by Leo Maxim
Later, at home, I start reading. Werner describes his childhood in Göritz, a village in Uckermark, where he grew up on his grandparents’ farm. His father, a builder, was at war, and his mother, who worked as a salesgirl before she got married, didn’t have the money to stay with the boy in Berlin. His grandfather has two horses, two cows, three pigs, a few chickens and lots of geese. Four-year-old Werner’s job is to look after them. Every day and in all kinds of weather he takes the geese to the meadow to feed. Sometimes they fly away from him, and then he has to run after them and catch them again. He’s so tired in the evening that he often goes to sleep over dinner. His grandfather is a large man with bushy eyebrows. A former policeman, now a clerk and registrar in the village. Sometimes Werner creeps into the register office at weddings, stands beside the door behind a filing cabinet and doesn’t make a sound. It strikes Werner that the bride is always much younger than the groom. His grandfather later explains to him that the farmers seek out the daughters of other farmers, mostly so that their fields fit together. These weddings aren’t particularly cheerful affairs. Everyone looks very serious, and when the wedding is over the groom takes a hip flask out of his pocket and all the men are allowed to take a good swig.
When the weather is good, Werner goes swimming with the other village children in the pond beside the fire station. Before they go swimming they throw three dead frogs in the water to appease the pond spirit who likes to drag children into the depths, or so say the adults, who see water as a dangerous business. When his grandmother catches him swimming, he gets an earful. At Christmas his father takes a holiday from the war, because there is no fighting on feast days, which strikes Werner as eminently sensible. His father is a Zieten Hussar, he wears a field-grey uniform with gold cords dangling from it, and black riding boots with five-pointed spurs that you can spin. Werner writes that he didn’t know very much about his father. Nor, in all likelihood, did his father about him. His father has a pale, narrow face and a moustache from which little icicles hang in the winter. He doesn’t say much, and his eyes gaze wearily past Werner. His father is happiest when tending to the horses, and with his brother he drinks brandy that he’s brought from France. After Christmas he rides back to battle.
When the First World War is over, Werner moves to Berlin with his parents. They have a little flat in the working-class district of Wedding. There is a sitting room, a kitchen and a dining room. The city seems so big and inhospitable that he soon becomes homesick. He misses the meadows and the wide sky, the village pond and grandfather’s parlour. His father works in a power station, and goes to the pub after work, often coming home very late at night. On Sunday his father lies on the sofa and reads the paper or sleeps. Then Werner has to be quiet, because his father gets angry when anybody wakes him up. On the other hand his mother is there for him, and he can talk to her about anything. She makes him something to eat when he comes home from school. There is salted herring with potatoes boiled in their skins, or vegetables with bacon sauce. After his snack Werner does his homework, and then he’s allowed back into the street and doesn’t have to come back until the gaslights are lit outside. Later they sit down to dinner at the kitchen table and Werner asks if Papa is coming home today. And his mother’s eyes are sad, and eventually Werner stops asking.
It is very different when his father is on his summer holiday. Then he is always at home, because he doesn’t meet his colleagues and go drinking beer with them. During these weeks his father makes precise miniature horse ploughs, coaches and farmhouses that Werner is then allowed to play with. The toys are in Werner’s siting-room display cabinet, arranged around his Olympic papers. There is a little yellow post cart, a bronze dray and a fire engine assembled from tiny strips of wood. Next to that is a stable with a hoist for lifting tiny bags of straw, and an inn with a brown wooden veranda. I’d heard about these things, because Wolf had told me about them. When he was little, Werner also let him play with them. Wolf says the toys were only used by children who didn’t have a real father.
At fourteen Werner becomes a member of a gymnastics club, and also begins to draw. Twice a week he goes to evening classes at the College of Art on Grunewaldstrasse. There is also a life drawing class there. Werner is terribly excited the first time he goes. He’s never seen a naked woman before, and he’s disappointed. The woman, standing floodlit on a plinth in the studio, has flabby, drooping breasts, varicose veins and lank hair. Werner draws her as he would like to see her. It’s a pretty picture, but the course leader isn’t pleased. “Here we draw women as they are,” he says, and Werner has to start all over again. Werner has talent: the professor advises him to stick at it, and maybe even take a course of study at the college. When Werner tells his father, his father laughs at him. He tells him to learn a decent craft like everyone else in the family. “Studying art isn’t for people like us,” his father says. And that’s the end of it. At sixteen Werner takes an apprenticeship as a model-builder in a foundry, because his father knows the boss of a model factory. In the meantime the global economic crisis is spreading, and unemployment is on the rise. Werner should be glad that he has the chance to learn anything at all. Work in the factory is hard. Werner has to carry wood, sweep the factory floor and carry huge bags of glue. Twice a week he has to deliver the finished models to the customers in big baskets. If he does anything wrong, he is yelled at by the boss or punched in the stomach by the other apprentices.
There are lots of demonstrations in the streets. “Class against class”, it says on the Communists’ posters. Werner doesn’t know what it means. He thinks it might have something to do with school. At home in Wedding, the Communists engage in street battles with the National Socialists. People are beaten up or even killed. At the Kristallpalast cinema they show the anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front. The Nazis riot and throw bottles of ink at the screen. The Nazi thugs scare Werner. Most people have been made redundant at the foundry. Only the foreman toils away with six apprentices in the production hall. Just before Werner’s apprenticeship certification exam his father dies of tuberculosis. On his last visit to the hospital his father gives him a silver Thaler. A memento.
Along with his certificate, Werner receives his release papers. In one of the files I find a letter from the factory owner, Alwin Schrumpf, testifying that Werner has been fired “only on grounds of lack of work”. The letter is dated 3 March 1933. Werner is nineteen. From now on he goes twice a week to the dole office on Gormannstrasse, where he is given one mark eighty-seven pfennigs. One mark fifty of this goes to his mother in expenses. Of the few pfennigs left over he can’t even afford a tram journey. That is how his adult life begins. The queue outside the dole office on Gormannstrasse gets longer every week. A man he knows there advises him to go to the “Brown House” on the Lützowufer. “They’re always looking for people.” Werner goes there and asks. They need part-time workers for the railways, but you only get a job if you become a member of the SA. These are the thugs that Werner has encountered before, so he opts instead to keep going to the dole office.
After a few months the situation in Germany changes. “However much the workers might curse Hitler, he creates work,” Werner notes. “Many people’s views and political opinions are changing.” Whether his own views are changing, he doesn’t say. But now he can work for weeks at a time in the model factory again, and from 1935 he is even taken on full-time. He receives “a very decent wage”, which is also urgently needed, because by now his mother has used up all her savings and her widow’s pension isn’t even enough to keep her alive, let alone her and her son. Now Werner is the breadwinner, and that makes him proud. “At last I can take charge of my own life, all of a sudden everything seems possible,” he writes. A few months before at the gymnastics club he met Sigrid, who is five years younger than he, almost a child. They spend every free minute together. They go out, dance the tango, the waltz and the slow foxtrot in cafés in the park. They even win prizes, they’re such a handsome couple. There are
lots of photographs of her in Werner’s albums. “Sigrid doing gymnastics 1936”, it says on one page. She is sitting on the barre, her head tilted towards the sky and her legs outstretched. It could be one of those propaganda photographs showing the new, Germanic person. And they were just practising sport. But even that strikes me as suspect. The two of them seem too comfortable with the times, with the years of the body cult and the pomaded quiff. It all hangs together too neatly for me, the proud, blue-eyed workers’ children and the cries of “Sieg Heil”. I grew up with those truths. For me there was nothing innocent, nothing normal about Germany in 1936. Anyone normal belonged to the other side.
I visit Sigrid. She’s now living in an old people’s home run by the workers’ welfare organization, in Hohenschönhausen. Visiting her is fun, because she’s always so delighted. I owe Grandma Sigrid my first serious experience with alcohol. When I was fourteen, I emptied half a bottle of advocaat with her in the campsite. She only ever talked about the war, and I couldn’t get a word in. When I was a child she was my favourite grandma, because she let me watch television until closedown at her house, and eat cheesecake till I was sick. I could do what I liked, she always thought I was great, because I was like her Wernerle. Sigrid still clearly remembers her first few years with Werner. The boat trips on Lake Tegel, the skiing holidays in Carinthia, the cycling trips to Birkenwerder and the visits to the cinema on the Kurfürstendamm. She worked as a shorthand typist in the Raddatz & Co. department store on Leipziger Strasse. They went on outings with the gymnastics club and did amateur theatricals. Sigrid’s eyes gleam when she talks about those times. “All the confusion was over, my mother cooked very nicely, and I had Werner. They were the happiest years of my life.”
The only nuisance, says Sigrid, was the constant political discussions. If Werner was convinced about something, he always had to convince everybody else as well. Werner was very keen on National Socialism, he had raved about the new age, about new possibilities. “He liked order, he liked punctuality.” And at last he had work again. “Nazism is posh Communism,” he used to say. Sigrid didn’t really understand what he meant, and she didn’t ask because she was much happier dancing with Werner than talking to him about politics. But Werner had argued with her father Fritz, she says. He banged on at him evening after evening, but Fritz, who was more inclined to sympathize with the Communists, wouldn’t be convinced.
Wolf even says that the arguments once got so violent that Werner threatened to inform on his father-in-law for anti-government propaganda. Werner actually ran to the police station, but it was already shut. The next day his fury had vanished, so Fritz was free from the threat of denunciation.
Sigrid can’t remember this affair. It strikes her as a bit of an exaggeration. On the other hand, she says, she does like to remember the nice things. Wolf says the story of the denunciation happened exactly as described. Fritz had told him everything, and Fritz hadn’t been inclined to exaggerate. I don’t know what I’m supposed to believe. Can you forget that the man you’ve loved wanted to throw your own father to the lions? Or did Sigrid forget it because she wouldn’t have been able to live with Werner? If that’s true, what would have happened to Fritz if the police station had in fact been open?
Sigrid talks about an argument with Werner after their marriage, when they had found their first flat, a room in Pankow. Werner was determined to put a swastika flag in the window. Sigrid thought that was stupid, she didn’t want banners all over the place, not least because of her father. In the end they agreed just to buy a very small flag, but then Werner came back with the biggest flag he could find. Apparently the small ones were sold out. He put up flagpoles on the balcony of his parents-in-law’s apartment too. He would even have supplied the flags, Sigrid says, but Fritz forbade him from putting up the Nazi flags. Twenty years later Werner bought red flags for Fritz’s balcony. But that was quite a different story.
14
Jottings
NONE OF THIS MAKES IT SOUND as if Werner really had such a “critical wait-and-see attitude” as he claimed in his CV in the Fifties. It sounds more as if he, like many others, had been convinced by the idea of the better life. He noticed that things were moving forwards, that his life was getting nicer, and that even the children of workers suddenly had a chance. No one in his family had ever been skiing in the mountains before. He was also the first to see the sea. Even if they’d had the money, it would never have occurred to his parents to hire a wicker deckchair or buy a bottle of wine at a tea dance at the Wannsee. Werner felt like a social climber, like someone who’d struck lucky. “All of a sudden anything seems possible,” he writes, and that was probably the feeling that many people had in those days. Hitler made the little people big and the big people small. Gerhard, the son of the haute bourgeoisie, had to leave the country, while worker’s son Werner was able to enjoy the high life.
When Werner writes his memoirs in the Eighties, the process of repression has plainly advanced still further. He writes: “When the Third Reich was imposing its violent rule on every level, I was gloomy about this brutal form of government, and went on trying to find a solution for myself. If I didn’t salute the Nazi flag, didn’t go to any Nazi rallies and didn’t want to pay the contribution to the ‘German Labour Front’ in advance, I got into trouble. I scratched out the little swastika in the bronze medal I received for taking part in the Olympic Games. But even that didn’t change anything. I practised passive resistance, without supporting any counter-actions.” All of this is probably true. Werner isn’t the kind of person who makes things up. But he’s also very good at forgetting awkward things. It’s possible that in 1936 he really did scratch out the swastika from his Olympic medal, and in 1941 he was absolutely required to have quite a large swastika flag in his first flat. That he was hesitant at first, and eventually enthusiastic. Sigrid says that in the winter of 1942 he voluntarily gave his skis and warm underwear for the soldiers in Russia. “His skis were the holiest of holies as far as he was concerned, and he himself could have used the underwear. But he said everybody must do his bit for the final victory.”
I asked Sigrid what she’d known at the time about the crimes of the Nazis. She had to think a little. “We didn’t worry about them,” she said. She’d remembered a few things. There was a girl in the neighbourhood with curly blonde hair, called Nina Haller. Eventually the girl disappeared, because she was a Jew. Her Jewish headmistress, who had always ensured that children from poor families, like Sigrid, got Wurstbrote from the richer families, suddenly wasn’t there either. “But that was just how things were, we didn’t ask any questions, perhaps we were scared,” says Sigrid.
In February 1941 she goes on honeymoon with Werner to Hohnstein in “Saxon Switzerland”, the hills south-east of Dresden. There is a fortress on a mountain. People say locally that it’s a concentration camp. Sigrid says that one night trucks full of prisoners drove through Hohnstein. But that can’t be true, because Hohnstein concentration camp was closed down in 1934. Perhaps the people there told her about the transports. At any rate Sigrid says that none of it really touched her. After all, they were on honeymoon. “I thought we had the right to a bit of fun. Later on, everything got difficult enough.”
Werner didn’t have to go to war for some time yet. The model factory where he works supplies components for arms manufacturing. He is categorized as “deferred from military service” and is allowed to stay in Berlin. Wolf is born in 1942. Because of the increasing air raids on Berlin, in summer 1943 he sends Sigrid and the baby to stay with a cousin who lives in a village in Saxony. He himself receives a cure in the Baltic spa town of Kühlungsborn in recognition of his major contribution to the war effort. On the train journey there he meets a woman called Lilly, with whom he will spend this holiday. A year later Lilly falls pregnant with his child. On 9 September Werner has to report to the Hindenburg barracks in Bremen. He is trained to fire an anti-aircraft gun, and at the end of September he goes with his unit to the Lüneberg H
eath, where he is to take part in manoeuvres. Werner sees the red and gold heather and the brown and green forests. He thinks it’s a shame “that we have to wreck this dreamlike landscape with our grenades, and disturb the later summer calm”. He clearly hasn’t heard much about the war that’s been raging for five years in Europe.
In mid-December 1944 the regiment is assembled in Nettlingen. They are to halt the advancing American tanks in the Alsatian Ardennes. It’s the Wehrmacht’s last act of defiance on the Western Front. Werner probably doesn’t know at the time how pointless it is. It’s part of the last gasp. Werner kept a diary about his time in the war, in which he recorded in great detail everything that happened during his absence from home. I found the diary on a bookshelf in his flat, beside a first edition of the constitution of the GDR. Werner was amazed when I showed him the battered black notebook. He had already forgotten about it. The pages are closely written. Werner has beautiful, neat handwriting. Even the first lines, which he wrote in a hole in the ground in Alsace, seem concentrated and orderly. The hole is his dugout, two metres deep, frozen earth, three metres away from his grenade launcher. A blizzard is raging. It’s 31 December 1944. “When we fire the regimental salvo it’s five minutes to midnight. The grenades take with them my best wishes for the Yanks. The whole horizon is bright when the grenades land over there. Amazing New Year’s fireworks display. Boy, I wouldn’t fancy being a Yank. Two hundred and seventy shots, that’s 670 hundredweight of steel and explosive whizzing over there. By the time we’ve reloaded and aimed at the new target, it’s two minutes after midnight. So it’s 1945. I think about home for a minute. Are they still awake? I don’t think so. I’m sure Mutti is asleep, and so is Sigrid unless there’s a raid. They give us tablets here so that we don’t go to sleep. I can hardly feel my fingers, it’s so bloody cold.”