by Uwe Johnson
At customs in Hamburg they’d been almost manically festive. They’d greeted him by name, congratulated him on his return home to Germany. If he hadn’t been dressed up, as though for a funeral, they might have nudged him in the ribs. And yet it was an ordinary weekday, March 2, 1933, a Thursday. He thought he’d take a look around the Free Hanseatic City of Lübeck, see if they were acting all crazy there too.
Men in uniform stood partly blocking the station exits: two at each exit, one in policeman’s green and one in SA brown, asking everyone to take out their wallets. But the city employee, supposed to pass the travelers along to his partner, kept drifting away from him, seemingly embarrassed, making the inspection of papers in the midst of the gathering crowd look unserious, even indecent. Still, Cresspahl assumed an obliging manner (this was his first move in dealing with officials, all his life), as if happy to wait for the Brownshirt to finger his documents the way he was the papers of two young men, who in their flat tweed caps looked less like workmen than apprentice hairdressers. But the policeman in his shako made it clear to Cresspahl, with an angry swing of his chin, that people paying a visit to Lübeck in a black suit and polished shoes did not need to be checked; out on the sidewalk, Cresspahl caught another disgusted, almost imploring look from him. He seemed sickened by this Hitler fellow’s private army. Cresspahl almost gave him a nod.
Erwin Plath lived in the North St. Lorenz neighborhood, on a side street off Schwartauer Allee, near the slaughterhouse on the border, and for a moment before he knocked Cresspahl stood amazed outside the stately, freshly painted gabled house. Plath’s wife sprang out at him as though she’d been leaning against the door. – My husband’s not home! she screamed, – my husband’s not home! she said again, and Cresspahl moved a step back on the sidewalk so she could see him better. That didn’t help. Her husband wasn’t home!, she cried, as if she wanted the neighbors to hear. Cresspahl slowly opened his top two coat buttons, at a loss, and also because his collar felt tight, and suddenly she whispered something, from which he gathered that Erwin would be at the Hindenburg House that afternoon, “to follow.” – My husband’s not home! she announced, very loud, and Cresspahl did not even try to answer. Back on Schwartauer Allee, he permitted himself a shake of the head. Years ago, in Hamburg, Erwin had told him about his wife, stubborn but easygoing enough, not about a scared little girl dabbling in drama.
On the railroad bridge, he did not turn right but went straight, toward Ebert Square, crossed over the moat on the Puppenbrücke, past the statues, listened to what the monuments had to tell him, answered back,
all right, Bismarck, say something already
circled the Holsten Gate sunk in its bowl of earth, and disappeared into the city center. Nothing much to see there. He inspected the fully stocked furniture stores, and no one had to explain to him that high unemployment was still weighing down the businesses that sold on installment, that the sawmills were therefore hesitant to buy, and that no one was eager for someone like him here. The department stores had just had their Linens Week sales. Houses at bargain prices filled one real estate broker’s window. He was urged repeatedly not to miss the orchard- and pig-count on March 3. He was officially informed that the year 1933–34 was that of the Beetle. He stood with his hands behind his back looking at placards and shop-windows and newspaper pages on display, a sturdy man in holiday clothes, walking lazily down Broad Street, up King Street, bareheaded, his short curly hair in the softly wafting air, a little curious, even then not surprised.
Then he saw something, but time started racing so fast that by the next day he no longer believed everything that had happened. At Hindenburg House, a funeral procession came marching toward him, with muffled drums, navy flags, swastika flags, and, bringing up the rear, far behind the blue and brown uniforms, he really and truly did see Erwin shuffling along, a bit stooped, as though they weren’t in fact the same age, and with a vacant stare as if he literally were helping carry someone to his grave. But what was a registered Social Democrat doing with a dead lieutenant captain and a cortege of Storm Troopers? Erwin pretended he didn’t see Cresspahl, while Cresspahl joined in, adopting the appropriate dazed expression, and they trotted along to the Old Cemetery side by side in silence, every inch the mourners. Only when the procession turned onto Mittelallee did Erwin slip off down a side path, handkerchief raised to wipe something invisible off his face so that no one would particularly notice him. Cresspahl later found him in the farthest corner of the graveyard, behind a mausoleum wall, anxious, looking over his shoulder, whispering, not cheerful, not the jokester that Cresspahl had known for some twenty years. Erwin was waiting for someone. Not Cresspahl. Basically he was waiting for the police but hoping someone else would find him first.
So it was Cresspahl who rode back from the cemetery on the rear platform of the number 2 streetcar down Israelsdorf Allee across Klingenberg Square to Kronsforder Allee with Erwin’s envelopes. The address was on a street of town houses with elegantly plastered half-timbered beams or pretty Jugendstil brickwork. Behind the quiet curtains there was nothing more shocking than Marlene Dietrich in pants, nothing more urgent to do than see the talkie No Answer from F. P. 1 again, nothing more advisable than to hoist the black, white, and red flag up the pole, in heartfelt readiness to be agreeable to the state, so that any possible mistake might at least be counterbalanced by the sincerity of the effort. In one of these houses, in a room dark with velvet and mahogany, Cresspahl handed off the two passports, with visas to go abroad, that Erwin had given him. The people around the polished family table seemed to him to be playing school, but impatient, rushed, as if they knew there more urgent things to consider. Namely, the question of whether the Communists had started the Reichstag fire, or Hitler’s Storm Troopers had. Also, whether the Social Democrats could now ally themselves with the German Communist Party again and keep their dignity intact. For the Communist representatives from Mecklenburg—Warncke, Schröder, Quandt, Schuldt—were on the run; there was reason to fear that Ernst Thälmann might come knocking at the door next. Thälmann was reported to be on his way to Denmark. And yet the Communists had made a pact with the Nazis against the Social Democrats. Could those who had coined the slur “Social Fascists” ever be forgiven? Leading the discussion was a weak little runt of a man, his rectangular mustache held perfectly still beneath his nose, his shining bald skull tilted to the side as if he were asleep, but when he woke up he railed like a furious, merciless schoolteacher. Cresspahl didn’t stay to hear the end of the argument; he and two other men returned to the city, separately, on different streetcars, this time on line 1 via Ratzeburger Allee. On the way to the stop, the other two ranted something at him about The Lübeck Gazette. If you believed what it said there, Reichstag Representative Julius Leber had, one February morning, intervened in a fight on Grosse Burgstrasse between Brüggmann the Nazi and Rath the worker with the incitement: Stab ’im! Cresspahl’s travel companions were especially bitter that the bourgeois paper had failed to show proper respect toward a Reichstag representative (who was also the editor of the Social Democratic competitor, The Lübeck Herald). But after the publisher, Charles Coleman, had voluntarily thrown any Israelite cultural news out of the paper, allowed SA ads with swastikas, and promulgated biographies of Mussolini and Hitler, what else could they expect? And now it had gone so far as to print not only the police report on the burial of party comrade Brüggmann but also the NSDAP District Committee’s depiction of it. The ranting sounded timid, like disappointed hopes; Cresspahl seemed bored.
At Klingenberg he didn’t meet up with either of his companions and didn’t entirely mind, to be honest, since they hadn’t let him get a word in edgewise about his own distance from the SPD since 1922. After a while, he headed out to Beckergrube, the street where Erwin had said he’d wait for him, and sat in vain for a long time at a window looking out over the backyard in the parlor of an old woman who treated him like some teenage gang member just looking for trouble. Clearly she was used to
such visits. She spoke only Plattdeutsch. She made him eat a plaice fried in very little butter. Then she pleaded with him not to leave, in a downright gentle voice as though she hadn’t just been acting quarrelsome. She reminded him of his mother, and that made him laugh. Back outside, he noticed some drunks standing around strangely joyless and halfhearted. On Johannisstrasse, a crowd pushed him right up next to a fight that was just starting, three men casually shoving one another. After every shove they would walk another half a step farther, shoulders thrown back like swaggering children, until one of them blocked a punch to his upper arm with one hand and socked the attacker on the chin with the other. They were still arguing about the parade two weeks ago of the Reichsbanner, the Socialist veteran’s group, which the SA had blocked off the street to stop, claiming that shots had been fired, and also that someone had shouted an insult to Reich Chancellor Hitler; the two men left dead, though, were later identified as Reichs-banner members. (And last night, a Nazi parade had allegedly been shot at from the rooftops.) The policeman outside the Reichsbank faced strictly northward, and nothing he heard made him turn his head; clearly he was busy enforcing the renewed prohibition against tearing off twigs and pussy willows, either intentionally or accidentally. Toward evening, Cresspahl was walking down Schüsselbuden, and when he saw the consulate’s plaque at number 17 for His Great British Majesty George V, he had the feeling of two different realities and wished he were in only one. He was on his way to the station, by the Salt Depots, when Erwin caught up with him, now standing tall, like a man with great self-respect out for a stroll. He talked loudly about the Sunday excursion he had planned, on the Wakenitz by motorboat to Ratzeburg. But he couldn’t stop looking over his shoulder, and he was still waiting. Someone had come by his house around midday, asking for him. Cresspahl didn’t want to go back to his house with him, but at the station he found that there were no more trains to Gneez that night, never mind Jerichow, and when he knocked on Erwin’s door again he was arrested, just like that, the police sprang out from the dark hall and drove him to the station in the car that he had noticed right off as too fancy for a street like that. The police were prepared to bring him food in his cell in exchange for his money, the British inserts in his passports were good for that at least, but they didn’t know what else to do with this slow, dense piece of work who said he’d only wanted to make a little stopover in Lübeck, till the next train, and who sat on his stool so stiff and huddled up so tight that it was almost like he was afraid to get dirt from the walls on his black coat. Back then the Lübeck police still prided themselves on their cleanliness and they took this as some kind of insult. So they questioned him only the next morning, and still he refused to save himself by using his father-in-law’s social standing in Lübeck. He felt sure that the only thing that could help him was acting dumb. He insisted on seeing his friend Erwin Plath—he had stopped in Lübeck just to see him, and now time was running out, and he wanted to have done that at least. They finally brought Erwin in and put him in the other corner of the office. Erwin looked a little battered about the shoulders but now he was openly in high spirits, and sly, swinplietsch as they say in Mecklenburgish, as though at last the wait was over and what was happening wasn’t as bad as what he’d expected. The commissioner, in a scintillating mood after a good night’s sleep, launched into a lengthy interrogation, starting off craftily by asking how the two gentlemen knew each other, they were such good friends. At which, striking a military pose, Cresspahl gave a thunderous shout that yanked the stunned interrogator right up out of his swivel chair: Twenty-Fourth Holstein Artillery Regiment, Güstrow, Second Battalion! After the first syllable Erwin joined in, shouting in unison until the proper moment when Cresspahl left him room to add something: Fifth Battalion! Erwin said.
When they were sitting over breakfast in Gerda Plath’s kitchen, Erwin had started waiting again. – Who could that have been yesterday, around midday, that you sent me word of at the Hindenburg House: he brooded out loud, kneading the back of his neck. – It was someone who knew the signal, the two coat buttons: he said, looking past Cresspahl, who obviously couldn’t know. And Gerda involuntarily glanced at Cresspahl, who up until then had been acting clearly reserved around her, and they both realized at the same time that someone really had failed to turn up yesterday, someone who knew the signal as a signal. – ’E’s sittin right ere: she said, pointing an elbow at Cresspahl. They both watched Erwin’s face as delight defended itself against the other realization. Then he said, haltingly, in Plattdeutsch: What we need is a drink.
That morning, Friday, the third of March, 1933, Gesine Cresspahl was born in Jerichow.
October 21, 1967 Saturday
A Western correspondent witnessed three air raids, seven bombing waves, numerous isolated flights over the area by the Americans, and another eight alerts in the vicinity of Haiphong (Vietnam) on Tuesday; the day was described to him as normal. Tens of thousands of Chinese are working to restore rail and road communication with their own country. The New York Times gave detailed plans and possible alternate routes for the demonstration taking place in Washington today; protestors intended to occupy the Pentagon, for instance; further demonstrations in support are expected in London, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Bonn, and Copenhagen. In Mississippi, seven whites were found guilty in the murder of three young civil rights workers in 1964, among the seven was Cecil R. Price, the chief deputy sheriff who held the victims in Meridian County jail until the Ku Klux Klan could finish making its preparations, then released them, recaptured them on the highway, and handed them over to the lynch mob, which included Price himself (the bodies were found in the earthen dam of a small pond, buried with the aid of a bulldozer). Five of the convicted men are free and can read their life stories on page 18 of The New York Times.
Saturday, South Ferry day.
– So Cresspahl, your father, my grandfather: Marie says: didn’t get to Jerichow to see you until the afternoon of March 3, 1933.
– Not quite afternoon, but at the same time the leader of the Communist Party of Germany, Ernst Thälmann, let himself get caught and arrested in a small room on Lützow Street in Berlin. Without a ticket to Denmark on him.
– And Cresspahl wasn’t drunk.
– Not visibly. He’d helped Erwin Plath in Lübeck get through not only the morning but also a liter bottle of Doppel-Kümmel aquavit and half a case of beer, and Gerda Plath wouldn’t let him go until he’d done justice to her coffee. She wanted to send this Frau Cresspahl a sober husband. The man who arrived in Jerichow, walking upright and rather slowly down Station Street and under Papenbrock’s first sixteen windows, was as wide awake and alert a drunk as you can imagine.
– So he must have been in a good mood: Marie says.
– A blind man seeing everything, retaining nothing. A deaf man who heard a cat run by without understanding what the sound meant. Jerichow seemed very loud. There was music on Market Square. There were more people on the square than he thought lived in the whole town. Papenbrock’s door onto the square was locked.
– No one had told him anything.
– He seemed to remember reading The Gneez Daily News on the train. He didn’t think he’d seen any birth notice for Cresspahl. He walked back to Station Street and found Papenbrock’s gate in the high brick wall and a door to the house. In the warm hall, behind all the brown doors, it was quiet. The silence closed in around him and made his ears hum like when you’re underwater.
– D. E. says that happens to him?
– He didn’t find his wife upstairs, off the hallway where Papenbrock had put the rooms for his children. He padded back down to the front door and left his bag outside, in the middle of the path. The bag was meant to say on his behalf: It was a long trip. Delays sometimes happen on trips.
– Families like that take afternoon naps: Marie says.
– Lisbeth was sleeping nestled in her hair in the room above Papenbrock’s office, which only a week ago had been a sitting room. She slept prop
ped up on several other pillows, mouth open, breathing laboriously in the overheated air, installed among the stately formal furniture as though on her deathbed.
– Now the baby.
– The baby lay in a rustic cradle against the wall between the two windows looking out on the market. The baby was wedged in, packed tight in eiderdown. The baby was asleep on her right ear, between two loosely clenched fists. You could see her breathing but not smell her breath. Her chin still stuck out, the forehead receding sharply below the few dark hairs. She was a healthy baby girl with fully formed fingernails, reddish and blue skin, only a few tiny crow’s-feet around her eyes.
– You can’t know that about yourself: Marie says, as a statement of fact, not an objection.
– I know it about you.
– I’m not like you.
– In July 1957 you were.
– I wish you’d tell the story how it would have been told to you: Marie says.
– I was told that no one even noticed Cresspahl. Suddenly the house woke up and sent one ambassador after another in to see the two sleepers. Mama Laabs, the county midwife, came. Louise Papenbrock came, with hot-water bottles for the baby. The servants came, the cook, the maids, the coachman, the workmen, to offer their congratulations. Edith brought her two children with her and proved to them that the stork had brought the new baby, because look, at the foot of the cradle he had also left some Lübeck marzipan in two gold paper wrappers. Edith of all people. Albert Papenbrock came in, the grandfather, in stocking feet, bringing the best tray with tea the way Lisbeth had learned to make it in Richmond. They didn’t have much use for this guy by the north window. Louise Papenbrock nodded at him, contented, imperious, her revenge postponed. To the people who came up from the stable and the granary he seemed appropriately dazed. Edith’s children curtsied and looked him in the eye until he coughed up a sixpence. Albert was the only one to put his arm around his shoulders and say something to him with a chuckle, maybe he was trying to laugh, and then he dragged him almost affectionately into the next room and sat him down in front of a bottle of Rotspon and drank a glass with him, keeping the same puckered-up look on his face, like a child needing consolation. But before that, Dr. Berling came too and clapped Cresspahl on the shoulder.