He stood at the head of the stairs leading to the cellar. He took a few tentative steps down. He felt fear, of course he did, but when you’ve survived the Ardennes offensive, you can… Still, he couldn’t help screaming out loud. Right in front of him there was a dead body. No, not a dead body, he wouldn’t have screamed if it had been because he had seen so many dead: it was just a torso, with part of the neck left. No head, no arms, no legs. That was the horrible thing.
Part Two
A Professional Job
10.
Bernhard Bacheran should have gotten out of bed at 4 AM when his mother, on her way to the bathroom, had accidentally pulled down the empty coat rack in the corridor. The loud noise woke him. A glance at the alarm told him he still had an hour to go. He turned over and snuggled back under the warm feather comforter. That was when he had one of his worst nightmares ever. He was in some kind of a dark cellar. Fog was seeping through the cracks in the walls and wisps floated through the room. Standing at a wooden table or work bench was his Uncle Waldemar. He was brandishing an axe. Lying on the table was his mother. She was dead. That was bad enough but it got worse: Uncle Waldemar lifted the axe and chopped off his mother’s arms.
He uttered such a piercing cry that Anne Marie Bacheran rushed to his room: “Child, my God, what’s wrong?” “It’s nothing, mother, nothing.” He struggled to shake off sleep. “I just had a bad dream.” He didn’t say what the dream had been about. He knew what had caused the nightmare, it was obviously the phone call he had received late last night. “Please be at the Robert Koch hospital forensic lab at 7:30 tomorrow morning.” The State’s prosecutor was detained elsewhere, and so Bacheran would please take down the protocol in his place. A capital offense. Pieces of a dismembered body had been found at the Knie subway station and doctor Weimann would conduct the postmortem. Waldemar Weimann was the leading star of German forensic medicine who also possessed great charisma. Waldemar… the name must have sparked the nightmare. Waldemar, Uncle Waldemar… His uncle had a farm in Prignitz and whenever you visited, he was slaughtering animals: pigs, chickens, geese or rabbits.
Annemarie Bacheran was a teacher at Neukölln school: she was attuned to young peoples’ growing pains and so she figured out what the problem was. “Why in heaven do you want to be a prosecutor so badly? Why criminal justice? Corpses and things…” “The first corpse is always the worst.” Bacheran sat up and put his feet on the floor. “I’m still just a trainee…” he looked forward to being a prosecutor one day: He would see to it that law and justice reigned. And he would uphold real justice, not the injustice of the Nazis or the Stalinists.
“Don’t have a heavy breakfast: you don’t want to throw it all up when you’re standing at the dissecting table.” “I won’t Mother. And if I do throw up, I’ll bring you back all the vomit so you can study it closely during your class tomorrow morning.” The main subject she taught was biology. Having said this he went to take a bath. Having a bath tub was a luxury in those postwar days, especially in the NeuKölln area.
Afterwards they had breakfast together. Just the two of them since Erna Nostiz – his aunt, his mother’s sister- was still in bed and since Berthold Bacheran – his father, Annemarie’s husband- had died in the Ardennes in 1944. He had been a minister. He always called his son ‘my little hare’. Bernhard worried constantly that he was doomed by this combination of his parents’ professions; he could end badly as the proverb said: “Teachers’ stock and ministers’ sons all turn to nothing.” Would it come true?
Today was Saturday so he knew that his mother would ask the inevitable question: whether he was going out that night. “Are you going out again, dancing or something…?” “No.” He knew what his mother thought: other young people your age – he was 24- are long married or at least with a fiancée, and you are not. You don’t even have a regular girlfriend. Maybe it’s true what the neighbors are saying: he’s of a different persuasion. “I want to work some more on my article for the law review. We must fight hard against Carl Schmitt and win decisively.” In his view Carl Schmitt and his glorification of the total state had prepared the ground for the Nazis.
His mother did her best to look mischievous as she said: “What about a Carla tonight instead of this Carl?” At which he definitively lost his cool; he threw his napkin on the table. “No. Don’t you know that I only really enjoy women when they are dead and particularly if they are carved up.? And then, imitating a French chansonnier, he sang: “Now my son Bernhard, he was a man apart, of very deviant tastes, he liked his ladies best, when they were dead, oh very dead; he was so macabre, he could love a cadaver. Oh what an aphrodisiac for a necrophiliac.”
Ten minutes later he was outside on Fuldastrasse. The street ran slightly at an angle to the North-South axis, from the navigation canal to Karl-Marx-strasse where it crossed the Sonnenallee. It could boast of only one architectural landmark: the Martin-Luther church where Bacheran had been baptized and received confirmation. He wanted to go to the West Berlin County seat for Criminal and Social Medicine which was housed at Robert-Koch Hospital institute for Forensic science, in Moabit. He was wondering how to get there… It was hard to decide: he could either take the number 95 to Sonnenallee station and then the subway to Bellevue with a change at Ostkreuz, or maybe better, he should take the subway to Stettiner train station and from there the 44 streetcar. No, that was wrong, it didn’t run to the end of Invalidenstrasse anymore. The city was being split in half, the world was being split in half. The East began at Sandkrug Bridge. And, because of the blockade, the number 44 wasn’t running anymore. It would only resume service on January 2, 1950. He remembered reading about it somewhere. What he needed was a car… When I’m a prosecutor…, he thought.
“Come on, Bacheran!” he scolded himself. The person he got most angry at was always himself. Here he was a born and bred Berliner standing clueless like someone fresh from the provinces, or from the moon. Well, whatever route he finally chose, he had better be on his way. And so he went off, finally deciding on a completely different path: he would take the subway at NeuKölln townhall downtown to Knie where he would switch from the C line to the A line and then take the number 2 to Moabit. A little complicated but a bad decision was better than no decision at all. That was an old soldier’s rule that even he could cherish: he was a lieutenant after all. Or had been. He’d been promoted to the rank of lieutenant in April 1945. Imagine!
As he looked up Sonnenallee a streetcar rumbled over on his right in the direction of Tempelhof- Attilaplatz and he realized that the number 95 connected with the 21 at Hallesches Tor Gate and the 21 would take him to Moabit. He knew because he and his family were used to taking it from Lehrter station to go and visit Uncle Waldemar. No, not Waldemar Weimann. But the connection brought back the memory of the nightmare, and the cut up corpse. He stood there not knowing what to do. He wasn’t quite claustrophobic but he had much rather take the streetcar than the subway when he had a choice because the subway travelled deep underground: it reminded him of a night spent in the air raid shelter, knowing that they could be hit any second and that they would be buried alive and die a horrible death. So, today, he would take the streetcar.
As he walked to the stop to wait for the next 95, he realized his mother hadn’t said whether the body that had been found in the ruins at Knie was that of a man or a woman. In all probability it was a woman. He froze as he bumped into the lady conductor’s voluptuous body as he jumped on board. What would her behind look like if he… Bernhard Bacheran felt he was almost ripe for the insane asylum. Just then the number 68 drove past. His grandparents used to tell people of their own age that they thought it was crazy to hop onto the 68 because it linked two mental institutions: Dalldorf, later Wittenau, in the West and Herzberge in the East. Since the division of the city, the streetcar served only the western half of the route and just the hospital in the West: Bacheran thought that might be the right destination for him too.
He had heard the tram rumblin
g up from afar, almost from around the corner and ran like a sprinter to catch it. A yellow railcar stopped right in front of him and, without thinking, he jumped on board. During the trip he relaxed a bit. He stood at the front of the car on the driver’s left and took pleasure watching him operate the car. The man kept his eyes straight ahead, nothing could disturb him. His left hand turned the handle, switched the power on high and then back to low. His right hand released the emergency brake. Or was it the sand spreader. Whenever someone ran across the rails ahead of the streetcar the driver pressed the ball of his left foot on a brake lodged in the floor. Bacheran was very impressed by it all. As a child he had always wanted to be a streetcar driver.
First they drove down Sonnenallee, close to the wide promenade. Dawn still refusing to break. Of course these were the shortest days of the year. They passed Innplatz on the left. He had learned to skate there on the ice skating rink. And opposite stood the old Rixdorfer Police headquarters. Bacheran wondered whether Voigt the shoemaker from East Prussia, later to become the fake captain of Köpenick who robbed the city coffers, had also been interviewed there for his passport. “Christ!” Just before they reached Hertzbergplatz, he realized he was going in the wrong direction. He jumped off in a panic the second the tram reached the stop and ran to the opposite side of the tracks. Then he cursed himself again: “You idiot!” he could have stayed on until the S-Bahn station and taken the train. And so the succession of streets in reverse: Wildeerbruchstrasse, Fuldastrasse, Pannierstrasse. Then to Hermannplatz with the remains of the Karstadt department store: the SS had blown it up in the last days of the war. Urban-Strasse, Urban Hospital. Here too corpses were waiting to be opened up by a pathologist, but no dismembered corpses, no murder victims.
Hallesches Tor, Mehring-Platz. He got off and waited for the 21. The tram that came up was the “living-room and kitchen” type. Much to his chagrin the empty driver’ seat at the back was taken: the tram, of course, originated all the way back in West Berlin at the new Police headquarters on Friesenstrasse. Even as a young man he still liked sitting there and his mother was more than annoyed: must he really belittle himself like that? Children sat on that seat. “Ah, mother, inside every man lurks a child.” She would shake her head: “If only you started having children!” He would smile in return: “Wait, what’s the name of those self-pollinating plants?”
Now they were driving through places that Bacheran could only compare with Carthage: “Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.” (Cato) he was proud of the little Latin he knew: “As for Carthage, I think it must be destroyed.” It must have been God himself who had decided that Berlin should be destroyed in punishment for Auschwitz and more than 50 million dead. The big question was: would this section of Berlin remain like this forever and become a big attraction in the year 2000, or would everything be rebuilt in the original style or be replaced by modern buildings? Was there a ‘modern’ style? There was, in the USA, the home of the new gods, or at least the new demi-gods. The thought came to him as he passed Washington Platz. A godforsaken hundred square meter area between Spreebogen and Lehrter station. There was nothing left of the train station itself but the façade. Same thing for the Reichstag. The water in the Spree was cloudy. Bacheran shuddered: he imagined himself rowing in a life boat and capsizing. He was a bad swimmer and the walls on either side of the river were too smooth and steep to climb. “Doctor Weimann, here’s a corpse we fished out of the river for you.”
A quarter of an hour later, Bernhard Bacheran, the lowly assistant DA trainee was standing in the presence of the great Weimann, remembering a line from Goethe: ‘I come here full of awe to meet and hear a man universally admired!’ “Good morning, Counselor Weimann. I’m…” “I know. Come. Even dead people don’t like to wait.” That could have been a good title for a crime story. It was said that doctor Weimann had literary ambitions and was writing down everything he did in order to compose his memoirs. Hopefully he wouldn’t record that he had taken a young district attorney with him to the morgue and that the young fool had then proceeded to faint when he saw a man’s severed torso.
A long bare corridor led to the realm of the dead. The heating pipes seemed so rusted they could burst at any moment. Bacheran almost hoped they might since it would give him a few minutes’ respite before he had to go in. He felt like a man about to be sick, leaning over the railing of a ship. And this in the presence of such a man as Doctor Weimann. Although he didn’t realize it he had slowed his pace.
Dr. Weimann stood waiting. “You’re immune to corpses, aren’t you?” Bacheran stared, dumbfounded as if the doctor had spoken in an unknown language. ‘Immune’, ‘corpse’…? Finally he understood. “Yes, no… Well I mean: I was often on my uncle Waldemar’s farm, in the country and … Sorry.” He noticed he was completely beside himself. “I was a soldier, I saw enough of my fellow soldiers die.”
Dr. Weimann’s secretary came over and he introduced her. “Hildegard Lehmann…” Bacheran bowed slightly, as if he were at a dance, during the first hour. “A pleasure…” She seemed barely older than he was. If he wanted to make an impression on her now he had to be heroically strong. Ahead he could see the steel door to the cold room. Ten paces, nine, eight, seven… When he had first seen fire in 1945 at the front in Selow on the Oder river against the advancing Russians, he hadn’t been as frightened as this. He was afraid of a corpse. He started admonishing himself. His sentences sounded like titles for murder mysteries, maybe like Dr. Weimann’s: “Dead Men Don’t Shoot,” “Dead Men Don’t Kill.” He felt an archaic dread, close to magical thinking: someone had died, it meant Death had appeared, Death had struck. Maybe Death still lingered here…
Pull yourself together! Bacheran was used to giving orders and receiving orders attentively. But he couldn’t order himself to go in. A voice inside him screamed at him to get away, to walk out of the hospital. He couldn’t understand why. Fifty years later a first year psychology student could have told him he suffered from post traumatic stress and should be treated for it. The ceaseless shooting, his friends lying dead around him… That was the reason. But he didn’t dare tell Weimann why his entire body refused to go into that cold room.
The secretary must have noticed that his face was turning whiter and whiter, grey even and almost greenish because she quickly opened a bottle of cologne from her handbag and held it up to him. He shook his head. It wasn’t the odor that would make him sick.
Two men came up behind them and shut the door as if to cut off any escape. They were Doctor Spengler, a colleague of Weimann’s and Legal Assessor Behrens who, as a judge, would insure the dissection was conducted legally.
Behrens was also charged with updating the group on the case. “A patrolman from the 131st Police Precinct in Charlottenburg had discovered the torso the evening before inside the rubble of a building close to the Knie underground station. It belonged without a doubt to a man. Inspector Menzel –MI/3- was on the case. He and his men had not been able to find anything in the ruins or in the cellar: no traces of a fight, no pieces of clothing, no personal items. The body was completely naked. And there was no blood. It was absolutely clear that the victim had been killed and dismembered elsewhere.”
Bacheran couldn’t believe it: such a large torso, weighing at least … well … at least 60 kilos, the man must have weighed 80 kilos. You almost would have to be a weight lifter to carry such a … well, thing … through the streets and throw it down into a cellar in the ruins.
Thinking about this and other aspects of the murder allowed Bacheran to calm down. Still he kept trying to admonish himself: just imagine that this thing lying here is the carcass of an animal and Uncle Waldemar is going to cut it open. It’s just a pig or a calf or a sheep. Or imagine this is merely a dream or that you’re sitting in a movie house watching a film, with you in it, acting your part. You’re acting the part of Bernhard Bacheran, young District Attorney trainee, assisting the world famous pathologist Dr. Waldemar Weimann, examining the remains o
f a crime victim.
When he reached dissecting table number 6, he was, at last, totally composed. From then on he was like an automaton. Had he not been there, the whole thing would have taken place exactly the same way. The two doctors donned rubber aprons and stood on either side of the dissecting table. The table was so long it made the torso look ridiculously, comically short. Like a store widow dummy that had its head, neck, legs and arms sawed off. The two doctors were struck by the shoulders of the dead man: “The cut is perfectly neat,” Spengler said. “It’s astonishing how the arms were separated from the body in perfect circular cuts, it’s absolutely astonishing.” “A surgeon couldn’t have done a better job.” Dr. Weimann spoke for the first time.
Spengler laughed. “Or a butcher.”
The district judge also voiced his surprise at the fact that the arms hadn’t been hacked off or sawed off but had instead been separated from the shoulder joint in such a professional manner. “I have yet to read anything about such a method in the annals of crime; none of our serial killers is known to have done that.”
Cold Angel: Murder in Berlin 1949 Page 7