My Name Was Five

by Heinz Kohler

  It worked like this: Mr. Fischer left the train at the edge of town when it stopped there because of the highway. That was a perfect spot for us to meet because the Russians lived there and the German People’s Police had no business being there. I always took two bikes to meet Mr. Fischer. He said I was the sneakiest person on earth, and I could be proud of it. But he still wouldn’t tell me how he ever got to West Germany and then back to Burg with all that loot.

  In addition to the rabbits, we ate a lot of herrings that year, but we also did a lot of trading. Most of it was barter because the Reichsmark was considered worthless and the blue Russian money was hard to find. But there were rumors about an imminent currency reform that would introduce a new Deutsche Mark. In the meantime, cigarettes and inner tubes were the best currency. Both were worth their weight in gold, and we easily bartered them for milk, butter, cheese, and good bread. Palmolive soap wasn’t a bad currency either. Still, I was worried a lot, not only about the ferret in my room, but also about the stories I had heard about the new Volksschädlinge, those “evil men who hurt the People” by their black marketeering. Such “criminals” often seemed to disappear without a trace. I wondered whether I would be one of them, being sent to Sachsenhausen perhaps, but I didn’t dare ask my parents.

  The Black Market

  means

  DEATH

  of the New Currency

  Stamp out the black market!

  Black marketers are parasites

  on working people!

  39. A Spark in the Heart

  [April – August 1948]

  In the spring of 1948, Mrs. Fischer took a typing job at the Town Hall and Mr. Fischer left Burg to go back on tour with the circus. Thus, I was always alone in the apartment right after school–except for the ferret, of course, which I quickly put in the new cage Mrs. Fischer had bought. One day, I used the opportunity to check out the Fischers’ living room bookcase, and I got a big surprise.

  I am not talking about all the books on the top shelf: Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Christoph Martin Wieland, Johann Gottfried Herder, and of course, Germany’s idols, Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller. Nor am I talking about the middle shelf, which also looked like it had been set up for our German literature class: Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis (“pen name of Friedrich von Hardenberg,” the cover said), Joseph von Eichendorff, Heinrich von Kleist, Eduard Mörike, and Ludwig Uhland. It was the lower shelf that caught my interest–at first with its odd collection of books and then with the special book hidden behind all the others. In the front, in plain sight, stood Wilhelm Raabe, Theodor Fontane, Stefan George, The New Garden Book I (“with special emphasis on ground covers, shrubs, and vines”), The New Garden Book II (“with special emphasis on soils, fertilizers, diseases, and pests”), and Dr. Oetker’s Basic Cookbook (“guaranteed success with your most favorite meals”). And behind them all, carefully wrapped in an unmarked white cover, I found a 510-page tome, entitled Love Without Fear. Now those pages, along with no fewer than 55 illustrations of sexual positions, I simply had to study in detail, which I did, every afternoon between 3:39 when I got home and 5:14 when Mrs. Fischer arrived. But while the theme of the book was the joys of sex and the peace one would experience by avoiding pregnancy, the book nevertheless managed to fill me with dread! Unlike my parents, it told me everything one could possibly want to know about venereal diseases, photos included, and I was so sorry I had asked! In fact, I was so upset that I abandoned my fantasies of inviting Helga to my room and letting the ferret out to make her jump into my bed. I took her on a carriage ride instead. Once spring had come, one could buy a half-hour horse-and-buggy ride for as little as 1 mark in front of the railroad station. The horses had bells, and the evening was beautiful. The moon wasn’t out, but the stars seemed close enough to touch. Helga let me put my arm around her and hold her hand. I wondered whether I might kiss her one day.

  -----

  They promised us a class trip to the Baltic once we had finished our first year of high school. As it turned out, Helga and everyone else did go that July, but I stayed behind in Ziesar working in the fields. I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t.

  It started at about the time when Newteacher Mr. Klaus was made principal. They said it had something to do with his being Czech and having spent the war years in Moscow. Be that as it may, I remember us spending a lot of time in his class reading Izvestiya and Pravda, the Russian newspapers, and learning Russian words and grammar in the process. But Mr. Klaus wanted us to learn more than that and he carefully selected articles dealing with economic and political differences between West and East.

  “In the Soyedinyonniye Shtati Ameriki [United States of America],” we learned, “natural and capital resources are privately owned and their services, just like those of people, are traded for money in markets, as are the products they help produce. Under the watchword ‘free enterprise,’ these private resource owners produce whatever they happen to like, without regard to the fact that the economy, like the human body, is an intricate, interdependent system that requires the careful coordination of the activities of millions of people.”

  “But no one does the coordinating,” the newspaper said, “and the result is a mess, chaos, the eternal cycle of boom and bust, bringing with it inflation here, unemployment there, and poverty and injustice everywhere.”

  “How different things are in the Soyuz Sovietskich Sotsialistichiskich Respublik [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics]! In the Communist society,” we were informed, “natural and capital resources are owned by the People as a Whole and are allocated by a Central Planning Board in accordance with a carefully coordinated plan. Instead of the Blind Forces of the Market, Reason and Science are in charge. No business cycles there!”

  We read similar articles about the political systems–articles that contrasted USA-style free speech and majority voting (“leading to constant controversy and ever-changing governments”) with the one-party Dictatorship of Proletariat (“implying orderly and effective governance”). No wonder, we were told, that American and Russian foreign ministers, first meeting in Moscow, then in Paris, couldn’t agree on anything, not even on such simple matters as the release of German POWs or the Soviet Union’s just demands for reparations from Germany.

  It was during one of these classes that Mr. Klaus wrote CCCP on the blackboard and called on me to write out the corresponding Russian words. Given that C stands for S in the Russian alphabet, and P stands for R, I knew the answer: SSSR = Soyuz Sovietskich Sotsialistichiskich Respublik [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics], but I made the mistake of pronouncing CCCP as Cee Cee Cee Pee rather than Ess Ess Ess Ar. Somehow that made Mr. Klaus very, very angry. He called me a durak durakom [utter idiot] and that’s what I remained to him from then on.

  Unfortunately, Mr. Klaus also taught Sports, my least favorite subject. I was genetically unable ever to catch a ball, which is why my class mates never failed to choose me last for playing on their teams. In addition, no one had ever taught me the rules of various games, such as soccer or tennis, which made me look even more stupid. These facts did not escape Mr. Klaus. He was determined to straighten me out by torturing me whenever he could, and I came to dread our gym class, because I could never climb the ropes as everyone else could, and he always called me a “little old grandmother.” I also feared swimming in the big outdoor pool, mainly because it was full of water rats, but Mr. Klaus didn’t care. In fact, he took great delight in my obvious discomfort. “Durak durakom,” he kept saying. I was tempted to answer him with the worst swear words I had ever heard in my life (and that all of us had learned from our Russian friends), but I didn’t dare.

  -----

  My classes with Dr. Schablin, on the other hand, were another matter. Under the general rubric of Art, she introduced us to Graphic Design that spring, and she encouraged us to write essays on subject matters of our choice and to illustrate our arguments with appropriate graphs. Under the
guidance of Mr. Kalitz, whom I still saw on the weekends, I decided to write on “The Interest Rate and the Wealth of Nations.” That was fine with Dr. Schablin, but it was another reason why I got into such trouble with Mr. Klaus later on. Consider what I wrote:

  Just as Robinson Crusoe could forgo 8 fishes for a day and divert his labor from catching fish with his bare hands to building a canoe and making a net (which would enable him to catch not 8, but 16 fishes on all future days and thus earn a 100% interest return per day), so every society can make similar choices. Every society can always divert some human, natural, and capital resources away from the production of consumption goods (an act called saving) and use these resources to build new capital goods (an act called investing). Over time, a society that saves and invests can accumulate more and more capital goods (similar to that canoe and net) and its annual production of all sorts of goods can grow (similar to Crusoe’s fish production). In such a wealthier society, everyone can be better off.

  I illustrated my point with the following graph and explanation:

  Dr. Schablin was very happy with my “marvelous example of graphic design,” as she put it, and she placed my illustrated essay on the school bulletin board. She gave me a grade of 1, the best. In fact, of course, Mr. Kalitz deserved the praise, but I didn’t say anything about that. And worse still, while I should have stopped right then and there, I gave it one more try. Egged on by Mr. Kalitz back home, I came up with a sequel in no time.

  Unfortunately, except for its conclusion, my second essay has been lost, but I remember the general idea. I decided to compare the likely consequences if a communist country, such as the USSR, and a capitalist country, such as the USA, were to forgo equal amounts of consumption goods (Crusoe’s fishes again) in order to produce capital goods (like Crusoe’s boat and net). Who would manage to raise future productive capacity the most, I asked, and boldly concluded that legions of self-interested capitalist entrepreneurs, always seeking the most productive uses of their funds, would easily beat communist central planners. The latter, I said, being less than omniscient, might forgo the construction of boring barns and silos in favor of a much more spectacular-looking project, like a steel plant. But those very barns and silos that they failed to produce might have prevented the destruction by weather and wild animals of crops otherwise stored in the open or might have prevented the death of animals otherwise exposed to winter storms. And the export of crops and animals so saved might have yielded funds to import twice as much steel as the new steel plant could produce! Profit-seeking capitalists would quickly figure this out.

  “What is the end result?” I asked, and this was my conclusion:

  Consider two countries, A and B, initially with an identical output of 100 monetary units. Let A’s output grow at a slow 2.5 % per year, because central planners, sitting in the nation’s capital city, lack the detailed knowledge for selecting the most productive investment projects. Let B’s output grow at 5 % per year, because investment decisions are made by private entrepreneurs who are intimately familiar with the circumstances of their businesses and are, therefore, more likely to know which investments will raise output the most. Then, after a mere 25 years, the output of B will be almost double that of A. After 50 years, the output of B will be 3.3 times that of A, and after a century, B’s output will be 11.1 times that of A. Given the same population growth, country A is headed for poverty; country B is on its way to great prosperity.

  For emphasis, I graphed the diverging national outputs in a diagram and, again, Dr. Schablin posted my essay as a perfect example of the meshing of text with graphical art. But, as I said, I should have known better. It was just too obvious that A stood for USSR and B for the USA.

  -----

  In the middle of May, on the day David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the new state of Israel and, thus, established the first Hebrew nation in 2000 years, Mr. Klaus called me to his office and asked me to explain my “anti-Communist propaganda” and my “obsession with the interest rate.” He said I clearly had not understood the teachings of Karl Marx on the subject.

  “Interest is the result of exploitation of the poor by the rich,” he said. “There simply is no room for that concept under Communism.”

  He strongly urged me to join the FDJ [Free German Youth] and take the Communist youth organization’s Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism course on Wednesday nights. In fact, he said, I was one of the few holdouts; almost everyone else in school had joined long ago.

  “If you really want to go to the Baltic this summer,” he added ominously, “you better join up now. My secretary has the application form. Pick one up on your way out.”

  Perhaps I should have, but his blackmail annoyed me. I walked past Miss Lisius and never asked her for the form. And that explains what happened during our last week of school, which was the week in June when the Russians cut all the rail and highway routes to West Berlin. I remember the day–it was my father’s birthday, June 24, 1948–when Mr. Klaus called the entire school, students and teachers alike, into the large auditorium to talk about the blockade of West Berlin, a place that had become “a cancer in our midst,” he said. And then, to my utter surprise, he called on me to join him at the front and he asked me to defend myself. I alone, he said, hadn’t joined the Free German Youth, and that was a blot on the school’s record.

  Before I knew it, there was a lot of organized booing and shouting, and then Mr. Klaus said the time had come for my self-criticism. I looked at the audience, a sea of noise, I trembled, my heart was beating in my throat. And all those voices swelled together to make an overwhelming sound and I thought of running out the door. Luckily, my eyes fell on Maxim Gorkii and Joseph Stalin, life-size portraits hanging on the wall next to the stage, and I read the quotations underneath:

  “One must always say a firm Yes or No.”

  And the other: “Into the heart, into the center of the heart, one must throw the spark.”

  These words! They took on life; I found my voice.

  “I just don’t like being pressured,” I said simply. And then I talked about my father. I talked of so much greater pressure brought to bear some years ago when his life and lives of wife and son were hanging in the balance. I talked of Sachsenhausen…..of cruel guards with skulls and crossbones on black uniforms…of my father being offered his freedom for joining them….of his spending years in minefields as punishment for firmly saying “No!”

  And I talked of the Russian song that Mr. Klaus had taught us all: “From Moscow to the black-earth fields of the Ukraine; from the Caucasus to the Northern Sea of ice….there is no place on earth where man can breathe more freely!”

  “Is this the freedom we are being told about?” I asked.

  There were no more boos, Mr. Klaus dismissed the crowd, and Dr. Hertling, smiling broadly, shook my hand as I left.

  -----

  That summer, on the very day that America defied Russia by opening an airlift to West Berlin, Helga and the rest of my class took the train to Stralsund and drove onto the island of Rügen, where, I was told, they vacationed on the beach underneath white cliffs of chalk. As for me, I paid for my recalcitrance, as Mr. Klaus had put it, and went to work on Ziesar’s collective farm. That turned out to be not so bad at all.

  I learned all sorts of things, such as milking a cow and plowing a field with a couple of oxen, this time all by myself, without Mr. Kalitz helping me. And I had plenty of time to read another questionable book; this one on The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, 1928-1937, which Aunt Martel had sent from West Berlin. The story was fascinating. I found out that Russia’s peasants had responded to the program with great hostility, just as Ziesar’s farmers had. In fact, the Russians had been much more rebellious–destroying buildings, machinery, and inventories of food and seeds, and engaging in the wholesale slaughter of the newly confiscated livestock. As a result, during the first five years of collectivization in the USSR, the numbers of cattle declined from 60.1 to 33.5 million, those of hogs fr
om 22 to 9.9 million, those of sheep and goats from 107 to 37.3 million, and those of horses from 32.1 to 17.3 million. And ever since, the book said, Soviet collective farm output has lagged considerably behind any comparable figure in Western Europe and America.

  I promised my parents not to breathe a word of this to anybody once I was back in school. In fact, to reassure them, I wrote a politically harmless essay for Dr. Schablin’s art class during the summer. It dealt with a beautiful painting that was slowly emerging from behind a white wall in the chapel attached to Ziesar’s castle. Entitled The Paradise, the painting had been created around the year 1500 and pictured the Almighty Father, or maybe Jesus, amongst vermilion (vivid red and orange) flower arrangements. To please the Bishop of Brandenburg, the scene had been painted with genuine cinnabar, a heavy mercuric sulfide, Hg S, and principal ore of mercury. At the time, I learned, cinnabar had been more expensive even than gold! Still, during Luther’s Reformation, overeager Puritans had covered the whole thing with white paint, but that paint had been peeling off since the 1860s, ever so slowly revealing the underlying scene. In conclusion, I noted that vermilion was also known as Chinese red. Might it not be true, I asked, that China’s Reds under Mao Zedong will similarly emerge from obscurity as winners in China’s civil war? My mother told me to keep politics out of it, as I had promised her, and to strike out the last sentence.

  “Into the heart, into the center of the heart, one must throw the spark.”

  “One must always say a firm Yes or No.”