The Karnau Tapes

by Marcel Beyer

  Helmut: 'Yes, looking for bats.'

  Heide, disappointedly: 'But they never came.'

  'Yes, they did.'

  'No, they didn't. Not one.'

  'You'd probably fallen asleep by then, sleepyhead.'

  'Hadn't.'

  'Anyway, we saw some.'

  Holde: 'Those were birds.'

  Helmut, impatiently: 'No, they weren't. Bats flap their wings quite differently, Herr Moreau showed us.'

  'But it was dark by then.'

  'It was prickly, hiding in those bushes.'

  Helga's voice again, very near: 'No, later on, when we were standing under that light. We threw stones in the air, and the bats darted after them.'

  Hedda, from above: 'They flew down, right past our heads. They ruffled our hair.'

  'Well, almost.'

  'But they came very close, the horrid black things.'

  Helga: 'Herr Karnau said the bats mistook the stones for gnats.'

  Heide again: 'Yes, gnats. And mosquitoes.'

  At this point on the night of 27 April the recording breaks off. Earlier that day the children's mother had called Dr Kunz for the first time. Who was Kunz, and why should he have acceded to her request? Why did our paths never cross at that time? Someone should have restrained the man, if necessary by force. At a second interrogation on Thursday, 19 May 1945, Kunz retracted his previous statements in the light of suspicions that another doctor was also involved in the murder of the six children. Continually stroking his hair, fiddling with his ears, and wiping his eyes as if plagued by swarms of little black flies, Kunz conceded that his earlier account of the circumstances of the killing had been inaccurate: it was true that Stumpfecker had helped him.

  But what was 'bonbon water'? Was it a pleasant-tasting drink consisting of water in which bonbons had been dissolved with an admixture of morphine, or was the sweet, strong-tasting beverage doctored not with sedative but with the lethal poison itself? Or should bonbon water be construed as an imprecise description of chocolates with a poisonous liquid centre that were given to the children to suck, no resistance being anticipated because it was so long since the six of them had had any sweets that their tongues would swiftly have licked away enough of the outer crust to enable the cyanide to seep through into the oral cavity? Were the doctors apprehensive because they could not be absolutely certain that the dominant sugary taste would render the children's gustatory nerves so desensitised against other stimuli that they would fail to notice the poison and unsuspectingly swallow it, mingled with saliva and sugar?

  Having injected the children with morphine, Kunz left them and joined their mother in the room next door, where they waited for them to go to sleep. She then asked him to help her administer the poison itself, but he refused, so she sent him to fetch Stumpfecker, whom he found in the Bunker canteen. She had already disappeared into the children's bedroom by the time Stumpfecker got there, so he went straight in. When the two of them emerged four or five minutes later, Stumpfecker walked off without so much as a word to Kunz.

  Stumpfecker was a man who had shattered children's legs at Ravensbruck and adorned his office with jars containing pickled foetal speech organs. I would have thought him capable of anything, but not of that, not of ending those six young lives. He sent me off to make copies of our recordings. Why? To get me out of the way while he dealt with the children. 'Copy them all very carefully,' he told me, meaning those wholly unimportant recordings of a crippled voice. And to think how insistent he was, once the deed had been done, that those discs should be preserved intact. . .

  Saturday, 28 April. Helga recounts a distasteful experience: 'And the whole place was awash with wee-wee.'

  The others giggle. 'It wasn't funny,' Helga says indignantly, 'it was awful. You've no idea how it stank in there, not to mention the revolting pictures on the walls.'

  'What sort of pictures?'

  'Naked, grinning women with big breasts and their legs apart so you could see the hair between them — even the slit. Make sure you never end up in that loo, even when there's somebody in the one up here. Better to do it in your pants than have to go down there.’

  *

  A belated night-owl pedals along the street below my window, bicycle tyres whirring over the asphalt.

  The Führer's driver, Kempka, one false witness among many, testified that Stumpfecker told him that the children's father had requested him to end their lives by injecting them with some fast-acting poison, but that he, Stumpfecker, had refused on the grounds that he would be too mindful of his own young family to do such a thing. The children's father had been at his wits' end, he said.

  Kempka kept inquiring after the dogs and sniffing his fingers. He was sorry, he said, but he hadn't managed to wash off the smell of petrol even now. The couple had eventually found a sympathetic doctor among the refugees in the other bunker, and it was he who put the six children to death. Who was this doctor? Not Kunz, it seemed, and no other candidate presented himself. Had Stumpfecker been so anxious to conceal his tracks that he lied to the others in the Bunker before anyone could question him about his involvement?

  ' "We're going there to say good — " What did Mama mean?'

  'When?'

  'Earlier on, before we went to that party in the other bunker.'

  'Yes, Papa interrupted her.'

  ' "Goodbye" — was that what she meant to say?'

  The others sound agitated. Helga tries to soothe them:

  'Goodbye? Why? Who would we have said goodbye to? The wounded haven't left, they're still in that underground hospital.'

  Heide: 'And the children?'

  'Yes.'

  Hilde: 'It's funny, there aren't any children left in Berlin apart from them.'

  Helmut: 'We're still here, aren't we?'

  Holde: 'They looked awful.'

  'Who, the children?'

  'No, the wounded. There was one hidden right at the back because he hadn't got a mouth.'

  Helga: 'You're making that up to scare us.'

  'No, honestly. No mouth at all, just a sort of hole.'

  'That's enough.'

  Helga's tone is so peremptory that silence reigns for a while on the disc marked Sunday, 29 April. It's as though each child is trying to stem the flood of images conjured up by Holde's reference to the wounded. Or as if they're doubtful of Helga's dismissal of their mother's truncated remark. Or as if Helga herself is aware that she's desperately trying to reassure the others by saying things she doesn't believe herself.

  The father's aide, Gunther Schwagermann, testified that he had seen the children's mother go into their bedroom at about seven p.m. She emerged a few minutes later, ashen-faced. On seeing Schwagermann she threw her arms around him, sobbing and mumbling incoherently. Schwagermann, who, while being questioned, continually fiddled with the loose threads marking the spot where his SS collar patches had been ripped off, gradually took in what she was saying: she had just killed all six children. In a state of total collapse, she allowed Schwagermann to help her to the conference-room, where her husband, looking very pale, was awaiting her. Realising what had happened without a word being said, he remained silent for a considerable time.

  Mischa, the telephonist, stated that the children's mother, her face devoid of expression, had walked past the switchboard-room and gone into her husband's office, where she sat down at the table and played patience, weeping as she did so. After about twenty minutes she went upstairs again. There was no sign of her husband during this time. Mischa could not refrain from mentioning that Schwagermann had once indignantly confided that Helga had made indecent advances to him.

  Schwagermann's assertion that the children's mother had nearly fainted and was utterly distraught is at odds with other accounts to the effect that she first made herself some coffee and then, as one witness put it, chatted briskly about old times with her husband, Artur Axmann, and Martin Bormann. Kempka, too, reported that the couple were looking quite calm and composed at eight forty-five p.m., w
hen he went back into the Bunker to say goodbye to them. He kept pausing to listen while being interrogated, as if receiving instructions from some unseen third party. The children's mother had ended by asking him to convey her affectionate regards to Harald, her son by her first marriage, if ever their paths should cross.

  According to one reconstruction, she put her six children to bed at about five-thirty p.m. and then gave them a sleeping-draught, probably Veronal. Later, when they were asleep or at least stupefied, she poured cyanide into their mouths from glass ampoules. This laborious proceeding would, it seems, have obliged her to lean across the nearest children in order to get at the ones beyond. They could not, after all, have assisted her by craning forwards and opening their mouths to take the deadly poison. Dosing the occupants of the upper bunks presented a special problem to someone ill-attired for such an activity in the brown dress, trimmed with white, which she had donned in readiness for her own death, because it must have taken considerable dexterity not to spill the cyanide while raising a child's head with her free hand.

  All the children passively submitted to this treatment — all, it is alleged, except Helga, who refused to take her 'medicine'. When all attempts at persuasion failed, her mother had no alternative but to introduce the poison into her mouth by force.

  Whose account of the affair is this? The details sound quite incredible, because the woman could not have done all this unaided. The source of the account, who refuses to divulge his name, is concealing something. Who else was in the children's room on that last, fatal night?

  I play the 30 April disc once more. Before the children start imitating my fairy-tale voice, I can also hear my own voice in the background. We're singing a bedtime song together: 'If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take ...' Fatigue notwithstanding, the youthful, high-pitched voices are doing their best to sing in unison.

  But the song is overlaid by muffled grunts and moans from the next apartment: my neighbours making love before dawn.

  *

  The girl is naked. That much is obvious, though all that suggests it are her bare, slender shoulders. The pale oilskin sheet covering the body from the chest down has slipped a little, revealing the left breast, because the head has been raised to show off the slightly pointed chin, the full, loosely compressed lips, the delicate nose, the closed eyes beneath the broad brow ridges, the long lashes, the arching eyebrows, the smooth, unlined forehead. The skin is universally flawless, and the complexion would be healthy but for some bluish flecks and the greenish tinge that discolours the whole face, all the more noticeable because the hair has been swept back off the forehead. Unnaturally taut in appearance, the hair is, in a sense, supporting the weight of the entire body: a whole hank of it is clutched in the gloved hand of the uniformed mortuary attendant, who has turned the dead twelve-year-old's head towards the camera and is holding it in front of his black rubber apron to ensure an even more effective contrast between pale face and dark background.

  The six children, all wearing light night attire, were discovered in their bunks in a separate room in the Bunker of the Reich Chancellery, which has since been razed to the ground. Also buried there, crushed by shattered concrete and mingled with the soil, are the remains of a bar of chocolate. All six children exhibited signs of poisoning. To enable them to be identified by persons closely acquainted with them, their bodies were removed to the Berlin-Buch headquarters of the Smersh Section of the Red Army's 79th Rifle Corps.

  The following report was compiled during the autopsy performed on Helga's corpse:

  'External examination: The body is that of a girl about fifteen years old in appearance, well-nourished and wearing a pale blue nightgown trimmed with lace. Height: one metre fifty-eight. Circumference of chest at nipple level: sixty-five centimetres. Colour of skin and visible mucous membranes: pink to cherry-red. Back of the body mottled with red postmortem lividities that can no longer be dispersed. Fingernails bluish. Skin in the region of the shoulder-blades and buttocks noticeably pale owing to pressure. Abdominal skin dull green, discoloured by putrefaction. Head macrocephalous with flat temples. Hair long, pale brown, plaited. Face oval, tapering towards the chin. Eyebrows pale brown, eyelashes long, irises blue. Nose straight, regular, small. Eyes and mouth closed. Tip of tongue loosely gripped between the teeth. When the body was turned over and pressure applied to the thorax, serous fluid seeped from the mouth and nose and a very faint smell of bitter almonds could be detected. Rib cage normally developed, nipples small, no hair visible in the armpits, abdomen flat. External sexual organs normally developed. Labia majora and mons veneris hirsute as far as the pubic symphysis. 'Internal examination: Mucous membrane somewhat bluish. Intestinal contents unexceptional. Womb firm, four centimetres long, three centimetres wide and two centimetres thick at the oviduct. Vagina slit-shaped, hymen intact.'

  Although the autopsy report speaks of plaits, the photograph shows Helga with her hair loose. Who undid the corpse's plaits? The pathologist's assistant in his rubber gloves?

  *

  An early bird is stirring. Awake now, it starts to sing and promptly evokes a chorus of twitters from other trees round about: the night is over at last. How much can I really reconstruct from these recordings? I've listened to every disc with care, more than once, and managed to recognise every voice including my own and that of the children's mother. Would it be better to destroy these wax matrices? No, I can't bring myself to render the children's final days on earth inaudible. I can't consign them to silence, those children who listened to me telling them a bedtime story the night before their murder.

  That was on 30 April: the last recording, made on the night we saw each other for the last time. At noon the next day all the recording materials and machines were rounded up and destroyed, some of them in the Bunker itself. Nine nights from 22 April onwards: nine wax matrices. I arrange the discs in their correct order and check the dates. But there are ten discs here on the kitchen table, not nine. Did I start the sequence on 21 April? Or cut two discs the same night? Impossible, I could never have changed the discs after lights-out. Besides, Stumpfecker sent me off to make copies late on the afternoon of 1 May. Did we ever make a recording during the day? In my cubicle, on another machine? The children knew about my work, so did they make me a recording by themselves? No, they would never have done so in defiance of their father's wishes. No date, no serial number. There's something wrong here, I didn't record this.

  'Is that you, Herr Karnau?'

  I've already listened to this disc, with its brief exchange between Helga and Heide and their mother.

  'Is that you, Herr Karnau?'

  Those are the last words I can make out. No, this isn't one of my recordings, definitely not. It doesn't display the tonal quality of the others, nor does it convey any idea of the children's animated conversations after lights-out. This one must have been made by someone inexperienced. Helga's unanswered question is followed at first by some unidentifiable sounds, nothing more. On the other hand, I was the only person who knew about the microphone and recording machine concealed beneath the bed. Now an adult's voice breaks the silence. Man or woman? I can't decide which, the sound is too fragmentary. All I can make out, very faintly, is: 'Yes, yes, oh yes . ..'

  Nothing more from this point on, just a liquid gurgle repeated six times over. Was that a muffled cry? A little sob? Nothing now but breathing, the superimposed breathing of six young children with different respiratory rhythms. The sound decreases in volume and intensity until, in the end, nothing more can be heard. Although the disc continues to revolve with the needle in the groove, absolute silence reigns.

  Although certain characters in the foregoing narrative bear the names of actual persons, they are as fictitious as those that do not.

  *

  The introductory quotation is taken from an entry, dated 20 April 1941, in the diaries of Joseph Goebbels.

  MARCEL BEYER

  Marcel Beyer was born in 1965 and lives in Colog
ne. His first novel, Das Menschenfleisch, was described by the Suddeutsche Zeitung as a masterpiece and The Karnau Tapes, his second novel, has been translated into ten languages.

  Table of Contents

  # ISBN-13: 978-0151002559