My Name Was Five

by Heinz Kohler

  Mr. Hirsch said that my rendering was simply marvelous, and he posted it on the bulletin board in the hallway. He also used it as a springboard to explain Karl Marx.

  “Karl Marx,” he said, “didn’t study tadpoles or acorns, but the social arrangements of people. For that purpose, he reviewed the popular descriptions of economic systems–of the social arrangements by which millions of people in every country cooperate in the production, distribution, and consumption of thousands of different goods. Unfortunately, Karl Marx found those descriptions inadequate, because the economists of his day–he called them ‘vulgar economists’ to draw attention to their shortsightedness–were focusing on the tadpole, that is, on outward appearances only. They failed to see the inner essence of these social arrangements.”

  Mr. Hirsch offered to enlighten us, and he did.

  “When you focus on the outward appearance of an economy only,” Mr. Hirsch continued, “things are simple enough. Just as we need certain ingredients to bake a cake–a baker, an oven, fuel, and, of course, flour, butter, milk, and so on–so we need a combination of three kinds of resources to make every single good that we produce.

  First, and most obviously, we need human resources or labor; that is, the physical and mental effort of people. There can be no bread without the baker.

  Second, we need natural resources; that is, the gifts of nature no human being has made. Think of land and all the plants and animals upon it, of the minerals and fuels underground, and even of the oceans teeming with life. There can be no bread without the land on which the bakery stands and on which the wheat is grown.

  Third, we need capital resources; that is, the tools, widely defined, that people have made in the past. Here you must picture in your minds not just hammers and spades, but also factory buildings and blast furnaces, barns and warehouses, highways and railroads, horse-drawn carriages and trucks, milling machines and piles of raw materials in yard. There can be no bread without brick ovens and sacks filled with flour.”

  “The vulgar economists of Marx’s day,” Mr. Hirsch continued, “were content with describing the resources different countries had and the ways in which they used them to make goods and apportion them among people. But they failed to see the essence of the arrangement. Not so Karl Marx.”

  “He recognized a crucial fact: Most natural and capital resources in his day were owned by a tiny minority of the population, which he called the capitalist class or bourgeoisie. In contrast, the majority of people owned their own bodies only and they had to sell their labor in order to live. Marx called this majority the working class or proletariat.”

  “And Marx called this type of economic system Capitalism,” Mr. Hirsch told us, “and he recognized an inner tension within it, which he called the class struggle. That struggle pitted the working class against the bourgeoisie. Inevitably, they struggled over the economic surplus, the difference between the value of goods produced and the amount needed to maintain the human, natural, and capital resources that helped produce those goods. To the extent that the greedy bourgeoisie kept the economic surplus, Marx said, it exploited the proletariat. This exploitation angered the workers and sooner or later, Marx predicted, they would expropriate the bourgeois exploiters and seize political power. Then a new era of Communism would be ushered in, as is happening in Ziesar, right here and now.”

  Well, that was quite a mouthful and explains, of course, why my mind had gone somewhere else long before Mr. Hirsch had finished. There can be no bread without the baker were the last words on my notepad that day and they took me straight back to the night over a year ago when I had spied on Fred Senf and Jutta Zweig making love among the newly baked loaves at the bakery shop. And that image, in turn, made me dream of Helga who was sitting right there, two rows in front of me, and who just might be persuaded to join me at the new movie house the Russians had opened on Castle Street. It certainly was worth a try. But Mr. Hirsch interrupted my reverie.

  “Under Communism,” he said triumphantly and with a loud voice, “the bourgeoisie is gone and the workers themselves own all the natural and capital resources in common. That makes them the masters of the productive process rather than its slaves.”

  “West Germany,” Mr. Hirsch added, “is still a country of Capitalism, but, having studied Marx, we know its future!”

  He pointed to the new slogan on our wall, a 1848 quotation from Karl Marx, he said, which nicely summarized Marx’s grand vision of historic evolution:

  "Let the ruling classes tremble. . . . The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!"

  -----

  Mr. Wolf, our Current Affairs teacher, continued the story on the very next day.

  “Vladimir I. Lenin (1870-1924),” he wrote on the blackboard, right below the spot where Mr. Hirsch had written the name of Karl Marx. It had never been erased.

  “Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, which was his original name,” Mr. Wolf said. “He was born in Simbirsk, Russia. His father was a councilor of state and later became a nobleman, but his brother was hanged for complicity in an attempt on the life of Czar Alexander III. That led Lenin to study Marx, in addition to his law books at the University of Kazan. Lenin was deeply influenced by G. V. Plekhanov, who organized the first Russian Marxist group. By 1895, in St. Petersburg, Lenin founded the League of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class.”

  Too much screeching of chalk at the blackboard. I stuffed cotton balls into my ears–one of the few things for sale at the pharmacy–and thereby erased most of the annoying sound. And I stared at Helga. I loved her black hair. And I dreamed about her breasts. I imagined them to look like the Renoir girl in my pocket.

  “But,” Mr. Wolf continued much more quietly, “Lenin did more than spread Marx’s ideas. He developed them further in a 1902 tract, entitled Shto dyelat? [What is to be done?] Workers, left to themselves, Lenin feared, only develop a trade-union consciousness; they become aware of the need to fight employers for better wages and working conditions, and that is it. They do not develop a communist consciousness; they do not recognize their possible role in abolishing the entire capitalist wage system. That realization is reached, Lenin argued, by intellectuals, who are trained to view the broad sweep of history and who must, therefore, raise the consciousness of the working class above the day-to-day bread-and-butter issues.”

  “And I couldn’t care less,” I said to myself.

  “Such is done best,” Mr. Wolf quoted Lenin, “by forming a highly centralized and secretive Party, a professional vanguard of highly disciplined and dedicated revolutionaries, who lead the workers to Communism.”

  “Indeed,” concluded Mr. Wolf, “at a stormy Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which was held in London in 1903, these ideas of Lenin were discussed. The majority of delegates, the Bolsheviks, supported Lenin; a minority, the Mensheviks, opposed him. By 1917, when Lenin returned to Russia to lead the October revolution, his ideas had won out. The rest is history.”

  “This Communism stuff is really painful,” I thought, “almost as bad as Uncle Eddy’s sermons.”

  But there was to be no relief. Within days, Mr. Wolf turned to another one of our new gods.

  “Joseph V. Stalin (1879- ),” he wrote on the blackboard.

  “Yossif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was his original name,” Mr. Wolf said. “He was born in Gori, Georgia. Like Lenin, he was repeatedly arrested, jailed, and exiled, but always escaped. By 1912, as a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, he put out the first issue of Pravda, the major Soviet newspaper of today. And Pravda means what?”

  “The Truth,” we answered in unison.

  “Excellent,” Mr. Wolf said. “Before the year is up, we’ll read an entire issue of it. All it takes is a lot of hard, honest work, which is precisely what Comrade Stalin would expect of you.”

  Mr. Wolf held up a copy of Pravda and pointed to a line at the top of the front pa
ge.

  “Rabochii vsech stran, soyedinyaetyez!” it said. “Workers of all countries, unite!”

  “Sooner or later,” Mr. Wolf continued, “just as a tadpole turns into a frog, the hidden inner forces of Capitalism will lead to Communism, a classless society in which all resources are owned and used in common. This change in property relationships will, in turn, Comrade Stalin predicts, produce a dramatic change in the outlook of people. A new type of Selfless Person will emerge, who contributes freely to the welfare of all and who gladly follows Marx’s command:

  From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

  -----

  Mr. Wolf also said it was time to put Stalin’s ideas into practice. Accordingly, he arranged for all the 8th graders to stay out of school for two weeks and join the sugar beet campaign. In the first week, every morning at sunrise, we were assigned to various farms to help with the sugar beet harvest. By afternoon, teams of horses pulled big wagons full of beets into the village and we dumped them in the farmers’ yards.

  In the second week, we scrubbed the beets with brushes and cut them up and loaded them into big copper kettles half full of water. The kettles reminded me of the one in our attic in Berlin where my mother had washed our clothes. Apparently the raw material campaign had never made it to here. Just like the village church bells, these kettles hadn’t been melted down. We stayed up all night stoking the wood fire and stirring the beets with large wooden ladles. After endless hours, the beets became a sauce, which turned golden and then brown. And then the sauce thickened and the brown mush changed to black with a lighter crust, while our eyes turned red from lack of sleep.

  Finally, in the end, our tired feet, hundreds of little bare feet, carried earthen vessels filled with black syrup, and metal boxes brimming with brown sugar, into house after house throughout the village. That was our first practical experience with Communism, and our work made Mr. Wolf very happy.

  Indeed, I seem to have learned Mr. Wolf’s lesson very well, because later that fall I twice volunteered to help other people, which was proof positive that the spirit of Communism had found a home in my heart. The first occasion involved Mr. Kalitz who had been ordered to plow a field, but had trouble doing so on account of his bum leg. Following my suggestion, he hooked up a team of oxen to a plow and guided them, while I managed the plow handles behind them and did the harder part of the work. After that, I even volunteered to help Uncle Eddy ready the church for the Harvest Thanksgiving Service. I loaded up the altar with piles of potatoes and apples, with asparagus, melons, and sugar beets, and also with carrots, celery, and bundles of wheat. It was a pretty sight, but that day ended badly, nevertheless. Just when we were finished, my father came in and landed an uppercut on Uncle Eddy’s chin, almost knocking him to the ground, right there in front of the altar! I suppose Uncle Eddy had had it coming for a long time, but it still was a big surprise to me, this being the first and only time I had ever seen my father do anything like that. I soon found out why.

  Earlier in the day, a car had gotten out of control and run into a tree near the Town Hall where my father was working. He had run out and found the driver unconscious, leaning over the steering wheel. Just then Uncle Eddy had come along and made a spectacle of himself by laughing loudly. Instead of helping the injured driver, Uncle Eddy had pointed to a couple of little statues dangling from the rear view mirror, one of St. Anthony, the other of Maria, the Mother of God.

  “Just look,” Uncle Eddy had laughed, “how their false gods protect the Catholics!”

  That would have been enough to set my father off, but there was another thing. Later on, little Helmut had seen Uncle Eddy walk along the opposite side of our street and had called out to him, “Uncle Eddy! Uncle Eddy!” and Uncle Eddy, the proud Superintendent of the Lutheran Church, had raced across the street and boxed Helmut’s ears mercilessly for making such a spectacle of him. I suppose this must have reminded my father of that fateful day in 1940 Berlin when Uncle Eddy had made him do pushups on the sidewalk because of a similar infraction.

  “Don’t you ever lay a hand on my children again,” my father said after he had knocked Uncle Eddy to the ground.

  -----

  On the day school started again, I saw Uncle Herbert in front of the Town Hall. He tore down all the black market signs from the bulletin board:

  “For Sale: One Rug for a Radio.” And “Wanted: Razor Blades, have Eggs.”

  Then he posted a newspaper story inside the glass case; I copied all of it:

  October 1, 1946

  After more than a year, the Nuremberg trial of top Nazi leaders concluded today. It took 403 sessions and 16,000 pages of transcripts to reach these verdicts:

  Death by hanging:

  1) Hermann Göring (most influential Nazi leader, next to Hitler)

  2) Joachim von Ribbentrop (Foreign Minister, active in the deportation of Jews from France and Italy to extermination camps)

  3) Ernst Kaltenbrunner (Chief of the Reich Security Office and Gestapo)

  4) Alfred Rosenberg (chief racial ideologist, editor of the People's Observer)

  5) Hans Frank (Minister and Reich Commissioner for Justice, Governor of Occupied Poland)

  6) Wilhelm Frick (Minister of the Interior, author of Nazi racial laws)

  7) Julius Streicher (Editor-in-Chief of the anti-Semitic paper, Der Stürmer)

  8) Fritz Sauckel (Plenipotentiary General for the Allocation of Labor; imported 5 million slave laborers from France and Eastern Europe)

  9) Artur Seyss-Inquart (Austrian Chancellor, managed annexation, later Reich Commissioner of the Occupied Netherlands)

  10) Field Marshal General Wilhelm Keitel (Military Chief of Staff )

  11) General Alfred Jodl (Chief of the Operations Section of the German Army, imported forced labor from Denmark, Belgium, Holland and France)

  12) Martin Bormann, in absentia (Hitler's Deputy in charge of Party affairs, arranged expulsion of millions of Jews to Polish death camps, as well as the utilization of Ukrainian slave labor)

  Life in prison:

  1) Rudolf Hess (once Hitler's Deputy)

  2) Walther Funk (once Hitler’s Press Chief, later Minister of Economics, later President of the Reichsbank)

  3) Grand Admiral Erich Raeder (Commander-in-Chief of the Navy)

  20 years:

  1) Baldur von Schirach (Hitler Youth Leader)

  2) Albert Speer (Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions)

  15 years:

  1) Baron Constantin von Neurath (Foreign Minister, later Governor of Occupied Bohemia and Moravia)

  10 years:

  1) Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz (Commander-in-Chief of the Navy and later successor to the Führer)

  Acquitted:

  1) Hjalmar Schacht (Banker)

  2) Franz von Papen (Chancellor June-November 1932, then Hitler’s Vice Chancellor and diplomat)

  3) Hans Fritzsche (Radio Broadcaster)

  Note:

  Additional trials for crimes against humanity will be held later against diplomats, doctors, leaders of the economy, scientists, and other generals.

  Uncle Herbert also pinned a new poster to the Thousand-Year Oak. It had a picture of Adolf Hitler on it, but Hitler’s face was turning onto a skull. There were only two words on the poster. “Nuremberg, Guilty!” it said.

  37. Misgivings

  [November 1946 – June 1947]

  During my last year of school in Ziesar, things happened that made me suspicious of the New Marxist Society that Lieutenant Lazar Trapeznikov was so eager to build. Mostly, these were events at school, but a letter from Aunt Martel at graduation time confirmed my qualms. It started in 1946, just before Christmas vacation, when Mrs. Dietrich reappeared in her new role as our teacher of math.

  “Our subject this week,” she said, “is the mathematics of interest. It is a lot of fun and you can master it in no time, because you have already studied percentages and exponents, both of which come in han
dy here.”

  “Picture a country in which people lend and borrow money at an annual interest rate of 5%,” Mrs. Dietrich continued. “In such a place, someone who lent out 100 Marks for 1 year would expect to receive a reward of 5% of 100 Marks, or 5 Marks, in a year, collecting a total of 105 Marks. That’s simple enough. But things get more complicated once we consider longer periods of time. For example, if that person then lent out the 105 Marks for another year, the money would grow by 5% of 105 Marks, or 5.25 Marks, in the second year, reaching a total of 110.25 Marks.”

  “This process of turning present Marks into a larger amount of future Marks with the help of an interest rate is called compounding,” Mrs. Dietrich continued, “and it is easily summarized by a simple formula.”

  She put the formula on the board, along with her example:

  Compounding

  If we denote

  1) the present time by 0 and, therefore, the present value of money by PV0 ,

  2) the annual interest rate by i (such that 5% is written out as 5/100 or .05), and

  3) the future time by t and, therefore, the future value of money by FVt , then

  FVt = PV0 (1 + i)t

  Example:

  Given an annual interest rate of 5%, 100 Marks in year 0 turn into what in 2 years?

  FV2 = 100 (1 + .05)2 = 100 (1.05)2 = 100 (1.1025) = 110.25

  Mrs. Dietrich asked us to figure out what we would get back in 5 years, if we put 100 Marks into a savings account now.

  “127.63 Marks,” I said, after working with the formula.

  “Excellent,” Mrs. Dietrich said. “But now answer this: If you lived in our hypothetical 5% interest country and someone who owed you money had promised to pay you 127.63 Marks in 5 years, how much money might you just as well accept now as full payment of that debt?”