by Heinz Kohler
My father was smart, too, not with the op-language, but when it came to being a bread winner. One day, he took me to the big highway, and we gathered up a large bag of cigarette stubs. A stream of Americans drove to Berlin and back on the Autobahn, and they never finished their cigarettes. At home, we opened the stubs and had a big pile of American tobacco on the table. Sometimes, we could even identify the brand from the cigarette butts. Lucky Strike, it might say, or Camel, Pall Mall, Chesterfield, Old Gold, and Philip Morris. My father got a cigarette roller out of his bag and a pile of neat thin paper. We rolled a lot of cigarettes that day, and they all looked like new.
But my parents didn’t smoke. The next day, we went on a long trip with our wagon. First we went to the dairy, taking the straight route across the fields. The dairyman gave us lots of cottage cheese, a can of milk, and even a chunk of butter–all for ten cigarettes. Then we went to the miller, the one in the next village, who always wanted Aunt Liesel to take off her bra. He traded ten pounds of flour for twenty cigarettes. He also gave us some yeast. But when we got home, the flour had maggots in it.
We also stopped at lots of farms in the miller’s village, and my father asked for potatoes. Each farmer gave him a dozen or so, and our wagon was filled to the top when we got home.
We went back to the highway often, and we didn’t tell anyone about the source of our cigarette wealth. Years later, I learned that cigarettes had become a regular currency all over Germany in those days. There was even a new word for people like us who kept the system afloat: Kippensammler [cigarette butt collectors] they were called. Even Mr. Albrecht was ready to trade. He was always willing to supply sausages for a smoke, but he only gave us the ones he made from old horses. I still had to sneak down at night to get the liverwurst.
We also had fun looking at the pictures Aunt Martel had brought from Berlin. I liked best the one of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s Central Park, which she and I had often visited in the past. There used to be lots of giant old trees, surrounded by thousands of fragrant, flowering bushes in the summer, and all sorts of marble statues along its winding paths. I think I told you about that once before. But the picture showed none of that. The Tiergarten, I learned, had been the scene of one of the fiercest battles in the last days of the war. Almost every single tree, bush, and statue had been destroyed, leaving behind, miraculously, only the central monument, the tall Column of Victory that celebrated Germany’s triumph over France in 1871. The picture Aunt Martel had taken that summer showed a farmer plowing the park, in the very center of Berlin, in order to wrest a bit of food from the ground, while the Goddess of Victory looked on.
akg-images, London, United Kingdom
The Column of Victory in Berlin’s Tiergarten,
a Central Park used for agriculture
following World War II
35. Hooliganism
[April – June 1946]
In the spring of 1946, Lieutenant Trapeznikov replaced Major Mayants as Ziesar’s commandant. Mrs. Gronostalski said he was a devoted Communist and deeply shocked by what he called “antisocial activities” in our village–by Russians and Germans alike. There would be a lot of changes, she predicted.
“He is determined to win the hearts and minds of everyone for Communism,” Mrs. Gronostalski said. “As a first step, he has issued strict orders to the garrison that any further violence would be treated as a capital crime. He would not hesitate, he said, personally to shoot rapists on the spot; they are a blemish on the Motherland; they stand in the way of people embracing a new way of life, based on Marxism, Leninism, and Stalinism.”
“As for the rest of us,” she continued, “he is going to make sure, he says, that ‘everyone does honest work and the results are shared equally by all.’ There’s even a new sign on the wall behind his desk: ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat!’ it says.”
Everyone in the Albrecht house was relieved to hear the news, if it was to be believed, at least the part about rapes. And there was more good news as well. Mrs. Gronostalski thought she could get my father a job with the commandant, as chief of statistics. All they had to do was walk across the street and set it up. Mrs. Gronostalski said I could come along and try out my Russian.
“Ya lyublyu russkiy yasik, yasik nashevo velikovo sosyeda na vostokye,” I said.
“Ya nye znayu mnogo slov,” I quickly added.
These were sentences we had just learned in school.
“I love the Russian language, the language of our great neighbor to the east,” said the first one. “I don’t know many words,” said the second.
The commandant laughed, and my father did get the job, along with an office in the Town Hall.
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There were two things my father had to do. His first task involved copying the commandant’s list of the village population and dividing it into farm families and non-farm families. He then was to distribute ration coupons for various food items to the latter group, while also policing the bakery, butcher shop, and grocery store, which ultimately had to account for any loss of inventory by handing back the spent coupons. Black market transactions with the help of cigarettes were strictly forbidden.
My father’s second task was much more involved. Once a week, he was to prepare a giant table for the commandant, listing, in a first column, the names of all the farmers and, in numerous subsequent columns, the sizes of each farmer’s fields; the degree to which they were plowed, seeded, planted, or harvested; the extent to which they were devoted to growing barley, oats, rye, wheat, potatoes, sugar beets, asparagus, or just plain grass; and, last but not least, the numbers of chickens and geese, cows and pigs, horses and tractors currently owned, along with the number of eggs collected, the liters of milk produced, the pounds of silage fed to pigs, and so on, almost without end.
As page after page was glued together, some of the tables turned out to be 5 meters long, almost three times my father’s height, but that was all right. The commandant liked large tables. To produce them, my father walked from farm to farm every day and filled the table grid with numbers. Mrs. Gronostalski wrote in the column headings in Russian when he was done. I got into the act as well. Aunt Martel had brought me an animal-and-plant stencil kit for Christmas. It allowed me to trace 250 different figures and then fill in the result with colored markers. The commandant liked my visual aids, especially my rendering of the fatted pig. He gave me a reward: a Russian officer’s hat made with fine, light-brown leather on the outside and sheep’s wool on the inside and also on the outside rim. It also had white wooly ear flaps that one could let hang or button to the top. And in front, there was large shiny metal star, colored red, with a golden hammer and sickle on it and surrounded with golden ears of wheat.
Despite the fact that it was summer, I wore the hat when I accompanied my father on his daily rounds to the farms. But the farmers were not happy with either of us. They thought the commandant was just trying to make them work harder and for less, and they were probably right. Everyone knew that farmers were supposed to feed their families and then deliver all the rest of their output to the Russians. And the commandant was obviously watching their every move, having recently outlawed “black butchering,” the practice of secretly slaughtering some unregistered animal in the middle of the night and then disposing of it on the black market.
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I don’t remember how it happened, but that was also the time at which my parents got into the Big Fight. Maybe it was the constant griping by all the farmers that got my father down. Maybe it was my mother talking to my father about Leo Krell and how he had died and thus reminding him, as if he needed reminding, of the Hitler years and the war, and my father saying that he had never known any Leo Krell but that, perhaps, it had been a friend of his who tried to escape the penal regiment by taking on a false identity in the last agonizing moments of the war. Maybe it was a sudden flood of bad memories coming back to both of them; just seeing Uncle Herbert in town could have done it. But one thing
is for sure. Day after day, my father had been coming back from the commandant filled with potato schnapps, barely able to walk, and quickly passing out on the bed. Or on the floor. When it came to drinking, the Russians were a real inspiration.
My mother was not about to let that pass. She had been robbed of her husband once and she would not be robbed again. Because of him, she had journeyed into hell, had endured years of fear, hunger, and violence. Now he had returned, and he was not the same. That’s when my mother told my father to quit drinking right then and there or she and the children would be gone. She meant it, he knew it, and apparently he did.
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Back in school that spring, we had to do a lot of memorizing, especially in English and Physics. Memorizing English, taught by Miss Mahler, was simple enough. There was Milton, On His Blindness, and I performed beautifully, in front of the whole class. When I consider how my light is spent…The memorizing that Mr. Clausen, our physics teacher, required of us, on the other hand, was impossible, which, ultimately, caused all the trouble that spring. The subject was Measures and Weights and it all started innocently enough.
“With respect to length,” Mr. Clausen said, “the most important unit of measurement is the meter. It equals one ten millionth part of the shortest curved distance from pole to equator.”
“As we all know,” Mr. Clausen continued, “1,000 meters make 1 kilometer, a unit we all employ every day. But you should also know and memorize some of the most common non-metric measures: the Prussian mile of 7,532 m; the English mile of 1,609.34 m; the world nautical mile of 1,852.01 m; and the Russian mile, or versta’, of 1,066.78 m.”
In the same fashion, Mr. Clausen reviewed for us area measures, such as the square meter (“1 million of which equal 1 square kilometer and, thus, 100 hectares,” he said) and volume measures, such as the cubic meter (“equal to 1,000 liters,” he said), and measures of weight, such as the gram (“with 1,000 grams equaling 1 kilogram and 1,000 kg, in turn, equaling 1 ton,” he said). But then he got carried away, dictating definitions, such as these:
1) horsepower = the power needed to lift 75 kilograms to a height of 1 meter in 1 second
2) ohm = a unit of electrical resistance equal to that of a conductor in which a current of 1 ampère is produced by a potential of 1 volt across its terminals
3) ampère = a unit of electric current, equal to the steady current that (when flowing in straight parallel wires of infinite length and negligible cross section, separated by a distance of 1 meter in free space) produces a force between the wires of 2 times 10-7 newtons per meter of length
4) volt = a unit of electrical potential, equal to the difference of electric potential between two points on a conducting wire carrying a constant current of 1 ampère when the power dissipated between the points is 1 watt
5) watt = a unit of power equal to 1 joule per second
6) joule = a unit of electrical energy equal to the work done when a current of 1 ampère is passed through a resistance of 1 ohm for 1 second
Understanding nothing, I could not imagine myself memorizing these definitions by the next class. Stalling for time, I said:
“You use the terms ampère and volt in the definition of ohm and then define both. But you fail to define a newton, which is used in the definition of ampère.”
Mr. Clausen looked at me with disdain.
“A newton,” he said, rather reluctantly, “is the unit of force required to accelerate a mass of 1 kilogram by 1 meter per second per second.”
Not knowing the difference between speed and acceleration, that answer really bothered me.
“You mean, perhaps, ‘per second’ and not ‘per second per second,’ as you put it just now?” I asked.
“I mean precisely ‘per second per second’” Mr. Clausen said decisively and in a louder voice than before and his hand reached for the Yellow Uncle. Apparently, he hadn’t gotten the message.
“No corporal punishment,” Miss Mahler had said.
But that’s what we got before the class was over. The Yellow Uncle was visited upon many of us. There had been too many dumb questions, Mr. Clausen said, and somehow he never managed to answer any of them. And, as I said, that’s what started it all.
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When I got to school the next day, some of the farmer boys were already holding a caucus. They were going to teach Mr. Clausen a lesson and I agreed to help. By the time he walked into class, he found us counting aloud in unison:
“One, two, three, four, five ...”
“Quiet!” he yelled, and swish went the Yellow Uncle.
“Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve ...”
“What is this?” he shouted. “Have you gone mad?”
"Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen ...”
“Stop it, you hear! I am a learned man; you cannot do this to me. Stop it, do you hear!”
“Twenty-seven, twenty-eight ...”
Three of the bigger boys got up and opened the window. They picked up Mr. Clausen, shoved him out the window head first, but held on to his feet. We were, after all, on the second floor.
“Hurrah,” shouted the crowd, and “Hey, teach,” someone said, “repeat after me, and do it fast: ‘How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? It would chuck all the wood that a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.’ Go!”
Mr. Clausen complied in a hurry, and everyone gave him a hand.
“Yeah,” someone said, “and now try this; five times fast: ‘Sweet Sue sells sea shells at the sea shore.’ Go!”
Mr. Clausen tried again, and they pulled him in. He was very red in the face and ran out of the room. Soon Miss Mahler came. As I told you, she was the new principal. And she called us a bunch of hooligans and promised that we would pay for our misdeeds in the summer.
“You seem to have a lot of excess energy,” she said, "and I promise you that it will be put to good use. This summer, each of you will work, from daybreak to sunset, and, if necessary, the summer after that as well. Each one of you will learn the meaning of order and discipline.”
She also told us about building a new society of Communism, in which all people would be brothers and sisters and would give their best for the well-being of all. And she warned us about new tyrants who had arisen in the West, a group of evil men out to destroy “the emerging communities of brotherhood in the East.”
“They are dangling over us the sword of Damocles,” she said. “Their atomic bomb could snuff out life all over the earth in an instant. That’s where your energies should go: Building brotherhood at home and fighting the tyrannical monsters of the West!”
Wow! Where did that come from? I wondered what had happened to the sweet Miss Mahler I had known. Was she drunk, perhaps? I had seen her drink from that vodka bottle in her office more than once and she never seemed to drink anything else. Perhaps, I thought, she was worried about her breath, just in case Mr. Wolf was moved to give her a kiss.
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On the way home, I walked past the Town Hall and looked at the news. Although it had just been posted, it was five months old:
November 1945
An International Military Tribunal has convened in Nuremberg to initiate the trial against 21 former political leaders and generals of the Nazi regime, including, among others, Göring, von Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Jodl, von Papen, Sauckel, and von Schirach
Like the misdeeds of the Nazi leaders, ours was not forgotten by the time summer came. Miss Mahler turned out to be a woman of her word.
“It is time to avenge your crime and to teach you the meaning of socialist morality,” she said. The day school let out, we were given our assignments for the rest of the summer.
First, we were taken to the potato fields and shown the bugs that American planes were dumping every night while flying to Berlin.
“The monopoly capitalists are trying to starve us into submission,” Miss Mahler said, “but the people shall prevail.”
We crawled through endless kilometers of potato fields, each one of us with a row of plants between the knees, squashing the evil bugs with little stones. The sun was merciless. By noon, the sand got terribly hot, and I thought of slaves in cotton fields. But, if the truth is to be told, I also made sure to have a row next to Helga. That way I could get ahead of her by a meter or two and turn around often to smile. And I could look inside her blouse and see her little breasts.
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Whenever we had finished with the potato bugs, and it was a repetitive job that had to be redone at least once a month, we dug the gardens. The commandant had come up with a new slogan that appeared all over town:
“Junkerland in Bauernhand,” it said. “The gentry’s land into the peasants’ hands.”
Under the new program, the commandant expropriated all the farmers’ land in excess of 100 hectares and divided it into 5-hectare-plots to be given to non-farm families who wanted to farm. Many of the East Prussian and Silesian refugees took him up on his offer. They were called Newfarmers–like Newteachers, that was another new word fusing adjective and noun. But, and that is the main point here, additional smaller plots of land were available to all other families for gardening and that’s where our second assignment came in.
We were marched onto a piece of pasture land and told to dig it up with little spades. The plows and horses were needed for more important things, and we had the excess energy. But the girls couldn’t do the job, the grass was too thick. They were sent off to gather Queen Anne’s lace and chamomile for the local pharmacist and beech nuts for the margarine factory in Brandenburg. Some of them had to gather acorns to be fed to pigs.
My parents got one of the garden plots and we all worked it, on weekends mainly. We planted potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, kohlrabi, onions, and carrots. We also planted climbing green beans after building a structure made of tall poles. But we weren’t very lucky. There was no water nearby and when the rains failed to come, all the plants died. On the few occasions when everything flourished, everything was stolen over night just before harvest time. I tried to plant tomatoes a second time, but they were still green on the vine when the first frost killed them.