by Heinz Kohler
The sentence has been carried out.
Dibrova,
Military Commandant of the Soviet Sector of Berlin
Luckily, neither my mother nor I knew at the time that 124 other people were executed within days as well, including 41 Soviet soldiers who had refused to open fire on civilians. Some 25,000 others were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms, typically 10 or 20 years of hard labor. What we did learn at the time was that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, on the other side of the Atlantic, had been convicted of giving the atom bomb to the Russians and had been executed as spies. According to President Eisenhower, they received the ultimate punishment for “having immeasurably increased the chances of atomic war” and for “having condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world.” That thought made it difficult to fall asleep. And when I did sleep, there were scary dreams, always.
-----
I looked at the Christmas trees and the suspense was awful. My heart was beating in my throat; each breath felt like it might be my last. I heard the roar of machine guns. An airplane veered off to the right, just missed the trees at the edge of the meadow. I felt blood trickle down my cheek; glass splinters lay in my lap. When I dared open my eyes, I saw the lieutenant slumped in his seat across from me. He didn’t move. Dark blood poured from his mouth, slowly spreading over his chest, flowing over his medals, soaking his pants, the upholstered bench, dripping to the floor. And I saw two fingers lying on the floor, still clutching a cigarette….
And the heavens turned a fiery red. I saw airplanes diving out of clouds, spitting flames from their wings, and I felt the heat from the sea of flames surrounding our house, and I saw images of blood, the lieutenant’s blood and Dieter’s blood and that of the man who had been crushed by the tank. My heart pounded in my chest….
And I saw Mr. Albrecht cutting the throat of the pig and the blood was pouring into the bucket underneath its head and onto the soldiers, lying on thick beds of hay and straw–soldiers without arms or legs, with bloody stumps of knee, with chests or heads encased in white turned red to match the crosses on the side. A soldier screamed….
-----
That summer and fall, I wrote down my dreams and then I went to see Dr. Paulsen at the university. He was a psychiatrist, but he didn’t look like Dr. Freud. He was much too tall for that, and with his long white hair down to his shoulders and an even longer white beard, he reminded me of Rübezahl, the giant ghost of the Silesian Mountains, and that’s what I always called him in my mind.
I wanted him to read my dream notes, but he disappointed me. He wouldn’t do it.
“I don’t do dreams,” he said. “Träume sind Schäume.” [Dreams are but effervescent bubbles]
So the good old German proverb took care of my dreams. Still, even without the dreams, Dr. Rübezahl had me all figured out within the hour.
“I know what your problem is,” he finally said. “You are a classic case. Fear of exams! That’s what it is. Put your nose to the grindstone and it’ll all go away.”
“Could I get some Valerian drops?” I asked.
Dr. Rübezahl looked at me, puzzled.
“Sure,” he said. “They’ll calm you down.”
“Just three drops on a spoonful of sugar whenever you’re upset,” he added as he wrote the prescription. “Don’t take more than that; we don’t want your heart to stop.”
I had heard that one before.
44. Trapped
[December 1953 – October 1955]
Even on the day we got our Christmas tree, my mother was still reeling from the thought that I could have been killed by the tanks in the spring of 1953 or, at the very least, could have been arrested as a spy with that manuscript in my briefcase. She begged me not to publish the stuff, lest my name become known to the People’s Police and be put on their Wanted List.
“You can think about these things all you want,” she advised, “but keep the thoughts to yourself, don’t broadcast them.”
“Look what happened to Vati twenty years ago,” she added, “just because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. How different things might have been if he had kept his thoughts a secret.”
“No,” my father said, “secrecy is not the way to go. A man must speak out. Truth-telling is important, but one has to be smart about it. I learned that much.”
“You can publish all the books and articles you want–here in the West,” my father explained, “but then don’t be a fool and visit East Berlin. You’ve got to stay away from Helga.”
I said I would, but I am not so sure I meant it even then. Helga took up so much room in my head, it was hard to let her go. But my last visit had scared me, too, and I hadn’t been back since. I had written to Helga in the summer and in the fall, had begged her to come at least for a visit or spend Christmas with me, if she couldn’t come before then. I had even sent her a Christmas present, a new book by Ernest Hemingway, called The Old Man and the Sea. But she hadn’t answered me, and I had been thinking of her day and night. What I didn’t know at the time was that she had answered, but my mother had been hiding her letters. That’s how determined my mother had been to keep me from being shot as an enemy of the people!
I was still thinking of Helga when we all went to Christmas services at the Martha Church. It was an unusual thing for us to do, going to church together on a holiday morning, but that’s where my parents had been married in 1931 and the church had just been rebuilt after its destruction during the war. They were eager to have a look.
Just as we had so many years ago, we walked along the canal, fed the gulls, and crossed the bridge to Glogauer Strasse. That’s where my grandmother and Aunt Martel had lived and my mother had grown up with all her siblings and the new church had now risen from the ruins of the old. The church bells rang as we crossed the bridge and I heard that sudden roar inside my head, a roar of something, I didn’t know what. I felt dizzy by the time we entered the church yard and I felt panic at the thought of being trapped inside the church. As I had so often before in my life, I insisted on sitting in the last row, right next to the open door. The organ started to play, interrupting the silence with a loud noise, which startled me and made my heart jump. Just then, the ushers closed the door behind us. I tried my best to ignore this fact and to occupy my mind. I looked at the ceiling, where all the carved angels had been, but they were gone. Just like the alcoves and walls, the ceiling was whitewashed now; there wasn’t a decoration in sight. A black spiral staircase, made of metal no doubt, led to the pulpit now; there were no more wooden angels carved from mahogany wood and holding up the pulpit with their trumpets. Even the windows had been modernized; they were now made of ordinary glass. Gone were the gorgeous stained-glass Bible scenes of years ago. The organ stopped; I couldn’t breathe; I went and stood in the courtyard outside the door. I counted three Valerian drops onto a sugar cube.
-----
By the spring of 1954, my reparations book had taken on its final form, but my mind was somewhere else. The news was filled with stories about the Atomic Energy Commission of the USA and all the atom bomb tests it was conducting on the Marshall Islands. By April 1, we learned that the hydrogen bomb had been perfected, and it was not an April Fool’s Day joke. I found it scary to think of a bomb that could destroy any city with a single blast in the megaton range, some 700 times stronger, they said, than the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bomb of 1945. Radio East Berlin broadcast a plea by Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, who suggested the Cold War be called off and the USSR join NATO.
“The world is now facing the peril of a war,” he said, “in which atomic and hydrogen bombs threaten incalculable disaster, including the annihilation of peaceful peoples, the wiping out of whole cities; of contemporary industry, culture and science; of ancient centers of civilization as well as the great capitals of the states of the world.”
The western powers rejected his plea as “just a Trojan horse.” I thought of what it must have been like for the Greek s
oldiers to be trapped like that inside the horse. That was also the day on which I was trapped in the university elevator! I was alone in it at the time and I wasn’t really trapped, but the short trip from the ground level to the third floor turned into a nightmare. I was suddenly gripped by an uncontrollable fear of being trapped and couldn’t shake it off. My heart skipped a beat and then another and my pulse was racing and I knew I was about to faint when a wave of nausea came upon me and I had a taste of plaster dust in my mouth. But then, just as suddenly, the door opened and, on weak and wobbly legs, I made my way to class. There I sat, numb and unable to think.
-----
This time, Dr. Rübezahl was a great deal more helpful. The taste of plaster dust–that’s what interested him.
“Been buried in an air raid shelter, have you?” he asked.
“The experience of war never ends with the war,” he said. “Once you have experienced or witnessed an event that threatened death or serious injury to yourself or others and, with overwhelming force, rendered you helpless and terrified, a drama begins to unfold within your subconscious. Two powerful forces feud with another. One is called Secrecy; the name of the other is Truth-Telling.
Secrecy urges you to banish the horrible event from your consciousness, to deny it, to forget it, to treat it as too terrible to utter aloud, to make it unspeakable. Consciously, you end up feeling numb; you can’t feel anything, because if I do, you can’t survive.
Truth-Telling refuses to let the event be buried. It urges you to proclaim it aloud–in verbal narrative, if you can. But if you can’t or won’t do that, Truth-Telling conjures up a host of symptoms that call attention to the existence of your unspeakable secret. These symptoms, of course, are disguised representations of the intensely distressing event that Secrecy banished from memory, but that Truth-Telling wants you to remember and acknowledge and, perhaps, even relive.”
“So am I condemned to reliving these events for the rest of my life?” I asked. “It’s already been nine years since the end of the war!”
“Who knows how long it will last,” Dr. Rübezahl said. “Look at all the symptoms you have told me about: How long it takes you to fall asleep, how often you wake up, how easily you are startled, how compulsively you turn off the lights or pull down the shades, how you have nightmares, how you have difficulty concentrating in class, how you suffer from an endless list of psychosomatic complaints….”
“Listen to your own words,” Dr. Rübezahl added after looking at his notes. “You say ‘I came upon the street corner, I entered the subway, the church, the elevator, and something was pecking at my mind. I heard a little voice in me, which I couldn’t quite grasp. Something had happened here; if I’m not careful, it might happen again.’ What are you saying there?”
“You show a persistent expectation of danger. You are on permanent alert for self-preservation. You are convinced that danger may return at any moment. Take something as harmless as the door to a church or a subway train or an elevator, let it close behind you, and you feel trapped, just as in the cellar of many years ago!”
“There’s a name we have,” Dr. Rübezahl said. “Hyperarousal! That’s what we call it. Give it some thought! Once you understand what is going on, once you make the subconscious conscious, you’ll be better.”
-----
I thought about it, but things didn’t get better. One day, in the middle of class, I felt that familiar lightning flash in my head again and I saw myself standing outside the subway station, looking down at the charred body of a woman or a man, a gold ring glistening on what used to be a hand. My heart was pounding and my eyes were stinging from the smoke drifting across the street, but that didn’t keep me from seeing those little blue flames springing back to life among the piles of corpses in the middle of the square. And I felt the hot air and smelled the burning flesh and heard Aunt Martel say: “Come on, Hansel, we’ll go home and all will be well.”
“There are three concepts then to consider here,” Professor Conrad said, “the direct price elasticity of demand, the cross price elasticity of demand, and the income elasticity of demand. Which of the three would help us solve our problem?”
I certainly didn’t know. By then, my senses had returned, but my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking of Dr. Rübezahl and wondered whether he could be trusted. Perhaps, he was as fickle as the Silesian ghost, offering his services to unsuspecting travelers as a guide, promising calm wind and sunny skies, but all the while leading them astray into ever deeper forests and ever wilder mountains and then, suddenly, disappearing before their eyes, rising into the sky, and drenching them with a deluge of water and hail and scaring them to death with lightning bolts and a thundering laughter that echoes from the rocky walls of their mountain trap.
“Could he be trusted?” I wondered.
“So what we need,” Professor Conrad said, “is the percentage change in the quantity demanded of good A, divided by the percentage change in the price of good B. If the ratio is positive, what kinds of goods are we talking about? What if it’s negative or even zero?”
-----
During my last year at the university, things got even worse. In the world at large, Georgi M. Malenkov, who had been the Soviet Premier since Stalin’s death, had been blamed for the unproductiveness of Soviet collective farms and been forced to resign. Nikolai A. Bulganin was the new Premier, but real power was said to lie in the hands of Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Communist Party boss. Under his watch, on May 14, 1955, the Warsaw Pact was signed and the Soviet version of NATO quickly claimed to have an even more powerful H-bomb than the USA. All the talk about war and destruction worried me; so did the fact that I still hadn’t heard from Helga. That’s when it happened one day.
I was sitting in the barber chair, with the white linen cover over me and tied at the back of my neck, when the metal of the barber’s clippers touched my forehead and I freaked as I never had before. For a fraction of a terrified second, I was somewhere else.
The Mongol soldier decided to rest the barrel of his rifle at the center of my forehead. I saw him grin, but I felt the cold metal and I froze. Time stood still. I closed my eyes to escape that dreadful grin. I felt a colony of ants meandering across my feet. I heard crows fretting and shrieking in the branches of pine trees above, complaining about us who had disturbed their lives.
And then I found myself standing on the sidewalk outside the barber shop, the white linen cover still tied to my neck, my heart pounding and my legs trembling and the barber standing in the door, saying:
“What’s the matter with you? We are only half done. Are you crazy or something?”
-----
Dr. Rübezahl was clearly interested. In fact, he could hardly contain himself, fidgeting in his big leather chair. He made me tell the story of the firemen and SS soldiers and Hitler Youths, how I had watched them haul corpses to the middle of the street, stacking them up, two, three, and four layers at a time, many of them charred beyond recognition, some reduced to half their normal size like some of the mummies I had seen in the Egypt exhibit near our school….And he made me tell the story of Jutta, how the Mongols had come on their motorcycles and pointed a pistol at her, had dragged her out of sight, but I had heard them yell and her cry, and how the soldier with the slit eyes had rested the cold barrel of his rifle at the center of my forehead, while I had counted the last seconds of my life….
“And now it all comes back, in the middle of class, in the middle of the barber shop!” Dr. Rübezahl said excitedly. “A classic case of intrusion! That’s what it is.”
He lost no time to elaborate.
“When it all happened years ago, indelible imprints of these traumatic events were made in your soul and most of the time they are safely stored away in your subconscious. But all sorts of small, insignificant things can remind you of an horrific event. Quite inadvertently, you can be exposed to cues that resemble aspects of the event, like the cold metal of the barber’s clippers touching your forehead, j
ust as the barrel of that rifle did long ago. And at that moment, you can re-experience the event, you can relive it as if it were occurring now. A flashback breaks into your consciousness and a flood of distressing recollections interrupts and intrudes upon your normal life. You feel that time stopped at the moment of trauma; its frozen imagery and sensations vividly come to life. In fact, you enter a dissociative state that can last from a few seconds, as in your case, to several hours, as in other cases I have seen, and during that state you are unable to distinguish now from then. You are trapped in a moment of the past.”
That explanation made a great deal of sense to me. I was even ready to make a new assessment of Dr. Rübezahl and entertain the notion that he might turn out to be truly helpful. I thought of another story about his ghostly namesake. One day, Rübezahl watched a poor widow collect edible roots in the forest for her hungry children. He approached her and suggested she collect leaves instead. When she followed his advice, however reluctantly, the leaves in her basket turned into gold coins.
-----
During my last semester at the Free University, I learned something about myself that was stranger by far than all the details about the past that Dr. Rübezahl and I had managed to dredge up. Stepping out of a bookstore on that October day, I became aware of the pattern of squares on the cement sidewalk and I noticed how the air was filling up with thousands of giant snow flakes–big round flakes of snow that looked like cherry blossoms, falling slowly, ever so slowly, onto the trees and the cars parked beyond them, briefly obliterating the sidewalk squares, then melting away, followed by thousands more trying once again, but trying in vain, to cover up the sidewalk squares. Their failure was no surprise; it was much too early for a serious winter storm. And then, suddenly, I found myself trapped in one of those squares! My feet refused to move; I felt paralyzed, yet my mind was clear. And I suddenly saw the snow!