring depths. The fact that she was telling herself that such an escape route wasn’t an option made Bischoff realize that this possibility must indeed have occurred to her. Then they walked down a steep alley, and on the way back to the prison she confronted the question of what advice the Party might have been able to give her to help her cope with her situation. Would it be viewed as right or wrong that she, only to avoid breaking her word, remained with someone who, despite a few redeeming qualities, was in the service of the enemy. But she had to make the decision herself. She didn’t know whether she was once again committing an error, in this country in which hypocrisy could scarcely be distinguished from indifference, in which ignorance formed part of all the inept attempts at washing over and smoothing out, in which political contours melted away. When they reached the prison she was almost relieved, she allowed herself to be led through the halls by the matron, and it was only as the bolt fell shut with a bang behind the cell door that she was seized by despondency at having to assent to this divide, in which one side, struggling until the very last, had to place themselves in chains, while the other, continually capitulating, resided in a sense of security and smug satisfaction. Stretched out on the leather sofa, she heard the footsteps of the matron trailing off. Heard the police officers who, in dealing with her case, compliantly carried out their duties in the section that investigated offences that were directed against the security of the state; and so the matron must have also viewed it as her mission to neutralize anybody who was said to have been a danger to society.