by Heinz Kohler
As if in a flash, I realized that I had seen those squares on the bridge when Dieter was killed, had seen his blood wash away the thin layer of snow, and that I had never, never since seen snow again! Standing in that square, still paralyzed, I thought of the past winter and the winter before that, and all the winters for a dozen years, winters in Berlin, winters in Ziesar, winters in Burg, and winters in Berlin once again, and I could not remember a single day on which it had snowed! Hadn’t I played in the snow, gone to school in the snow? Hadn’t Helmut and I gone sledding on a hill, built snowmen in the yard? Hadn’t they plowed the streets, shoveled the sidewalks? Hadn’t I dug my way through the snow to bring in the firewood from my pyramid behind Mr. Albrecht’s house?
There was not a single image in my head that contained SNOW, neither heavy snow nor light snow nor cherry blossom snow of the kind that fell on the day Dieter and I had fed the gulls on that bridge…
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Dr. Rübezahl was so excited!
“A classic case of constriction,” he said. “That’s what it is.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “in the face of some traumatic event, people save themselves by consciously avoiding the stimuli associated with the trauma. They shun thoughts, feelings, and conversations about the event.”
I thought of my mother. “Now, Hansel,” she had said one day that spring, “we will never raise the subject again.” And we hadn’t, neither between us nor with any other member of the family….
“Traumatized people,” Dr. Rübezahl continued, “do their best to stay away from activities, places, and people that arouse recollections of the event. Much more often, though, something happens outside their conscious control. Without their knowing it, their field of consciousness becomes constricted. Important aspects of the event fall prey to a kind of amnesia. As a result, people are unable to recall their trauma. They don’t feel pain because painful memories are split off from ordinary awareness. In all these years, you didn’t see the snow because it would have reminded you of a pool of blood that was melting the cherry blossom snow falling onto the bridge! To avoid the pain of remembering the entire event, you allowed your mind to become detached, numbed, and paralyzed with respect to the one trigger–the snow–that would have taken you back to the moment of horror and possibly driven you insane.”
“Actually,” Dr. Rübezahl continued, “this is nothing new. Way back in the third millennium B.C., the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh described the suffering of a character who had survived a violent encounter that killed his friend. It caused constriction as well, although nobody used that term. And people have written about this type of suffering and its associated symptoms ever since, giving it different names, of course. During the Civil War in America, it was all about battle fatigue, in World War I we called it shell shock, in World War II combat neurosis. And now, in Korea, the Americans have come up with another term yet, gross stress reaction.”
It all made sense to me and if I could have foreseen the future, I could have added another term yet to Dr. Rübezahl’s list: post-traumatic stress disorder, destined to be introduced by the American Psychiatric Association into the 1980 edition of its famous diagnostic manual, DSM-III. Such logical explanations, however, were of little help to me at the time because I couldn’t feel anything. In fact, despite Dr. Rübezahl’s enthusiasm, I thought there was no point in my seeing him any longer. His “talking cure” didn’t cure a thing. Things kept happening to me, as regularly as clockwork, and no explanation–neither fear of exams nor hyperarousal, neither intrusion nor constriction–put a stop to any of it.
That night, I dreamed of snow.
I saw snow everywhere, large beautiful snow flakes blanketing houses, trees, and roads, covering cars, buses, and trolley cars, and our school yard and the footbridge across the canal. And suddenly, the white sky turned red and I got scared and ran inside to play with Dieter. We read his Struwwelpeter book, but the pictures appeared on a large white wall that was made of snow and we saw Konrad being warned never again to suck his thumbs. But when his my mother left, he did and there was pounding at the door and the tailor came in with giant scissors and he sharpened them and quickly cut off Konrad’s thumbs! Konrad screamed and screamed and the snow melted off the wall and there was blood all over the floor. And when Konrad’s mother returned, he stood in a pool of blood and both of his thumbs were gone….
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At graduation time that fall, I couldn’t listen to the speeches. My parents said I had a far-away look, and they were right. I was thinking of Helga and the time we weeded the sugar beets on Ziesar’s collective farm. That thought, in turn, made me think of Rübezahl, the Silesian ghost, whose name means “sugar beet counter.” I remembered the story. He, too, had wanted a girl he couldn’t have. But, unlike me, he hadn’t been a wimp; he had taken drastic action! He had kidnapped Emma, a Silesian princess, and had taken her to his subterranean realm. And to ameliorate her loneliness, he had brought her a basket filled with sugar beets and also a magic wand that could turn any beet into a person or an animal for companionship.
My mother kept sending me hints with her elbow to pay attention to the ceremonies, but I didn’t care. I kept thinking of the day on which Rübezahl, the ghost that is, had asked Emma in marriage and she had said that she would give him her answer once he had counted all the sugar beets in yonder field. And while he was counting the endless number of beets in the field, Princess Emma used her magic wand, turned a sugar beet into horse, and rode off, never to be seen again. I thought I’d do the same thing and escape all the traps by emigrating to the United States!
A scene from the Struwwelpeter book
45. The Wall
[November 1955 – May 1961]
So much happened in the next six years! Looking back at it now, time must have been passing at the speed of light. One day I was leaving Berlin, the next day I was back it seemed, but the calendar said otherwise. It all started with an unforgettable interview at the American consulate where I sought to attain my immigration visa.
“Is there anything you know?” the lady moaned after reading my application.
“The last thing America needs is another economist,” she explained rather exasperatedly. “What we need is carpenters, electricians, and plumbers–people with a useful skill. In Westchester County back home, I have to wait for weeks to get that sort of help.”
“I probably would have become a carpenter in East Germany, if I hadn’t managed to get into high school,” I said rather lamely.
“Bakers are good, too,” she said. “Can you bake at least?”
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Still, before long, I was on my way, beginning with a scary airplane flight from West Berlin to Hanover. It was my first flight ever, on a British DC3. You will remember the type: two propellers on the wings, a tiny wheel in back, and a steeply sloping aisle inside that made you think you were climbing a mountain when looking for your seat. Little did I know that I would fly one of those birds myself one day and have fun doing so. No fun on that day! When the props started, the noise terrified me and, when the aisle tipped level on takeoff, my heart almost stopped with fear. My mind must have blocked out the flight, but I do remember writing to my mother that the landing was a disaster–“straight down like an elevator”–which, of course, can hardly have been true.
The next part of my trip involved the Arosa Kulm, a tiny Panamanian freighter, which took three weeks to cross the Atlantic and even then missed its destination. We were blown into the St. Lawrence River by a hurricane and they deposited me in Quebec rather than New York. Having traded the image of Fort Frontenac for that of the Statue of Liberty, I ended up in the Midwest. Graduate school came next–economics at the University of Michigan–where I was not very happy, being fed an interminable diet of boring subjects: the specie-flow mechanism, the Mercantilist dilemma and the quantity theory of money, the optimum theory of population and subsistence wages, Say’s identity and the dichotomization of the pricing process, the
falling rate of profit and the stationary state, the marginal propensity to consume and the multiplier, the marginal efficiency of capital and psychological incentives to liquidity, the term structure of interest rates, the IS curve and the LM curve, Wicksell’s proof of product exhaustion, the Pareto optimum and the Scitovsky double criterion, the limitations of the falsifiability criterion in economics–the list went on.
If I could have baked at least!
Fortunately, in the middle of graduate school, right after Soviet artillery, infantry, and tanks had put down the Hungarian Revolution and seized its “reactionary” leader, premier Imre Nagy, something else happened that changed everything in my life and even took care of what doctors in later years were to call my PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder, which they considered chronic (symptoms having lasted for over three months) and of the delayed onset variety (symptoms having appeared at least six months after the stressor).
It started with a December 1956 letter from the President of the United States, sending me greetings and ordering me to appear, at precisely 7:00 A.M. one day, at the Greyhound Bus Station, 116 W. Huron St., Ann Arbor, Michigan. Before I knew it, I had taken and passed a large number of intelligence tests and was learning to fly! And this is the amazing thing: Being a pilot inside a plane, rather than a tiny, defenseless creature on the ground below it, made all my symptoms disappear. The talking cure had never worked very well; the flying cure did. It was so obvious in retrospect; how often had we talked about the safest place to be during the war-time years: inside the planes that rained destruction on us all and that had little to fear once the Luftwaffe [German air force] had been destroyed.
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Our first two lessons took place on the ground. We learned about aerodynamics and basic airplane controls. Just as I had experienced in German schools, we were asked to copy graphs from the board and summarize what they were about. My initial aerodynamics graph looked like this:
In this way, I illustrated the four forces affecting an airplane in flight: the natural forces of gravity and drag, which are opposed, respectively, by the man-made, artificial forces of lift and thrust. While upward lift is created by the movement of the air, known as relative wind, over a cambered wing, we learned, forward thrust is created by the engine spinning a propeller in front.
“In straight-and-level flight at a constant airspeed,” our instructor said, “lift equals gravity and thrust equals drag.”
My second graph was more complicated and illustrated three basic axes around which a plane can move under a pilot’s control. First, a plane can move around a lateral or pitch axis that can be imagined to extend from wing tip to wing tip. By moving the “steering wheel” yoke forward or backward, a pilot can affect the position of horizontal tail surfaces, known as elevators, which makes the plane’s nose go down or up. Second, a plane can move around a vertical or yaw axis that can be imagined to go vertically through the center of the plane. By moving foot-controlled rudder pedals right or left, a pilot can affect the position of the vertical tail surface or rudder, which makes the plane’s nose go right or left. Third, a plane can move around a longitudinal or roll axis that can be imagined to go through the plane from back to front. By moving the “steering wheel” yoke right or left, a pilot can affect the position of trailing sections on the wings, known as ailerons, which makes the plane’s right wing go down or up, while the left wing does the opposite.
All this was interesting, but our lessons in the air were positively exciting. Looking at the world from above was such a beautiful experience! I loved the sunrises over Lake Huron and the morning fog snaking along the rivers. I loved the rainbow colors inside the clouds and the pink and purple skies after sunset. I loved climbing the plane at the precise moment of sunset and making the sun reappear on my horizon. By repeating the trick, I could look at several sunsets in a row. And I loved the day on which my macho instructor proudly showed me the “iron cross” he had allegedly taken from the chest of a dead German pilot whom he had downed. “Der Deutschen Mutter” the inscription said, “To the German Mother.” I had seen that one before, on the day my grandmother had been given her Mother’s Cross. My instructor was not happy with my translation.
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By the summer of 1957, at just about the time Nikita S. Khrushchev was consolidating his power by ousting Vyacheslav M. Molotov, Georgi M. Malenkov, Lazar M. Kaganovich, and other Stalinists from important posts, I had mastered straight-and-level flight, level turns, climbs and descents at constant airspeeds, and even slow flight at constant altitudes. I was superb at ground reference maneuvers, deftly compensating for wind drift to fly a precise track over the ground, such as following a crooked road or a meandering stream, making S-turns across a road or steep turns about a pylon, such as the imagined point of intersection of two roads. After plenty of practice, my performance was second to none with respect to chandelles, gliding spirals, lazy eights, Dutch rolls. And I knew all there was to know about stalls–departure stalls, landing approach stalls, accelerated stalls–and also about spins, but I never managed to like accelerated stalls or spins.
“Keeping a constant altitude,” my instructor would say, “roll the airplane into a 60 degree bank and keep it there. The total air load on the wings now corresponds to 2 Gs; likewise, your body weight is doubled, note how you are pressed into your seat, your cheeks sag, the blood begins to drain from your head…”
That kind of talk didn’t make me happy at all. I tried to stay conscious by reciting in my head the latest stories I had read in Pravda, stories about Stalin’s “excesses” and his collaborators’ “persistent and deliberate actions to sabotage every effort to ease international tensions and improve the life of Soviet citizens at home.” Somehow talking Russian to myself worked; I never passed out.
“Do the same thing at an 80 degree bank,” my instructor continued, “and you have 5.75 Gs; you may grey out, even black out…now don’t be a grandmother,” said the man with the Mother’s Cross, “stay with me, raise the pitch and you’ve got your accelerated stall…controlled flight becomes impossible, it’s time to lower that nose, level the wings, give it full power to escape the stall. Do it now!”
And spins were even worse! There we are at 10,000 feet, wings level, power off to idle, pulling back the yoke to raise the nose…the airflow over the wings is interrupted, the airplane trembles and buffets, the stall warning light comes on, the horn blares, I give it full right rudder just then, and suddenly the nose points to the ground and the wings turn to the right, while I look north, then east, then south, then west and north again, and the altimeter reads 9,000 feet, 8,000 feet, 7,000 feet just as fast as you can read these words…and the instructor yells:
“You want to live? Opposite rudder, now! That slows the rotation…forward on the yoke, ease her out of the dive…add full power…” and there we are, flying straight-and level at 1,000 feet!
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Take-offs and landings, on the other hand, were much more fun. I learned how altitude, temperature, and moisture affect the take-off run: the higher they are, the longer the run. Thus, on a high-elevation airport, on a hot and humid day, the runway may be too short to allow liftoff, and trying to take off can only lead to disaster. I liked knowing about things like that.
I equally liked the challenge of practicing take-offs and landings in different types of fields, such as short fields and soft fields and fields hampered by winds blowing across the runway rather than towards the plane. In a short field, I learned, the runway is surrounded by tall obstructions, such as trees and skyscrapers, and steep angles of climb and descent are needed, preferably without causing a stall. In a soft field, the runway itself is the problem, being covered with gravel, hay, mud, or snow and resisting all efforts to attain flying speed. And in a crosswind? One may have to land on a single wheel, while lowering one wing into the wind and pressing opposite rudder to keep the nose aligned with the runway!
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By the time we starte
d night flying, in October of 1957, the Soviets had just fired a 184 lb. satellite into space. We watched it through a telescope, a tiny speck of light circling the earth at 18,000 mph, some 560 miles up. We learned about all sorts of other lights, too: the blue lights along taxiways, the white runway lights, the red obstruction lights, the red light on the left wingtip, the green light on the right wingtip, and the brilliantly white strobe lights on the plane’s belly and tail. And in the air, we learned about the night blind spot that could make an object seemingly disappear–it had something to do with those cones and rods–and our instructor did his best to get us lost in the invisible clouds of the night and experience the flicker vertigo caused by the strobe light reflecting on clouds and wings. It was easy to confuse stars and ground lights at first, but the experience of floating in the dark was amazing.
I was particularly fond of the VASI, the visual approach slope indicator, which was a set of lights on both sides of the runway’s approach end. When a landing plane was on a perfect glide path to the runway threshold, the nearest set of lights appeared as white, a farther set appeared as red. When the plane was too high, assuring a disastrous landing near the end of the runway or beyond, all the lights appeared to be white. When the plane was too low, aiming for the ground before the runway was even reached, all the lights appeared as red. Moreover, and this was the most interesting part, a cockpit instrument known as the ADF, or automatic direction finder, contained an arrow pointing forward to a little broadcast station on the airport. If the plane flew over the station, the direction of the arrow reversed, pointing to the aircraft’s tail. As I then learned, that little instrument was used during World War II to home in on regular broadcast stations, such as Radio Berlin or Radio Hamburg, which made it easy to find the cities in total darkness. While Dr. Goebbels shouted at us in the air raid shelters, he also guided Allied bombers to any target they wanted to reach! What irony! All they had to do was follow the ADF arrow to the station, watch the arrow reverse, and then fly any desired course for any desired length of time at any given speed to find any particular spot on the map. We practiced it: fly to the NDB [the nondirectional radio beacon] to which the ADF receiver is tuned, turn to a course of 095 degrees, adjusting for wind if necessary, hold the airspeed at 137 mph for 1minute and 36 seconds, and we found ourselves over McDonald’s red roof.