“But I am: at least I’m a member of the SPD.”
“That’s not enough.”
Bacheran could only agree with Mr. Leupahn since he too thought that denazification was a joke. But still. A Stalinist sitting in his own glass house had no right to cast stones. “We know that too many of the old Nazis escaped unharmed from the process and we will take care that their crimes are not forgotten. But as long as we don’t have a majority in Parliament we can’t get the necessary laws passed. Happily the Federal Republic isn’t a dictatorship like…”
“What’s wrong with the dictatorship of the only people who are reasonable, the dictatorship of reason?”
“In such a system conflicts are repressed, the opposition is jailed or sent to a camp.” Bacheran had talked himself into a rage. “That’s precisely the strength of the free world: conflicts are played out on the free market of ideas, in Parliament and we don’t have a Communist party of the Soviet Union, KPDSU, or an SED that says: ‘The Party is always right.’”
Helga’s mother intervened : “Your Parliament, Mr. Bacheran, doesn’t have a say, things happen only if monocapitalism feels a need for them.”
“In any case, it creates living conditions that, compared to those in the East, seem like paradise, otherwise we wouldn’t have thousands of fugitives coming over weekly.”
“Those people are blind and very soon they will regret having left.”
And so it went on for a while until Bacheran tried as best he could to steer the conversation to more mundane things. His aunt, he said, had made delicious poppy seed cookies. In Wedding he had recently seen Emil, the artist with the straw hat, on his bicycle. Now you could find licorice again. Hannelore Leupahn said they had plenty of food in Schmöckwitz because the cooperative there was providing goods for the camping grounds nearby between Zeuthener and Krossinsee lake, and everything was much cheaper than in the West.
Towards evening diplomatic relations between Bacheran and Mr. Leupahn improved when the young man offered to help him tar the roof on his shed. “The water comes through whenever there’s a heavy rain.” Bernhard put on an old pair of gym pants from KdF times, climbed the ladder and kneeled on the old and already terribly cracked tar paper. From Suhl to Rostock you couldn’t find any tar paper for roofing. He would have liked to buy him two or three rolls in Neukölln but Leupahn categorically refused any such present from the West. The only thing he’d let him bring them was a box of tea. “For your wife… instead of flowers.” They heated the black lump of tar on the hotplate and Leupahn handed it up to Bacheran who laid it painstakingly on the roof with an old tar brush. It was a very dirty job and after an hour’s work he looked worse than a kid playing in slime and sludge.
“Just like the Dobus,” he said to Helga as he came down the ladder. “When are you coming over to us in Fuldastrasse to clean up the cellar and take the junk to the garbage dump?”
Anyway, there hadn’t been any major new incidents and there might even be a silver lining on the horizon.
Helga walked him to the 86 streetcar stop on Verschauer Allee. In the end they did talk about Kusian.
“I happened to meet Dr. Weimann on Monday and he told me Elisabeth Kusian had begged him to do everything in his power to let her see Kurt Muschan. ‘Just once, after that I don’t want anything more from life.’ Word for word.”
“And… is he going to let her?
“Yes. He is after all charged with investigating the psychological background to the crimes, as they say, but he’s not making any progress. He figures maybe she’ll say more about her motives if the two of them see each other again. So Weimann is trying to convince the Examining Magistrate and Muschan too. If it works, he’ll contact me.”
34.
Bacheran sat in the 44 streetcar on his way from Fehrbellinerplatz to Moabit. A large woman was sitting across from him, perched on the red leather seat and he needed all his forbearance – to endure her presence: she was sweating profusely and smelled of the cowshed. To get a little air, she had pulled up her horrible flowery dress high above her knees and he could see her flabby thighs. Like fat rubber tires. Between the knees and the calves the tight elastic band cut off the blood flow. It wasn’t very pleasant to look at. Plus, it was so hot and sticky in the car that she was panting like a Saint Bernard. Bacheran looked out the window: he envied the people sitting alone in their cars enjoying the Berlin sun. Oh well, you couldn’t have everything. At least he had Helga. Or did he? Ah…
He tried again to concentrate on his reading. Before the Storm, Theodor Fontane’s big novel. He hadn’t known of it until his aunt had bought it at the Neukölln School for Continuing Education. It was about the fate of an aristocratic family in Oderbruch at the time of the French occupation of Prussia. How Berndt von Vitzewitz and Hohen-Vietz had whipped up a group of people like a storm against Napoleon. ‘We will have a happy, holy war!’ Bernhard shut the book. This was not the right thing to read right now. Better to look out the window. How long would it be before the rubble was cleared? How long before there were no more gaping holes between the buildings? Many of them, including the old Reich Center for Grain and Forage on Fehrbelliner platz were damaged, reduced to a mere shell: the roof completely gone, all the windows without glass or frame, the ceilings had caved in, the plaster and the façade black with soot from fire. Things had stirred up a bit on Wilmersdorfer strasse: wooden shacks had been erected where the rubble had been cleared and some adventurous dealers sold radios, textiles and such things. The whole thing looked a little like Christmas market stalls, but also like a town in the ‘Wild West’. Berlinerstrasse on the other hand was still like an open air museum of bombed out cities. There was barely a house still standing. The only building that was intact was, to Bacheran’s eyes, the ugliest: the Town Hall.
He passed Knie strasse and Franklinstrasse and reached Moabit. Although he was a State Attorney – or almost was – he was searched like a dangerous criminal before he was let in to the Investigation prison. The busy Chief Medical Examiner was already waiting impatiently. They said hello.
“Thank you very much, Mr. Weimann, for giving me the opportunity to be present.”
“My pleasure. But you know… I also need someone to talk to about this case: somehow Elisabeth Kusian remains a mystery to me.”
Bacheran smiled. “The mystery is not so much Kusian, the real mystery is how the millions of people who were cheated by fate, by Hitler that is, deprived of their youth, their lives, did not follow the natural desire to take what life should have given them – even if it entailed crime and even murder. Why is it that they didn’t do any wrong, how can it be that that they just go about their work like good upstanding citizens? Because they are psychologically intact and remained so and because what Sigmund Freud calls their Super Ego is strong and it says: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”
“Right, but Kusian was both angel and devil all wrapped in one.”
“You can read about concentration camp commandants with thousands of people on their conscience who were the most loving fathers at home. Everything is possible in human nature. We are all potential killers.”
Dr. Weimann sighed. “If only I had another ten years to give my professional opinion… until psychology and psychiatry have found out more about the human soul.”
“But I doubt they will progress that far.” Bacheran rummaged around his briefcase. A month before he had read Theodor Fontane’s Schach von Wuthenow and copied a sentence in the margin of a newspaper page. “Wait, here it is…” Finally he found what he was looking for: “‘… how are mysteries solved? They never are. Something of the darkness and the unexplained always remains, we are not allowed to see into the ultimate and most secret recesses of other people’s minds or even to understand our own motivations.’”
“Still we must try…”
As they spoke Dr. Weimann led him to a fairly large cell that was used as a conference room. Elisabeth Kusian jumped up when the guard opened the door and they came i
n.
“I thank you from the bottom of my heart, Doctor.” She kept Weimann’s hand in hers. “Will my Kurt really come?”
“He assured me he would. But let’s sit down first.”
There were only three chairs around the table so Bacheran had to sit on a stool in the back by the window. It was the perfect place.
“How are you otherwise, Mrs. Kusian?”
“I deserve my fate in every way but my days are not all dark.”
As Weimann was going to answer, Kurt Muschan appeared. He looked confused, guilty and clueless. The correction officer almost pushed him into the room. Kusian rushed up to him with a frantic cry and covered his face with her kisses. She also kissed his hands. She uttered all the words of endearment she might have used during sex. “My baby! My Kurti! My Kurti birdie! My wild stallion!”
The inspector seemed nailed to the spot and incapable of any emotion. His face was frozen as if the dentist had just inserted his drill in his mouth. Everything seemed to hurt. The passionate words of his Lisbeth were pure embarrassment. He let her pour her heart out. There was not a drop of pity or sympathy in him. Bacheran found him rather repulsive at the moment. He wasn’t guilty of anything but he had somehow played a role in the events that drove her to murder. Had he left his wife and lived with Kusian, then Seidelmann and Merten would still be alive. No, he couldn’t be accused of not leaving his wife, but still… Without him as a catalyst there would not have been two murders. He was not responsible obviously but what happened should weigh on him. Bacheran imagined what it would feel like if he was told Helga had committed a murder. Would he then declare: “I never want to see you again!” or would he put his arm around her shoulders and console her: “Come on, we’ll get through this together.”? Could that be expected from an ordinary human being – especially when he was putting his career in jeopardy…? Yes. No. Not everyone was that heroic.
After that outburst of passion, Elisabeth Kusian let go of Muschan and her tears stopped. Free and easy, almost like a young girl, she started telling her lover about her life. As if they were meeting for the first time.
“You know, Baby, on the farm in Thuringia, Elisabeth had a big dream: to escape from the cowshed and have a beautiful home, far away in the city, a villa, and to belong to the upper class, to have a husband who loved her and whom she loved. And many happy children… Elisabeth… yes…”
She spoke as if she were telling another woman’s story, as if she were completely separate from Elisabeth Kusian. Only when she reached the time of her marriage did her joy vanish: her face became hard and her voice raw. A never ending torture, darker than even the darkest night.
“Even on my way to the civil registry I was saying to myself: You are going to have to stay with this man for the rest of your life… That’s the worst in a marriage when it makes you bad instead of good. Kurt, tell your wife she is lucky to have you…”
This time Muschan was gripped by emotion himself, he could hardly hold back his tears. Bacheran found that the title of another Fontane book said it well: Unrecoverable. For Kusian, everything had reached that point where no recovery was possible, there was no second life. He had to control the impulse to get sentimental: there was also no return for her victims. He looked up at the sky: Lord, if you really loved human beings, then you would give them a chance to turn back life’s wheel and let them start over from a specific point on and do everything differently, and better.
“We have to think of putting an end to this session soon,” Dr. Weimann said.
Kurt Muschan was the first to get up, happy to escape what must have been hell for him, he took a few steps backwards towards the door, uncertain whether or how he should take leave of his former lover. “Well, then…”
Kusian got up too, went over to him, put her hands on his shoulders and looked him long and hard in the eyes. “Baby, look at me! You know me, don’t you. Think of all the things you did with me… Can you still believe that I really did any of this? Do you even think me capable of such horrible things?”
“No. But let me go Lisbeth, please!” He pulled away from her or rather he turned away from her, dove under her open arms, escaping her hold so that Kusian was left standing there like a gymnast with her arms up. Then he tried to pull the door open but it only opened from the outside. He hammered against it with his fists screaming to be let out. When the door opened, he jumped into the corridor like on a platform. As if he had to jump off a train before it gained speed. Enough, it was over, he wanted to forget everything.
Those who were still inside were silent. They had all witnessed Muschan’s behavior, not just Kusian.
There were sixty seconds of stillness and then Dr. Weimann broke the silence. “Tell me, Mrs. Kusian, were you serious just now?”
She gave him a cold look. “Do you perhaps think I said that as a joke?” Weimann found it difficult to assess the exact impact of those words. “Do you mean, then, that your confession, that everything you said to me during our many discussions, all of a sudden is no longer true?”
“I never made a confession.”
Bacheran couldn’t believe his ears either. He had been present when Kusian had recounted her actions in every detail.
Weimann tried to keep his composure. “And who was it then who did these things?”
“Oh please, leave me alone. Haven’t you searched and stripped every corner of my soul? Enough. I want to go back to my cell.”
Weimann and Bacheran stayed behind; they didn’t know what to think. They decided to go have lunch together and talk everything over again in peace and quiet. On Turmstrasse, after a long search, they found a decent place to eat. Bacheran ordered a beef roll and Weimann a Wiener schnitzel. They felt they needed something to make them feel better.
“If she really intends to deny everything, then I can’t wait for the trial next year.” Bacheran said.
“Ah… wait and see. She did this only in order to prevent Muschan from turning away from her entirely or so that he wouldn’t think of her as a complete monster. That’s why she wanted him to start thinking that maybe she’s innocent or at least make him doubt that she acted alone.”
Bacheran was skeptical. “What was it my grandfather used to say: ‘There’s nothing left to scrape from the barrel.’ As for her, the barrel’s gone. Even if they dared exonerate her she cannot think that Muschan would then abandon his wife and family to start a new life with her.”
“Who knows what women dream of when in the springtime,” Weimann quoted from a well known song. “She probably reacted this way for several different reasons. After all she always hoped that I would grant her diminished responsibility because of her morphine habit – but I didn’t and I won’t. So she needs to find something else to get off: the hidden real perpetrator. But maybe her behavior has to do with her valiant defender… She got one a few days ago. And do you know who he is…?”
“No, why…”
“My younger brother, Dr. Arno Weimann. And that rascal probably advised her to change her story fast before I finish writing my opinion for the court. But both of them are on the wrong path.”
“As I just said: I’m really looking forward to the trial.”
The trial was still six months away and when, by chance, Bacheran met the Medical Examiner in the month of November 1950 at the Renaissance theater, the doctor told him that he had spoken many more times with Elisabeth Kusian.
“‘I’m just a puppet in your psychiatric study’, she told me. Again and again she implies that she isn’t the murderer. ‘I still expect a lot from life,’ she insisted during my last visit. ‘If I tell the truth, Doctor, someone will end up in jail. But I, on the other hand, will come out in two years and I’ll start a new life…’ And I think I know who this mysterious other person is…”
35.
Bacheran couldn’t believe it: the calendar showed Sunday, January 7, 1951. The old year had come to a mixed ending. Walter Ulbricht had been named General Secretary of the Central Committ
ee of the SED. The GDR administration was blasting the Berlin Royal palace – to Bacheran that was an incredible denial of history. The stream of refugees from the East had increased - in 1950, about 60 000 GDR citizens had moved to West Berlin. All the refugee camps were overcrowded. The freedom bell was ringing from Schöneberg City Hall tower. In October the President of the Federal republic, Theodor Heuss, inaugurated the German industry fair in the exhibition halls at the Radio Tower. Bacheran didn’t like him much: he had voted for the laws that enabled Hitler’s power grab and given him a lift up. Helga was right in this respect. On November 22, the national soccer team had beaten Switzerland 1 to 0 in the first game since the war.
“We don’t know whether there’s life after death,” Bernhard said at the breakfast table with his mother and aunt, “but there’s certainly life after war.”
“That will make all the people fighting in Korea happy,” his aunt replied.
“…fighting and dying,” he added.
“For us!” His mother shot back. “For freedom and against the communist takeover of the world.”
“Bah…we don’t want to have a Third World War here in Berlin. I say: Better red than dead.”
His mother got very angry. “That’s Helga Leupahn’s influence.”
“Better inflow than outflow,” Bernhard grumbled, but then he turned serious. “As much as I hate Ulbricht, I can’t say everything is bad on the other side, and the Marxist criticism of the capitalist system I find quite right.”
“Then go over there!”
Bacheran laughed. “Only if you come with me. I would be completely helpless without you.”
His aunt tried to mediate between them. “Don’t start bickering again. Peace on earth! Will you be home tonight, Bernie? We want to have a good game of Rummy, and I would like to play Skat…”
Cold Angel: Murder in Berlin 1949 Page 25