Cold Angel: Murder in Berlin 1949

by Horst Bosetzky

  “Sorry, I’m going to the movies with Helga.” Just then the house bell rang. He was startled: 10:30 on a Sunday morning? “Who can that be?”

  His mother threw her napkin on the table. “God, I completely forgot: it’s Miss Ritter. I wanted to discuss the school trip for form 10a and other things with her…” She hurried down the corridor.

  “Your sister is a damned liar,” Bernhard said to his aunt, although he didn’t mean to be as blunt as he sounded. “Do you think I don’t know what’s going on? The only reason she invites Miss Ritter is because she hopes that I’ll catch fire and drop Helga.”

  Erna Nostiz tried to appease him. “She only means well for you. For her, your Helga is a bit of a Red Army – excuse the expression – gun toting female commissar, who will make you miserable.”

  “Maybe I love gun toting female commissars,” he said. And there was a kernel of truth in what he said since he was never more aroused than when Helga wore boots and looked just like a stern commissar. He probably needed her to be the opposite of his womanly, plump, almost flabby mother. From the little he’d read or knew of Freud, this represented his defense against incestuous desires.

  Rosemarie Ritter was 26 and she had started as a student teacher at his mother’s school at the beginning of the school year. Her subjects were German and Latin, which for Bacheran, sounded like a terrible combination; he hated writing essays of the type: ‘What did the author intend?’ and learning Latin vocabulary had been an absolute torture for him. Now he regretted that since if you wanted to shine in the legal profession, you needed a good knowledge of Latin, and Latin also developed logical thinking.

  The young teacher came in. They shook hands. He could tell how nervous she felt. Anyone who stood in front of a horde of wild high school students five times a week should be fairly tough, but she wasn’t. When he saw her blush in waves from the tip of her ears to her cheeks and neck, he was hit by a sharp recognition: God, she’s in love with me! Head over heels. Maybe he’d done his mother an injustice: the initiative for this foursome had not been hers but Miss Ritter’s. Rosemarie. She sat down and turned to his mother, ostentatiously and exclusively. Well, if that wasn’t proof enough that she was here only for him. He now had the opportunity to look at her. She wasn’t bad at all. As a teacher she possessed the same austere, strong, slightly masculine quality he liked so much in Helga. And her figure… He could see that he could have a lot of fun there. And, compared to Helga, she had the invaluable advantage of being from the West. With her he wouldn’t have to endure the fate of the male Dobu. Plus, it would be good for his career if his wife were a city employee of West Berlin. And she was attractive, highly educated and intelligent. And with a good speaker as she was, he could be seen at every party and make a splash. The opposite of Helga who always made it clear that she would like to throw all western businessmen, judges, attorneys and politicians in jail.

  All this went through Bernhard’s mind and then he got up and rushed out to the entrance hall. He felt a wave of disgust, disgust at himself. ‘My God, what kind of a heel am I?’ he grabbed his coat off the coat rack and gathered his scarf, hat and gloves as fast as he could.

  “Have a good day, ladies!” He called into the living room. “I’m off to Karolinenhof to pick up Helga.”

  Only when he was sitting in the S-Bahn did he calm down. He felt much better now: he had acted in a proper, decent way. He had done what Uncle Waldemar always told him to do: “Stay clean, young man.” Still he was not entirely at peace. This girl Rosemarie stuck like a bullet in his body. That was the image that came to his mind. Running away from her wasn’t enough. The bullet had to be extracted cleanly. But how? By marrying Helga… The very thought made him start. God, no! He couldn’t imagine it. But what then? He didn’t have the answer. On his right he saw the vast clearing of Baumschulenweg cemetery: not a bad alternative, resting in peace here. For ever and ever.

  At Grünau station, he was on the point of switching to the 86 when he hesitated. Was it right to show up at Helga’s unannounced like this? No, it wasn’t and especially not in her parents’ view. And then maybe she wasn’t alone, maybe she had visitors, maybe she was in bed with an official in the police department who followed the party line, and she had surrendered to him. The idea aroused him. Not only because of its voyeuristic qualities but also because it was ripe with possible consequences: if he caught Helga in flagrante, she would be responsible for their break up and he wouldn’t have to feel guilty, he could remain ‘clean’, if he ever did choose Rosemarie.

  He stood still, unable to make up his mind and let the first 86 for Schmöckwitz leave the platform without getting on. By now, if he walked to Karolinenhof, he would be faster. But then he would be alone with his thoughts for an hour, and that was surely torture. Maybe he could call the Leupahns up first and say that he happened to be in Grünau and would they have anything against it if he came over to Karolinenhof to see Helga earlier than planned? Yes. But he found he didn’t have Eastern coins for the telephone booth. Should he go up to someone and ask to exchange some money? He didn’t like to do that. It could be the wrong kind of guy and…

  He gave up and started walking slowly towards Karolinenhof. He was walking along the exact same path that they had walked on their first rendez-vous. It was only a little over a year ago and it felt like an eternity. What would things be like a year from now…? They would be a married couple living in… He couldn’t think of any neighborhood in Berlin where they would be living together. How could they. Think of the Dobus. Maybe they could emigrate? But where to? She would never go with him to a capitalist country and he would never follow her to a socialist one… There were more neutral countries. Finland for example. Not a bad country but too cold and a language that was impossible to learn. India? What would a West German lawyer and an East German woman Police Officer do in India? Damn it, the Earth was big enough, there had to be some small place where they could live in peace and raise their children.

  He reached the banks of the Dahme river and looked across to the opposite shore. He could see the Schilfgürtel where they had been so often that summer in the boat. Their love nest. Now everything was grey and the reeds on the Schilf were as sparse as hair on an old man’s head. Was it all over then, never to return? Would the cold war turn into a hot war? Would the first atom bombs fall on Berlin and would all of Germany be uninhabitable for centuries?

  Today, had he met an optimist, he would have declared the man insane. What if he agreed to live with her in the GDR? They fêted anyone who came over from the West and he was guaranteed a career there if he did. But, was Helga ‘worth a mass’, as Henry IV of France had said? Should he renounce everything that he had held sacred until then: freedom and democracy, free elections and open, critical thinking? No. And there was a nice prize for staying in the West and keeping Helga here in the East… Rosemarie.

  “Bernie, you’re here?!” She shouted joyfully and flew into his arms. Spontaneously, full of emotion, the opposite of what she usually did.

  He pressed her against him. Didn’t that mean anything?

  “Helga, my Helga… mine forever.”

  The stupid thing was that she wasn’t alone, her parents were there. The Leupahns had wanted to stretch their legs a bit and get some fresh air between breakfast and lunch. He saw how horrified her parents were that their daughter had greeted her lover like an actress in a Hollywood film. That was a sign of what they feared most in the future: that their Helga would shamefully betray the Workers and Farmers State and go over to the West. They didn’t want to have lived, worked and suffered for such an outcome. So the first thing they would ensure was that the couple could not walk together hand in hand through Karolinenhof. People would have talked and that would not be good for them.

  So Mr. Leupahn engaged Bacheran in a conversation about the agreement reached by the GDR the previous summer over the ‘Oder-Neisse Peace border.’ “The warmongers in the West are still up in arms against it – what
do you think about that?”

  Bernhard thought for a few seconds. “I’m not enthusiastic. All my ancestors come from the Neumark, from Pomeranien and East Prussia. And now that is no longer to be part of Germany… But of course, we did lose the war – vae victis – and so many horrible crimes were committed under Hitler in the name of the German people that this punishment is surely deserved: we should lose our unity and our Eastern regions. If Elisabeth Kusian is to get a life sentence for two murders, then what should the German people get when it has been responsible for the deaths of 50 million people and the destruction of the Jews…? A death sentence, in a sense, for East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and the Neumark, they will be lost forever; and three life sentences for the partition. If we say that one life equals fifty years, that means we won’t be reunified before 2100.”

  “Wrong,” Mr. Leupahn said. “Socialism will be victorious, nothing can stop it, and Germany will be reunified before this decade is out: under a red flag.”

  “Great, then you don’t need to worry about your daughter’s future or mine.”

  Although Mr. Leupahn was aware of the irony of his words, they spent a relatively relaxed time together. Helga’s parents seemed to have come to terms with the prospect of having him as a son in law, especially since he was anything but a warmonger. Love is blind… Love was a powerful goddess and if Helga had decided on him, well, they had to make the best of it. Pragmatism seemed to win the day as it had in the Kusian investigation.

  But when he went into the city with Helga they both had to admit that for all their agreement on the ideological level, they were incapable of deciding where they were going to, or wanted to, live together.

  “You will move to West Berlin of course.”

  “No, you come to the Eastern sector.”

  They got no further. Bacheran thought of the medieval twin cities of Berlin and Kölln which could not agree on where to build their common city hall and arch of justice: so they had them built on the border of the two towns, which in effect was in the middle of the Spree river. “Maybe we should try to get a house on the Oberbaum bridge,” he said.

  At the cinema, they forgot about all that. The Paris was showing Max Ophüls’s masterpiece, Roundabout and they both felt ‘far away’ as Bacheran described it later. They were aroused, crazy for each other. But where could they go? They didn’t have the courage or the money to rent a hotel room and at home in Fuldastrasse his mother was hunkered down with Rosemarie. Then he had an idea: they should go to his office.

  The guard at the door was quickly persuaded. “The Kusian trial starts tomorrow as you know and the defense is introducing a new witness who intends to undermine our entire case. The statements obtained in the East in particular. So I have to go through everything again with my colleague Leupahn. She looked as grim-faced as possible. Of course Bacheran didn’t need to go to such lengths to justify himself to a doorman, in order to get the keys. But the man had to log in the visit and if one of his superiors asked about it, and the guard insinuated anything salacious, there could very well be a scandal. “Bacheran does it with his chick in our offices and on Sundays too.” There would be long conversations, more like interrogations in fact, a note in his personal file and the pace of his advancement would grind down to zero.

  Still, this possibility did not reduce his lust when they reached his office especially since Helga made the best of the uncomfortable surroundings by bending over his desk and letting him come in from the rear. A totally new experience for him. You could even call it the highpoint of his existence until then.

  The following Sunday they did it again. That time Helga could only come later in the afternoon because of the ceremony of commemoration for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. They met Menzel at the Church of Remembrance, the Gedächtnis Kirche. Bernhard hadn’t seen him in a long time. He was doing well since he was very close to retirement and looking forward to sitting under a tree like a bird, in the garden colony.

  “We would have seen each other at the Kusian trial anyway,” he said. “I’m to testify next week.”

  “It seems she intends to deny everything she confessed to. You will have a hard time helping justice take its course. And in fact there still are some areas that haven’t been elucidated.”

  Menzel wasn’t going to let that upset him. “What can you do when she keeps pulling out new mystery men from her hat and saying they did it. Try to examine someone when you don’t know his or her name.” This he said also for the benefit of his colleague from the East since it was known in the Western sector that his work was underappreciated by the Eastern police.

  Helga made a cryptic pronouncement. “You will have a difficult time for various reasons.”

  “Many people will have a difficult time. First because of the crowds: they are standing in line already. You’ve got to see it. Why don’t you go?”

  “Not a bad idea.”

  After they parted Bacheran splurged on a taxi and rode with Helga to Moabit. It was true: there was such a crowd in front of the Criminal Court that it almost looked like a demonstration against the communists.

  “There’s a collective Kusian psychosis,” Bernhard observed. He went up to one of the officers of the Stumm Police in charge of keeping order. “How’s it looking, colleague?”

  “And you are…?”

  “I’m from the Attorney General’s office.” Bacheran pulled out his official ID.

  “They’ll start handing out passes tomorrow morning but people have already been getting in line since 6PM.”

  The people in question sat on folding chairs wrapped in blankets like mummies at the small entrance porch. They were getting ready for a long night even though it was January and the temperature was just below freezing. More and more Berliners kept arriving, men and women, the line was getting longer. Bacheran thought it might already be 100 meters long. He calculated that if people stood in twos and took up about one square meter of space each, that meant 200 people. It was almost 8PM. And he had heard that there would only be 60 to 70 passes.

  A shifty looking guy with a floppy hat and an old leather jacket came up behind them silently. ‘pass… 50 marks.”

  “How did you get it, so early…?”

  “Want it or not?”

  “No thank you, I have a free pass.”

  “Oh…” the man turned to go.

  Bernhard looked at him. “Elisabeth Kusian. I wouldn’t mind being so famous one day that people are willing to pay 50 marks or stand on line an entire night to see me arrive. What do you think, Helga, should I murder you?”

  Apart from the fact that she disapproved of this kind of decadent Western humor, she wasn’t able to answer because at that moment, the crowd started pushing and shoving against the police officers. As they pushed, they yelled that the doors should be opened to enable them to spend the night inside the court and the officers were straining to hold them back and break them up. “That’s disgusting,” Helga said, “this craving for the sensational.” Bernhard smiled. “You know: bread and games will keep the people quiet. What’s clear also is who asked Kusian to commit two murders: our government in Bonn in cahoots with Ernst Reuter. Monopolistic capitalism is behind the whole thing. As always. Under these circumstances, you might find it hard to be here early tomorrow morning…?

  “Just you wait.”

  36.

  Before the trial, Bacheran felt excited like a soccer fan on the eve of the final cup. It was scheduled for January 15, 1951, a Monday. He woke up at 5:30, much earlier than the official time for breakfast with his mother and aunt. Next to his bed was the binder with the old and already slightly yellowed newspaper clippings from December 1949 to January 1950. He had read them carefully once more before he went to sleep. There were few new ones. Der Abend had recapped the case the week before in a long article. The headline – partly in large capital letters – was a real eye catcher: Written on the victims’ pack of cigarettes was Beautiful woman at Zoo… Below, on the right hand
side of the page was a particularly good keystone photo of Elisabeth Kusian. A truly beautiful woman. The article spoke of One of the most horrifying cases of robbery and homicide in Berlin since the war and pulled all the stops in the last two sections to make it sound really exciting: What is Elisabeth Kusian hiding? “If I’m condemned, you will be the only person I will tell the truth to!” she admitted to one of the investigating doctors. – “A deviant, a psychopath with disharmonic character traits. No genetic defect, no mental retardation. She is perfectly competent to stand trial,” according to the Medical Examiner. Kusian’s attorneys, two of Berlin’s mostfamous defenders, Dr. Weimann and Dr. Nicolai are not talking. Let us wait. The Telegraf of January 14, 1951, the day before, Sunday, had given the Kusian case 500 words in its Berlin section and mainly covered the psychological aspect of the two murders: Few trials have attracted as much attention as the one against Elisabeth Kusian, who killed twice. She will stand before the Moabit court tomorrow morning. The sensational aspect of this trial is not so much in the seriousness of the crime itself as in the psychological background and the personality of the defendant. – ‘All or nothing.’ seems to have been her motto. “If you want to reach your goals you have to use all the means at your disposal.” says her diary entry of June 20, 1949. (…) A warmhearted, model nurse, a sacrificing mother, a tender lover, on the one hand. A weak, sex driven woman, a devious and brutal murderer on the other. Two souls in one body. Will the trial lift the mystery?

  It was time to wash. There was a strict order as to who got to use the bathroom from such and such a time to such and such a time. He was first although he left home last most of the time. At the breakfast table too, Kusian was topic number one.

  His aunt felt a degree of understanding for the murderer. “So many people have been killed since 33… What’s a person’s life worth, she must have thought. And life had betrayed her in every way. It’s no wonder that she wanted to take what she thought she deserved.”