All for Nothing

by Walter Kempowski

  •

  Discipline and good order reigned in the youth hostel. The wash-rooms were tip-top quality, and every group of refugees had been given a place in the great meeting hall. They sat close together in families, with their suitcases and rucksacks, and the horses were stabled in the gymnasium. Members of the National Socialist Nurses’ Association went round giving out food parcels. Peter had to show his papers, Heil Hitler, and he got a food parcel too. There was even hot soup at twelve-thirty. That was probably what kept the people here.

  A single lance corporal tried to get a food parcel for himself, Heil Hitler, and was immediately sent to the military police in the office. He didn’t come out for a long time.

  ‘It’s come to this, has it? Leaving your unit and then trying to get hold of food!’

  And what had the man done with his gun?

  He’d been sent off, Heil Hitler, to report three dead Russians that he had discovered in a village.

  Oh, well, that was different.

  •

  Some two hundred people, large and small, were waiting for soup here under murals illustrating the life and work of the philosopher Herder. As well as soup, they wanted to know how things were going. They listened to the latest news, on the radio and as it was passed from mouth to mouth. How far away were the Russians now? They hoped to find out whether the road to the Frisches Haff was still clear. Every detail was passed on in an undertone. Children ran about among the adults, playing catch.

  Up in the gallery, a sailor hoping to cheer everyone up brought out his accordion:

  Homeland, see thy stars

  Shine in the firmament.

  He was surrounded by refugees, small and large, some with tears in their eyes. The sailor was part of an anti-aircraft unit. He hadn’t expected life in the navy to be like this. As far as he was concerned, his homeland was one of the old tubs now at the bottom of the sea.

  •

  And here in this place, built by the Party to encourage young people to go hiking, in a youth hostel of the Greater German Reich and under a picture of Herder’s voyage to the west, it so happened – because the world is nothing but a big village – that Peter came upon his tutor, Dr Wagner the schoolmaster, who was clad in walking trousers and coat and gaiters.

  Which of them saw the other first?

  Dr Wagner joyfully hugged the boy, and they immediately began exchanging news.

  ‘Mitkau is burning, my dear boy,’ said Wagner, ‘and the Russians are probably in the Georgenhof by now.’

  And Peter told him about Auntie and Vladimir and Vera.

  ‘Oh no!’ exclaimed Dr Wagner. ‘Hanged? The woman too? They didn’t deserve that.’ At first the schoolmaster had said only, ‘Really?’ because he assumed the boy was telling his stories again. But he was shocked by this. ‘Hanged?’

  •

  ‘All wrecked,’ said Peter, ‘the coach too. I drove it all by myself,’ he added, ‘with Auntie in the back.’ He claimed to have made her very comfortable there, with straw packed round her. And that, he said, had been her downfall – the horse and coach done for, and he, up on the box, had got away without a scratch. He fell to the ground, yes, but not a scratch on him. A miracle!

  ‘A miracle,’ whispered Wagner. ‘To think you were able to drive a coach!’ And he thought that Auntie had never been very nice to him. She spoke sharply when he was teaching Peter irregular verbs – fero, tuli, latum.

  •

  ‘And do you know who else is here?’ he said. ‘Come with me.’ He went ahead in his old-fashioned walking trousers and his gaiters, which dated from the 1914 war, and led Peter to a back room, but they were sent straight out again, because a woman was having a baby there. It was Felicitas, and half an hour later mother and child were both dead.

  ‘She was always so funny,’ said Peter.

  ‘Yes,’ replied the schoolmaster. ‘Death takes us all just as we are.’

  Peter said nothing for a while. ‘I expect you’re thinking of your mother, my dear boy,’ said Wagner. But Peter wasn’t, he was thinking of the Georgenhof and the penknife with the four blades that his father had brought back for him last year. He wished he had brought it with him. And he was also wondering what ‘opake’ meant. The schoolmaster had just said the situation was opake.

  •

  His trouble, said Wagner, was having to drag that damn suitcase of the baron’s round with him. Heavy as lead, with all those chronicles inside it. He’d been tempted several times to leave it behind . . . and there was a tale to be told about that, too, and how difficult it had been to retrieve the case in the first place. The things the people there had said to him.

  What with Drygalski asking, in irritation, what that was supposed to be . . . and Sonya wanting to know what was in it.

  And incidentally, Drygalski had left the Settlement too, simply abandoning his wife.

  •

  Katharina’s situation had changed considerably. The police officer who allowed her a breath of fresh air had not reappeared. She had been left alone in her cold cell with her white fur cap on her head. Were the guards still here? Much as the banging of doors and the sound of a key turning in the lock had alarmed her, this sudden silence was uncanny.

  But then, very early in the morning, the cell doors were opened and everyone was told to come out. ‘No talking!’ They were herded into the yard, and given half a loaf of bread each. ‘And bring your blanket with you.’

  Almost at once an unshaven man on crutches made his way to Katharina’s side. He had a great gash on his forehead, like a sabre wound. ‘Dear lady . . .’ he whispered. It was Schünemann the political economist, who had been picked up with a bag full of forged papers and ration cards.

  ‘Dear lady . . .’ he said. Did he want to pour his heart out to her? Or ease his conscience? Tell her why he had taken the envelope with the military postmark on it?

  None of that mattered any more. ‘Shut up!’ a guard called, and the gate was opened and they had to march out.

  •

  They marched through the town, thirty prisoners, and at the Senthagener Tor they were joined by another thirty concentration camp inmates.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Shut up. There’s going to be some shooting.’

  •

  They were led westward, and just as they were passing the Georgenhof the big green bridge, Mitkau’s pride and joy, exploded. The trek stopped, and the carts were taken over the ice of the River Helge. More and more carts went on to the ice, and there was a jam because it was difficult for the horses to pull the heavy carts up the sloping bank. Then the ice broke and carts sank, and the screams of the people in them sounded, from a distance, like a great sigh.

  •

  Katharina kept her head bent. Like the others, she looked neither to right nor to left. Schünemann swung himself along on his crutches beside her.

  ‘Dear lady . . .’ he kept saying. Was he trying to tell her how good life used to be, and how he too had seen better days?

  ‘Shut up!’ shouted the guards, and then they pulled him out of the group by his coat and hit him. A man who had helped to destabilize the will of the German people to resist, shooting his mouth off. They began beating him in earnest.

  •

  Katharina had thought that Lothar Sarkander might get her out of this. Would drive up in his car at the last moment, waving a white cloth out of the window. Reprieved! Reprieved! And then he would get her to climb in as he once did before, holding the car door open, and racing away with her.

  ‘This woman is a very special person . . .’

  The sea! They had stood on the landing stage at the seaside. Seagulls, and the waves lapping at the wooden breakwaters, her hat like the sun behind her head. And in the restaurant that evening, he had blown cigarette smoke over the candle. Acting the part of a Hungarian café violinist – ‘Avant de mourir?’ It had made them laugh so much. He had burrowed his way into her heart with that violinist act . . . And the view
over the sea from their room. Had the sea shone that night? Had billions of little luminous fish made the sea glow? And when the time came she had brought the little girl into the world.

  •

  Katharina thought he might come to her rescue. At the last minute?

  But it didn’t happen, and she had to take care that no one trod on her heels. The concentration camp inmates from the brick-works were crowding round her. ‘Lady . . . bread,’ they said, and Katharina gave them all the bread she had. These men formed a phalanx against the others who also wanted her bread, and would let no one else near her, a woman who still had bread . . . Only when she had no more to give did they move away.

  ‘Votre coeur . . .’ said one of them. Was he an educated man?

  •

  The bell in the Johann-Gottfried-Herder Youth Hostel went at six in the morning. ‘Stand in line for coffee!’ There were people brushing their teeth in the washroom, and Dr Wagner was shaving. You felt different after shaving.

  Then they collected their coffee from the Red Cross, and everyone had four slices of bread and margarine. The watchdogs stood at the counter, Heil Hitler, to see if anyone was trying to get into the queue without proper papers. And they filtered out all men aged from fifteen to seventy. They should go and defend their country, damn it all! One woman screamed and clung to her husband, but they took him away no matter how helplessly he looked Around him.

  •

  Wagner and Peter passed muster. ‘My boy,’ said Wagner, ‘I think we should stick together. Fate looks kindly on us.’

  Peter with his lightweight rucksack, the microscope under his arm, and Wagner with the baron’s heavy suitcase.

  Outside the youth hostel, there was a keen wind blowing round the corner into their faces. The sun was shining but the wind was keen.

  A small hand-sledge stood outside the door, its rope lying in the snow like a snake.

  Dr Wagner put his case on it, looked round and said, ‘Come on, my boy, quick, before someone takes this away from us.’ And they ran as fast as they could. It was a stroke of luck, after all, and as the phrase to remind you of musical notes goes, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. Dr Wagner even thought it was funny. ‘We cocked a snook at them!’ he cried. Then they were part of the human crocodile winding its way in wide curves through the trodden snow, between wrecked carts and dead bodies, towards the nearby town.

  •

  Peter pulled the sledge and Dr Wagner pushed it. ‘Look around you, boy,’ said Wagner. Up there stood the Johann-Gottfried-Herder Youth Hostel, banners waving in the wind, with human beings pouring out of it. It was an impressive sight. But the cry was ‘Go on!’ again.

  Dr Wagner held his suitcase down on the sledge like an organ-grinder holding his barrel organ. It bothered him that he couldn’t remember anything by Herder. He was racking his brains for literary references. Weimar, that was no problem. Goethe and Schiller. But he couldn’t remember anything by Herder, nothing at all. The Cid, he thought, but what did that amount to? What did it mean? He used to remember things so well. He would read a poem two or three times, and then he could recite it from memory. You come again, you strange, you swaying figures . . . that was Goethe’s Faust. He knew half of Faust by heart, but now the poetry in his mind was ebbing away. He and his mother used to go for long walks and played at capping each other’s quotations. In my boyhood a god would often save me . . . Hölderlin, yes, but these days his memory played him false, and sometimes wouldn’t cooperate at all.

  Didn’t Herder have something wrong with his eyes? Maybe an ulcer? That was all he could remember about him just now.

  •

  On the other side of a lake – the drooping branches of weeping willows lay frozen in the ice – stood a solitary house, broad and comfortable-looking. A bronze deer in front of it was crowned with snow.

  BEWARE OF THE DOG, said a notice.

  The double door of the terrace stood open, its two halves swinging in the wind. Three dogs, shot dead, lay beside the door.

  No one down below took any notice of the house. Why bother to climb the hill? they must have thought. On, go on was the watchword, reinforced by rumour: ‘The Russians are coming.’

  But the two of them pulled out of the convoy, curious. A house on the banks of a lake? With a bronze deer in front of it? The sun was strong, and Peter pulled the sledge uphill. They tacitly agreed to give themselves a moment’s rest.

  The procession crawled along the road through the white landscape below. They could hear the cartwheels, the voices, people coughing. But all was still up here. A child’s loud cry broke the silence – it had probably lost its mother. The white house looked like the home of an artist. Would they find more dead bodies here?

  •

  Was it the house of a painter? A sculptor? No, a writer had lived here. His typewriter was still standing on his desk, with an empty coffee cup beside it. From his desk you looked along an avenue leading to a pavilion on the bank of the lake. It was probably a nice place to sit and write.

  There was a landing stage beside the lake, and a boathouse. Beyond it were the towers of the town towards which the long line of people were moving. The inhabitants of this house must have seen beautiful sunsets. And at this moment the sun was shining brightly.

  They both looked around them. Sunlight fell on the crystalline snow on the terrace, making it sparkle in the spectrum of rainbow colours. What a sight!

  •

  There were family photographs on the desk: the writer himself in thick-lensed glasses, his wife and two small children holding a teddy bear and a doll. There was a mourning ribbon on the wife’s picture.

  A photograph of Hitler hung on the wall above the desk, with the sun shining on it. An inscription could be made out under this photo.

  To the highly esteemed author

  Gotthardt Baron von Erztum-Lohmeyer

  on his 50th birthday.

  Adolf Hitler,

  Führer and Chancellor of the Reich

  Should they turn it to the wall to keep it from fading?

  The library was next to the study. Its doors were open. When the writer wanted to look something up in a book, he had only to put down his pen and stroll into the room next door. It also held a couch on which he could recline. All very attractive.

  And all very tasteful. The walls were covered with clear, bright pictures, ranged side by side. Young people in many different positions, turning towards the future. The young people looked like Peter.

  It was a pity that the writer had fled, and was not here any more. He could have looked out of his window at the proud youth hostel down below, and the long line of people in the shining snow spilling out of the hostel to follow the curves of the winding road. What an impressive sight.

  From that image, a writer could have been inspired to write a great epic on human nature. When humanity suffers, it should be recorded in literature. The great tales of the Thirty Years War. Verdun. The Children of Israel, always crossing the Red Sea.

  Wagner shielded his eyes with his hand. He felt badly shaken.

  •

  No one had yet interfered with the books, although the glass panes of the bookcases had been smashed. Why? Perhaps the writer had done it himself, in a moment of despair.

  Sucking air in through his teeth, Dr Wagner looked for Herder. The owner of this house, the writer, must surely have the works of Herder on his shelves. He would have kept the classics always at hand. Goethe, Schiller and Körner stood there side by side – but nothing by Herder.

  But I myself, Wagner thought now, have no books by Herder on my shelves. Shame on me! He had to smile, and resolved to buy himself Herder when all this was over. Good heavens, he hoped he would survive if only to do that.

  Surely it must be possible to get away with his life? Was he to die without ever reading Herder? Didn’t culture contribute to the perfection of humanity?

  •

  Meanwhile Peter was looking for something to eat. He walked through
suites of rooms with pictures on all the walls.

  There was indeed half a loaf on the kitchen table, just where it had been left. But it was as hard as a rock. Peter appropriated it, and a jar labelled SUMMER 1944. HERTHA’S BLACKCURRANT JAM.

  He tipped oatmeal into a bowl and sprinkled sugar on it. Then he called Dr Wagener, and they ate heartily.

  Peter thought of giving the schoolmaster one of the silver spoons he still had in his pocket. Wouldn’t that be a bond between them?

  •

  Peter opened the baron’s suitcase. At the very top was the booklet on Roads and Footpaths in the Baltic States, and inside was his father’s name, Eberhard von Globig. Well, thought Peter, so the baron helped himself to that.

  There was no chamber organ in the writer’s house, but there was a grand piano. Wagner sat down at it and tried to play his E minor variations. But the piano was badly out of tune. All the same: ‘Listen,’ he told Peter. ‘E minor – G major – enharmonically changing to F major . . . can you hear that?’

  Peter put his microscope on the piano.

  The schoolmaster laughed. ‘You won’t get any further with a microscope.’ From F major it wasn’t far to B flat major . . . and then the whole world was open to you! But exactly how had he done it before? How did it go? And how had he managed to infuse the whole thing with melancholy? He played so loud a flourish that Peter shushed him. For goodness’ sake, someone might hear.

  •

  At this moment Katharina was being marched along the road down below. In her white Persian lamb cap she could easily have been seen among the prisoners. Perhaps she was looking up at the house. A lakeside villa with a bronze deer on the terrace, and now piano music?

  Her black boots had already been taken away from her, and she was trudging along in a worn-out pair of men’s shoes. Whenever she slipped, the guard beside her told her to watch out.

  From all sides, onlookers shot the prisoners hostile glances. It’s the fault of people like that, they thought. They stirred everyone else up against us, they fanned the flames setting the world alight.

  A farmer even reached out towards her with his whip. He had tied little knots in the lash, to make it sting more, and it caught Katharina’s cheek.