Red Love

by Leo Maxim

  Werner and Sigrid on their wedding day, 1941

  The next morning, just after dawn, American fighter bombers fly over. “They don’t dare touch us, they’re scared of our anti-aircraft fire, they’re Americans, after all. German fighter pilots would have done everything quite differently.” Werner sounds as if he’s been there for months. His soldierly first-person-plural is routine by now, and he doesn’t seem to have any doubts about his mission. A few pages later, on the other hand, he writes with horror: “The Yank is shooting at our gun emplacements. We’ve had our first fatality. Our radio operator got a grenade splinter in his head. After about ten seconds he was dead. I have a funny feeling in my stomach when he’s laid on the truck. His name was Mehrling, and he played the piano beautifully on our farewell evening in Nettlingen. It’s such a tiny step from life to death.”

  Werner has barely slept for five days. He repeatedly dozes off even when he’s walking, he falls on his face in the snow and gets up again, startled. He’s wearing two shirts, two pairs of underpants, two pullovers, a drill suit, a mortar suit and a coat. He’s still cold. On 5 January it occurs to him that his daughter Rita is now a year old. “In the dark hole in the ground, Franz is already asleep, I think about home and about Rita. I cry a bit and go to sleep.”

  Over the months that follow a hasty retreat begins. Werner has recorded the dates and places in tiny handwriting on a sheet of A4 paper: “13.3. Niederbronn, buried Pawelczek (…) 21.3. Kaplanai-Hof, 15 minutes’ barrage against our position (armour-piercing shells) (…) 24–26.3. Friedrichstal, 1st bath since Hildesheim.” In spite of his hunger and his constant terror he does seem to have some romantic dalliances during this time, which he records in brief notes: “1–3.4. Hohenklingen (young farmer’s daughter, about twenty-four, father and brother fallen, mother dead, would have liked to keep me, twenty-five acres of land! She wanted to give me civilian clothes). I was scared, the SS was after us (…) 9–16.4. Rienharz, with a Rhineland girl, jolly evenings (…) 20–23.4. Schwörsheim, as a private lodger in the flat of a young war widow, Elsa Taglieber.”

  The next detailed entry is dated 1 May 1945, 2 p.m., Westendorf. Werner writes in pencil: “We arrive here at nine o’clock with our mortar division. At twelve the Yank fires into the village. We have recognized the pointlessness of fighting on, and decide to accept that we’ll be taken prisoner. Our officers drive on into the Alps. We tip the mortars down a hill, bury the aiming equipment and the optical devices. The Yank is 700 metres behind us on the motorway, and doesn’t dare come in to get us. We still have enough food and time. I sit in a parlour, reading and thinking. It’s actually a shame that it’s all going to be over today or tomorrow. I’d have liked to go on running until the war was over so that I could get home without being taken prisoner. But I’ve had it up to here with being chased every day, and with the lack of ammunition. We play forfeit games with a farmer’s daughter and another young woman till midnight, then we lie down on the floor to sleep. The next day a Pole comes at eleven and says the Yanks are telling us to hand ourselves over. We march in march formation to the Yanks. The first sentry tells us to throw our guns on a pile. A little further along, a Yank addresses us in German. He looks like a drunken cowboy. He wears dark glasses around his helmet, and a coloured scarf around his neck. In each hand he holds a pistol. So the war is over for me.”

  They spend a few nights crammed together in a barn, on 6 May the prisoners are taken via Munich and Augsburg to Heilbronn. They sit in a field surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. There are heavy machine guns at the four corners of the fence. It’s hot and there’s no water, at midday a few buckets of rust-brown broth are passed over the fence, but by now there are at least 20,000 people in the camp, Werner guesses. He lies on the hard mud floor and tries to sleep. Time passes, it’s unbearably hot by day and at night the temperature falls below zero. No one knows how long they will have to stay here, or what’s going to happen to them. The surrounding fields are also being fenced off, and new prisoner transports are arriving every day. There’s hardly anything to eat, and even water is in short supply. Werner tries not to move too quickly, because it makes him dizzy. The first men collapse and are taken away, others go completely mad and can only be calmed with great difficulty. Werner records: “Here you see everyone as he really is, lots of people lose their composure. They push their way to the water tap like animals, no one wants to wait. I’m avoiding any pointless movement. Saving strength. Anyone who falls and doesn’t get up is lost.”

  A week later they are divided according to postcode and assigned new places in the camps. Werner hopes that the process of their release will begin soon. On 21 July they march to Heilbronn freight station, accompanied by American soldiers with sub-machine guns at the ready. They climb aboard freight trains, thirty men per carriage. A railwayman whispers to them that the train is bound for France. “We’re stunned, the little bit of strength we derived from the hope of an imminent return home has fled all of a sudden. I feel profound despair. I don’t even have the strength to cry.” They travel via Strasbourg and Nancy to Le Mans in eastern France. There they end up once again in a camp in an open field. It is forbidden to get closer than five metres to the barbed-wire fence. An over-zealous prisoner assigned to cleaning duties goes closer to the fence to pick up a piece of paper. The sentry fires at him and the man roars with pain. A paramedic is called. He comes and kneels down by the injured man. The sentry also shoots at the paramedic, who dies immediately. Werner watches all this without any particular emotion. “I’m too weak to be really sad. I forget the names of my comrades, even trying to do small sums creates difficulties.” There is a small photograph in one of Werner’s albums that was taken at this time. At first glance you wouldn’t recognize him. Werner is emaciated, has a full beard and long hair. His gaze is dull.

  At this time his diary is his closest companion. He has smuggled it through all the checks, in a double-bottomed suitcase. After being taken prisoner by the Americans he writes: “For all my misfortune, I have been lucky after all. My pen and notebook are there.” The diary is his friend, in whom he can confide everything. During the first few weeks in France his handwriting is unsteady and indistinct. That is probably due in part to the exhaustion he writes about. On 22 August he notes: “It takes a lot of self-control to continue with this diary. But it’s the only meaningful thing remaining to me.” He describes in great detail life in the camp, the food portions, the weather, his comrades. About the lost war, about the Third Reich that has just collapsed, he doesn’t waste a word. Is he perhaps afraid that his diary might one day fall into the hands of his guards? Or is this not the time for political reflections? By day Werner now digs mass graves. He gets double rations for that, and feels his strength slowly returning. In the morning they throw the corpses of comrades who have died in the night into the graves. Twenty corpses per grave. Then they pour on lime and soil, because otherwise it begins to stink after a few days. In the sick barracks Werner sees comrades he remembers from Heilbronn. “They have tuberculosis, and are not to be saved. I will bury them all, that much is certain. At the same time my fear of becoming ill myself is growing. This is a death sentence.”

  I have compared the dates and established that Werner arrived in France just before Gerhard left his French exile for Germany. For Gerhard the time of uncertainty is coming to an end, for Werner it’s just beginning. I try to imagine what it would have been like if the two of them had met at this time. The victorious French lieutenant and the captured German corporal. Gerhard dealt with German prisoners of war a lot, he even visited the camps to tell Wehrmacht soldiers of the crimes of the Nazis. When Werner arrives in Le Mans, Gerhard has just turned up in Paris, and sees his father again for the first time since the end of the war. France has become both men’s destiny, but in very different ways.

  15

  Pains

  WERNER IS LUCKY, AS EVER. In early April 1946 he ends up in a group of prisoners distributed around the surrounding farms.
One farmer, by the name of Jean, seeks him out because he’s the tallest man in the group. He asks him what he does for a living and Werner says “farmer”. Only a few days later, when it becomes clear that he has no idea about ploughing, harrowing or milking, Werner admits that he’s actually a model-maker. He’s allowed to stay on anyway, because he’s a quick learner and a hard worker. “A lot of work, a lot of food,” the farmer told him on the first day. The day begins at five o’clock. First Werner cleans out the stables, then he milks the cows and works in the garden. In the afternoon he goes out into the field. Work stops at half past seven. The food is abundant and delicious. “For the first time in ages I’m able to eat as much as I like. Communication with the boss is primitive but successful. Grabbing my bottom and saying ‘boom, boom, boom’ means peas. Today the boss weighed me, eighty-two kilos. The days consist only of eating, working and sleeping. In bed I still play the mouth organ and think about mother, Sigrid and the children.”

  The work is hard. Werner has blisters on his hands and can barely move his right knee. He trudges behind the oxen pulling the plough, in wooden clogs. The seed rows seem incredibly long to him. He notices himself getting dull, his brain closing down and all of his life going into his body. He recites poems out loud and delivers little lectures about electricity and technical drawing. He wonders if a brain gets smaller if it isn’t used. On 21 April Werner writes: “Last night when I went to bed it occurred to me that it was the Führer’s birthday.” Is it possible that he doesn’t know that Hitler’s been dead for almost a year? Does he know anything at all about the world beyond the French farm? Has he had news of his family? Werner describes everyday life in obsessive detail, but there are no thoughts about anything beyond the everyday. There is a photograph showing him and Jean the farmer. Werner is wearing a tie under his jacket, and is more than a head taller than the Frenchman. The farmer is a squat little chap. In the photograph Werner looks like the boss. Clearly that’s also the opinion of the madame of the house, as Werner calls her. More and more often the two of them stay up together in the parlour long after everyone else has gone to bed. “The patron is grumpy, he’s as attentive as a shooting dog.”

  They’re now working from dawn till dusk. At lunchtime there’s a break for an hour because the draught animals need a rest. Werner has pains in the small of his back and cracks in his hands, and his left wrist is swollen. “I don’t know if my arse is still attached to my pelvis or whether it’s hanging from a string.” Sunday is the day of rest. Werner thinks of Lilly, his holiday romance, who has just turned twenty-six. He describes how they met back on the train to Kühlungsborn. They sat facing one another in the compartment, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her. They fell into conversation, and when they arrived at the Baltic they had told each other their most intimate thoughts. Lilly got out in Kühlungsborn Ost, and he had to travel on. They arranged to meet at the beach and spent every day and soon every night together. “I’m happy, I feel as if I’ve met the woman of my life,” Werner writes. Then there are two crossed-out passages in the diary, the only passages he’s deleted, the ones no one else is supposed to read. After the blacked-out passages he writes about the child born after that holiday. “Very few people would forgive me for bringing this child into the world, but they wouldn’t reproach me for taking the lives of hundreds of people in the war with my gun. What sort of strange morality is that? What sort of times are these? As far as possible, I will give my little Heinz the feeling that he has a father, even if his father isn’t with him. It would be nice if Sigrid and Wolf were here now. I’m hopelessly alone again.”

  On 30 May 1946 Werner gets his first letter from Sigrid. A year after the start of his imprisonment. All that time he plainly didn’t know what was happening to his family. Sigrid writes that everyone is well. She encloses photographs of Wolf and Rita. Werner is proud of his son because he looks so much like him. He is beside himself with joy, and replies that now that fate has been kind to him he is ready “to be a decent family man who will, I hope, no longer stray from the right path”. It’s a kind of oath of loyalty, a statement of faith. “I want to climb the ladder of my ability right to the top. Where my ability stops, I will put my boy. I will make sure that he doesn’t have to start his ascent right at the bottom as I did. He won’t start his life with just a primary-school education. Soon I will tell him all that I am and all that I can do.”

  It will be another year and a half before Werner can finally set off for home. A year and a half in which he slogs away on the farm, day in and day out, and has no idea when his imprisonment will be over. I don’t know what happens to him during this time, his notes become increasingly irregular. He hardly gives away any of his thoughts and feelings. Some days he just records his weight, his pulse and the state of his digestion.

  On 30 September 1947 he becomes a little more forthcoming again. On that day he boards a train with thirty other prisoners in Le Mans. They are heading back to Germany. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for all those years, and now the time has come, and I’m a bit confused because everything’s going to be different from now on. I almost think I’ve got used to being a prisoner and don’t know where it goes from here.” They travel via Saarbrücken, Mannheim, Frankfurt, Hanau and Bebra to Eisenach, where they arrive late on the evening of 10 October. They are registered, examined and deloused. He is granted permission to send a telegram to his family in Berlin. Among Werner’s papers I find the registration form for Eisenach transit camp. “Well fed, normal responsiveness, no vermin detected,” it says on the form. They pass through three other camps before he is finally able to board the train to Berlin.

  “We arrive in Berlin at six o’clock in the morning on 28.10. That is the big moment for which we’ve been waiting for years. I want to absorb this last piece of homeward journey whole, and enjoy it with a clear consciousness. When I step out of Gesundbrunnen U-Bahn station, I have the feeling of being really at home for the first time. In a few minutes I’ll be at my place, and how will that be? I still have my key to the apartment. I quietly open the kitchen door and go in. The kitchen is smaller than I remember it. On the kitchen table there is a bunch of flowers with a welcome message, it looks as if they’ve been expecting me. I prepare myself for the first greeting, wash myself, comb my hair and brush my teeth, I’m calm but slightly agitated. Sigrid calls, who’s there? It’s the same voice as before. What am I supposed to say? I don’t say anything. I hear footsteps, the door opens. When I pull away from Sigrid’s first embrace I see Wolf and Rita. Both, and Sigrid too, look just like their pictures in my memory.”

  Here the diary stops. It is only four months later, on 24 March 1948, that Werner writes again. It is his last entry: “Time has passed quickly, and much has happened and changed. After I greeted my loved ones again, my imprisonment vanished like a dream. Life picks up at the precise point when I received my call-up notice. At home, everything is fine, by and large. I’m pleased with the boy. He’s turning out just as I’d imagined and hoped. But the girl hasn’t had the upbringing that her character needs. I want to have a determining effect on her, to achieve her acknowledgement of me. I think I have found the way, which will also force Sigrid to be rather tougher with her. After a few violent discussions between Sigrid and me about her management of the household and her domestic duties, she is trying to fulfil my wishes. I myself have lost a lot of weight lately, I’m constantly shivering, and filled with internal unease. I’ve just had lunch, and now I’m looking out of the window, calmly for the first time. The cobbles in the street drift past the houses like a strip of stone. How heavy must it weigh on the earth below? I feel as if all the cobblestones are weighing down on me.”

  It just can’t go on like that. How could it, after everything Werner has been through? I don’t know whether he was able to talk to Sigrid about it. About the horrors in the war and in the camps, about his fears, his loneliness. Did they have time for such conversations? Or was the hardship in the winter of 1948 still so
great, even at home, that there was no time to worry about past hardships? Perhaps Werner didn’t want to talk, he just wanted to forget it all as quickly as possible. It would be in keeping with his character if he had wanted to sort it all out on his own. If he suffered in silence under the pressure of memory. And then sometimes lost his temper, hit his son, yelled at his wife. The pressure had to go somewhere. It’s easy to condemn him today, to present him as an angry father and a bad husband. But it’s possible that Werner couldn’t have acted otherwise, that the years abroad had blunted him. If you’re in constant danger, if your sole concern is to save your own skin, if you spend months lying in the dirt, watching your comrades die, can you be normal again straight away? Can you ever be normal again?

  Werner tries, he won’t leave himself in peace, it’s almost as if peace is what he fears. A dreamy glance out of the window will have to do. As long as Werner is functioning, as long as he is being active, he can keep the past at arm’s length.

  Three weeks after his return he goes to the labour exchange, where he says he wants to be either a teacher in a vocational school or a stage-set painter. They give him the addresses of the main school authority and the stage workshops. Werner stands at the tram stop and can’t make up his mind. He decides to get onto the first tram that comes along. It rattles and squeaks along to the school authority building on the Werdersche Markt, past burnt-out ruins. Werner sees for the first time the ruined state of the centre of Berlin. The school authority, a formerly magnificent building, looks uninhabitable from the outside. Inside, Werner gets lost in the passageways and corridors that end in bricked-up doors. He climbs creaking stairs, with rats darting around beneath them. Werner wonders what the schools must look like if the administration is in such a state. An elderly gentleman shows him the way to the personnel department. There he is welcomed with open arms. Teachers are urgently needed. Only two days later he sits the exam for teacher-training college.