by Heinz Kohler
-----
So far as our school assignments were concerned, there was a third one as well. Despite the blisters on our backs, the calluses on our hands, and the wounds on our knees from all the crawling on the potato fields, we were sent to take care of the sugar beets. We crawled over endless rows with tiny plants that had to be thinned just right, and with big fat plants that had to be weeded and watered with buckets from the brook. And we were supervised by none other than Mr. Clausen himself, who stood at the end of the rows, berated us for our dirty fingernails, and cheered us on by calling us “anti-social parasites.”
“Those who don’t work, don’t eat,” he said. “So work.”
Strange as it may sound, Uncle Eddy said the same thing during his Sunday sermon that my father and I secretly watched from my hideout on the organ bellows.
“For it is written in 2 Thessalonians, chapter 3,” Uncle Eddy said. “Finally, brethren, pray for us that we may be delivered from unreasonable and wicked men: for all men have not faith. Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us. For yourselves know how ye ought to follow us: for we behaved not ourselves disorderly among you; Neither did we eat any man's bread for nought; but wrought with labour and travail night and day, that we might not be chargeable to any of you: Not because we have not power, but to make ourselves an example unto you to follow us. For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat. For we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.”
My father said Uncle Eddy was crazy and, rather than listening, we decided to study the new poster that the commandant had asked my father to put up at the Town Hall. In the background, the poster showed images of two socialist folk heroes, August Bebel (1840-1913) and Karl Liebknecht (1871-1919). Bebel, my father said, helped found the Social Democratic Workers Party in 1869, which later became the SPD. And in the waning days of World War I, just two hours after Philipp Scheidemann had proclaimed the German Republic from the balcony of the Reichstag, Liebknecht, standing on the balcony of the Emperor’s Palace in Berlin, proclaimed the Free Socialist Republic. And on the last day of 1918, he helped found the Communist Party of Germany, KPD. Shortly thereafter, Liebknecht was kidnapped by soldiers and shot to death in the Tiergarten, my father said.
In the foreground, the poster showed what was happening now. The new leaders of Germany’s Communists and Social Democrats, Wilhelm Pieck on the left and Otto Grotewohl on the right, both freshly imported from Moscow, were shaking hands on a deal that merged their parties into the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, SED. They were asking voters to choose them over the newly formed Christian Democratic Union, CDU, and Liberal Democratic Party, LPD.
“But without me,” my father said. “No more politics for me.”
“But then what return did you get from the things of which you are now ashamed?” Uncle Eddy thundered below us. “The end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christo Jesu our Lord. Amen.”
Unity of the Workers' Movement –
Unity of Germany!
Vote SED
[Socialist Unity Party of Germany]
36. Metamorphosis
[September – October 1946]
Mrs. Gronostalski had been right about Lieutenant Trapeznikov. He was determined to shake things up in our village and to bring about a big metamorfoza, as he liked to say. He did, for Russians and Germans alike. To everyone’s relief, the violence disappeared almost overnight. And there were outward changes that were fairly obvious, like all the fresh red paint appearing on the triumphal arches in the streets. More important things happened behind the scenes.
I remember the day in September of 1946, right after school had started and I was finally in the 8th grade, when I got my new Igelit shoes at the grocery store. For one thing, they are hard to forget, because they were weird shoes made from a new material, called plastic. They were dark brown and shiny and had no seams of any kind, nor did they have any eyes for shoelaces. They looked like they had been cast to fit my feet perfectly, more like a pair of tight-fitting, but rigid socks than shoes. It was equally weird that I had to get my new shoes at the grocery store, because the shoe store had disappeared and become the House of German-Soviet Friendship. The sign over the door said so, in Russian as well as German, and the inside had all been spruced up with loads of red fabric and bookcases filled with new books and, of course, large portraits of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.
In any case, just after I had bought my new shoes, I noticed Aunt Liesel and Uncle Herbert walking down the street in my direction. I hadn’t seen them for months, and they sure looked different. Both of them were all dressed up in new clothes and not so thin anymore. However, Uncle Herbert was still smoking a pipe with his own brand of “tobacco” made of dried rose petals; I could smell it. But my eyes were riveted on the red armband he was wearing, not unlike the swastika armband I had seen him wear in Berlin, but the swastika was missing, of course. He saw me staring at the armband and then at the button in his lapel. There was a hammer and sickle on it and its rim was red. The button with the brown rim and the swastika was gone.
“Well, you can be the first to know,” Uncle Herbert said, “I’ll be the new mayor, starting tomorrow. I’ve been going to school in Burg, have joined the SED, and am looking forward to a lot of important work around here. We’ll be living above the police station, right next to the Town Hall.”
I said nothing, but he must have seen the shocked expression on my face.
“There’ll be a new police force soon; we’ll call it the People’s Police,” he explained.
“You can tell your parents,” he added rather formally.
I was still speechless and watched them walk down the street–past the pharmacy and butcher shop on the right, past the Kommandatura on the left, crossing over to the Thousand Year Oak, past the Town Hall, and into the old police station next door, as if they owned the place.
-----
“Opportunist, that damn opportunist,” my mother said, “I suppose when the time comes, he’ll wear a green armband, too.”
My mother was instantly worried about my father’s job, but Mrs. Gronostalski said that my father would continue working directly for the commandant. No problem there. She was right once again. In the coming weeks, Uncle Herbert pretty much ignored us–perhaps, we knew too much, and he didn’t want to upset the applecart, or he was just too busy to do otherwise. But he didn’t put on a green armband; my mother was wrong on that account.
First, Uncle Herbert got all the farmers together in the school auditorium, the old farmers and the Newfarmers alike, and told them about land reform and collectives. I went to listen.
“Wouldn’t it be much better,” Uncle Herbert asked, “to put all the land in the village together into one giant farm and then jointly farming it for the good of all?”
“Instead of each of you wasting half the day moving among different fields–plowing a little field south of the village at sunrise, then sowing winter wheat on another little patch north of town later that morning, then harvesting cucumbers east of town in the early afternoon, and finally making hay in a little pasture out west,” he said, “think of how more efficient it would be for all the properties to be combined, for all the fields to be giant, for every one of you just doing one thing on any given day!”
“In addition,” he said, “such a rational division of labor on a collective farm would make possible the use of new equipment, like tractors and harvesters. In contrast, the use of such machines on numerous, tiny, dispersed patches of land simply makes no sense.”
“And at harvest time,” he added, “you can just share the crops produced, as you share them now within your families.”
The farmers didn’t buy his ideas. They grumbled a lot about sharing the land and the tools and the work and said they would end up sharing their crops by loading them onto railroad cars going to Russia. The Newfarmers, having just received their own land, were particularly mad at Uncle Herbert. Newfarmer Birkenfeld called him an asshole.
-----
Second, Uncle Herbert got all the store people together–there weren’t many of them left, just Mr. Albrecht , the butcher, Mr. Senf, the baker, Mr. Adler, the pharmacist, and Mr. Kalitz, who was now running the grocery store–and he told them about “the immorality of trading for profit.” He urged them to join the HO, the new Handelsorganisation, a nationwide consumer stores organization that would be owned and run “by the people.” To explain his point, he held up a giant green cabbage.
“Look at this cabbage,” he said. “Last month, farmers who sold cabbages like this one got precisely 10 pfennigs for it. But you,” he pointed to Mr. Kalitz, “were charging 30 pfennigs a head and do you know what a buyer had to pay for it in Berlin?”
Uncle Herbert answered his own question:
“Berliners had to pay 90 pfennigs, fully nine times what a farmer got for it! There is no excuse for such rip-offs. Once the people own all the stores, what the farmer gets and what the consumer pays will be more or less the same. There will be no more Jewish traders and insurers and other such exploiters in-between!”
Except for me, nobody seemed to notice the slip about the Jews. The store people, perhaps, were too upset about the handwriting on the wall. Mr. Albrecht was hopping mad. He said he wasn’t about to lose his butcher shop, no matter what the reason. Mr. Adler asked whether Uncle Herbert had ever owned a store. Had he ever heard of paying a mortgage or an electric bill or all the other bills for its maintenance, which requires a markup over the price at which goods are bought? And Mr. Kalitz, who had gone to college in the 1920s, said Uncle Herbert was an idiot.
“I’ve read Karl Marx, too,” he said. “and all that talk about cabbage growers being productive workers, and store owners being unproductive workers and, thus, a bunch of exploiters, is a lot of bull. In the real world, the process of production is not confined to physical manufacture or the growing of a crop only. A cabbage in Ziesar in September is not the same thing as a cabbage in Berlin at Christmastime.”
“Those who transport that cabbage through space and time,” Mr. Kalitz added, “are just as productive as those who grow it in the first place. Unless you’ve been living on the moon, you know that it takes horses and wagons or trucks or railroad cars and real human effort to move those cabbages to Berlin. You call that unproductive labor?”
“And given that Berliners want cabbages not just in September when we harvest them here, but also at Christmas and Easter and all kinds of other times of the year,” Mr. Kalitz continued, “you surely must admit that we need warehouses and retail stores to make that possible? And Mr. Adler is right; all these cost money to build and maintain!”
“Yeah! Yeah!” the crowd shouted.
“And we need even the ‘unproductive’ labor of your despised insurers,” Mr. Kalitz added. “What if half the cabbages spoil or are stolen on their long journey from Ziesar’s fields at harvest time to Berlin’s dining room tables at Christmastime? For that reason alone, the ultimate seller must collect twice as much per head of cabbage as what the grower got for it. The difference just pays for the other head that disappeared and was never sold, but for which the grower got 10 pfennigs, nevertheless!”
Except for Uncle Herbert, of course, everyone gave Mr. Kalitz a standing ovation. On that night at least, Uncle Herbert got nowhere.
-----
Third and finally, Uncle Herbert got real busy with the denazification campaign. Any former member of the National Socialist German Workers Party could show up at the Town Hall and apply for denazification. The commandant had set the rules; Uncle Herbert administered them. There were two ways in which one could wash away one’s Nazi past and then be eligible to become a respected member of what the commandant called “the new society of Communism.”
Some people could claim that they had only been Schein-Nazis [facade Nazis], which meant they had only given the (false) appearance of being a Nazi in order to have an easier life. They had been brown on the outside only; they hadn’t really believed in the Nazi cause. They had done nothing and known nothing. Mrs. Dietrich of all people, the sister of Hitler’s erstwhile District Leader of Magdeburg and the wife of Ziesar’s last mayor, who had been hanged for werewolf activities, claimed to be one of them. Uncle Herbert quickly denazified her and, in no time at all, she showed up in our school as my new teacher of math.
Theoretically, there was a second way to get the coveted Persilschein [Persil Certificate], named after the laundry detergent Persil, that washed away the sins of someone’s Nazi past. Like the Persil ad of old, one might become “pure as the driven snow” by producing a letter from someone who had been helped or treated kindly at a time when it was dangerous to do so. Letters of thanks from Jewish survivors, who had been kept out of the camps or had been secretly hidden and fed, or who had merely been treated kindly when walking on the forbidden sidewalk, rather than in the muddy street, these were particularly prized. But no one in Ziesar came up with anything like that.
I know all this because I saw the commandant’s rules when I checked out Aunt Liesel’s and Uncle Herbert’s apartment after school one day. They had lots of new furniture by then, which no one else could afford or even find. They had all sorts of new books, too. Many of them looked alike, except that they had different numbers on them and different colors. The Lenin ones were blue and went from one to twenty. The Stalin books were red and went from one to thirty, but number 17 was missing. I saw a volume of poetry by Maxim Gorkii and various writings by Karl Marx, nicely shelved in chronological order: The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844; The Communist Manifesto, 1848; Theories of Surplus Value, 1861-1863, and Capital, volumes 1-3, “written in 1867-1880, and edited by Friedrich Engels in 1883-1894.” Uncle Herbert was always reading, Aunt Liesel said. It seems he was turning himself into a good Communist. For a moment I wondered: Might he have been one of those “beefsteak Nazis,” brown on the outside but red in the middle, finally trading in the raised arm for the clenched fist? No, I dismissed the thought. My mother was right; a damned opportunist, that’s what he was.
-----
Meanwhile, now that law and order had returned, the commandant was eager to transform the rest of us as well. My parents and all the other adults had to sign up for “political awareness courses” that were offered in the school auditorium every Wednesday night. And we 8th-graders, most of us in our last year of school and slated soon to join the world of hard-working proletarians, were fed a heavy diet of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism in every class we took. Mr. Hirsch, our History teacher, focused on Karl Marx and his teachings. Mr. Wolf, our Current Affairs teacher, reviewed the work of Lenin and Stalin. And all the other teachers, no matter what their subjects, still managed to link them to the new doctrines of the day.
“Karl Marx (1818-1883),” Mr. Hirsch wrote on the blackboard.
“He was born in the West German city of Trier,” Mr. Hirsch said, “and he descended from a long line of rabbis, which explains why he has been called ‘the last of the Hebrew prophets.’ In fact, however, in order to attend a good school, and ultimately the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena, Marx was baptized into the Christian faith when he was six.”
“Marx’s own teachings,” Mr. Hirsch told us, “have their roots in the dialectical approach of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, his philosophy professor at the University of Berlin.”
Mr. Hirsch gave us a week to research the subject and write an essay. Mine, which paraphrased a pamphlet I found in the House of German-Soviet Friendship, received a grade of 1, which was the best.
I still have a copy; it read like this:
The Dialectical Approach
By Hans Keller
The dialectical approach is a way of looking at the world that rejects the uncritical acceptance of outward appearances. Instead, it helps us gain true understanding of the essence of all the things we observe by focusing our attention on their inner contradictions, which, in turn, foreshadow metamorphosis or inevitable change in what we observe right now.
As an example, consider a tadpole swimming in a pond. An uncritical observer focuses on its outward appearance and describes it–perhaps, in great detail. And the thing so described is real, not a delusion. Yet still, the description is misleading because the tadpole is not a fixed thing! To understand its essence, we must recognize those inner contradictions–not in the sense of logical impossibilities, but in the sense of inner pressures and stresses, inner tension, inherent conflicts, opposing forces–that are bound to produce change, development, evolution, metamorphosis, revolution–call it what you like.
In our tadpole case, there is a hidden dynamic process at work that brings quantitative change (a bigger tadpole) and then qualitative change (a tadpole changing into a frog). The tadpole, thus, is but a transitory stage of a larger unfolding reality. In the same way, a person trained in the dialectical approach sees the fly in the maggot, the butterfly in the caterpillar, the oak in the acorn, and the apple, or even the new apple tree, in the apple blossom.