Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Erdamer’s colleagues in the senate of the Free Hanseatic City of Lübeck had shown him the way: the ones from the Social Democratic Party had stepped down, even though the Reichstag election had nothing at all to do with the makeup of the local government. It was unconstitutional. It was against the law. And he’d spent his whole life in small towns. He no longer had a chance at a ministerial position in Schwerin. In Jerichow, his daughter was losing a friend, this Lisbeth Papenbrock with her Cresspahl in England. He was losing control over, and responsibility for, the knife fights in the villages, the nightly exchanges of gunfire between Reichsbanner members and the SA auxiliary police. He was losing the weekly wrangles with the Nazis in the city council over Semig the Jew. He was losing the people who had waited until eleven o’clock on Sunday night by Johs. Schmidt’s loudspeakers for the election results, enjoying the warm air, practically drunk on each new vote count. They were acting like not only the police but the tax office was about to be abolished. He had been unable to reach anyone on the phone in the Schwerin party office, or even in Gneez. That afternoon, when he called the city council meeting to order, he had not yet decided. Then the Jerichow Social Democrats resigned: Upahl, Stoffregen, Piep, Piepenbrink. Even Stoffregen. Kleineschulte with his Hugenberg Party stayed; Kleineschulte said he’d come see him that night to explain himself. It was not prearranged that he would throw Kleineschulte out. Erdamer was now forty-three years old. When he stood up, his shoulders fell quite naturally into the bearing of an officer. He held his chin so high that he couldn’t see anyone who was sitting down. He felt the brief, then lowered glances at his gaunt head, close-cropped all around, at his eyes almost blind with strain, at the contemptuous twitching of the corner of his mouth, and he was sure they were watching not without concern as he walked out the door.

  From the top of the town hall steps, he saw Cresspahl approaching across the market square, Papenbrock’s son-in-law, clearly wanting to register his child, the child to whose health he had just drunk on Saturday. He decided not to tell him that the registrar was taking minutes at the council meeting and thus unavailable, and then, as he started walking away, a rather haughty upright man in riding boots under a long coat, no further decision was guiding his footsteps. He passed between the two sentries without seeing them (otherwise he could have greeted them by first name), he was through them before they managed to turn Horst Papenbrock’s now truly uncertain command into a lopsided present-arms maneuver, he was past Cresspahl without having acknowledged him, and Cresspahl stood there, stopped in three different tracks at once—saying good day, expressing indignation at Horst, and taking a first half step to follow Erdamer—stopped in the middle of Market Square, in full view of the bystanders, baffled, openmouthed, with an expression on his face both deaf and listening, like a trapped rabbit waiting for the blow not a breath away from its neck.

  Shut up, Gesine. Shut yer mouth.

  October 27, 1967 Friday

  is the day on which The New York Times reports the following: People tend to forget things associated with unpleasant experiences.

  This has been proven to The New York Times by means of an experiment two Princeton researchers conducted on sixteen undergraduates. The subjects were volunteers who did not know the objective of the study. First, they were taught a language of ten three-letter nonsense syllables and English-word equivalents for each, for example MEMORY (mental images, recall, retention, etc.) for DAX. Then they were given a second list with ten other English words subliminally associated with the words of the first list. The vocabulary of the second list, like the contents of the first list, was projected on a screen, only this time some of the words were presented simultaneously with an electric shock to the volunteer’s hand. The shock created a bridge across the associations to the corresponding made-up word from the first list and incinerated the nexus, while the pain-free correspondences remained in the students’ minds. That’s the proof. QED. If you don’t believe it, that’ll be ten cents. The New York Times costs ten cents. There it sits next to us, on the visitor’s chair, so eager it’s on the edge of its seat, hat askew, and it talks and talks and keeps us from our work.

  Giving the customers what they want, Gesine.

  The latest news of Science.

  It’s relevant for your problems too, Gesine. You’re interested in how forgetting works.

  How remembering works.

  All these years we’ve just lived our lives and taken it for granted.

  And now at last two men show up in Princeton and lay it all out for us. That they’ve proven it.

  They say they’ve proven it.

  They have proven it, Gesine.

  What was it that they decided they had to prove?

  Common knowledge.

  “I remember things I don’t care about”?

  No. “Painful things get forgotten.”

  Why is this superstition worth an experiment?

  So that we can make use of it, should the need arise.

  Which forgetting do they mean, then? Vienna-style, London-style, Chicago-style?

  Simple obliteration, Gesine. The annihilation of what had been known.

  Make use of it for political purposes?

  No ethical person would . . .

  But Science would, definitely.

  For the time being, Science has only observed a learning process.

  In no more than sixteen people.

  Who are volunteers, so above suspicion.

  So not even chosen for their ability to remember, or to forget.

  Who are unsuspecting, so they constitute convincing evidence.

  So they also have no motivation to remember or forget.

  Yes they do. A couple of dollars.

  People to whom the learning process itself offers only modest pleasure or profit.

  At least they’re all the same age.

  A Granny Prüss would’ve not only remembered the electric shock but dug around in her mind for the reason behind it. Granny Prüss holds a grudge.

  A learning process culminates in one of two genuine alternatives.

  With a shock you forget, with bodily comfort you retain. What a crap choice.

  But reasonable.

  As reasonable as the cow who gets shock after shock from an electrified fence. The cow just can’t learn.

  With your cows, the shock is what they’re supposed to learn, Gesine.

  And with people, forgetting is supposed to be transferrable, or what?

  It’s indirect, don’t you understand?

  With just ten word pairs.

  Still.

  All with a breaking point in the same place, prepared in advance.

  The breaking is real, Gesine. It’s still real.

  An arbitrary grouping of thirty letters into clusters of three, that’s what The New York Times calls “a language.”

  As does Science, Gesine. The Times is strictly following Science.

  A language of unrelated words?

  I’m sure that Science has its well-considered reasons.

  Learning a language involves using what you’ve learned.

  In that case, forgetting would be too hard.

  That’s what makes it worth anything.

  The experiment was not about semantics, Gesine.

  And they gave it no time to mature in the memory.

  The existence of a forgetting has been proven.

  But no one had any desire to retain this useless vocabulary in the first place.

  Everyone was given the same democratic choice between retaining something and forgetting it.

  A blind reaction.

  An automatic reaction.

  The alternatives weren’t evenly balanced; they tipped the scale with pain on one side.

  And the burdened alternative was destroyed.

  And there you have it.

  What we have, Gesine, is a functional model of the finest behavioristic provenance.

  Bioveristic?

  Don’t be rude, Gesi
ne. The New York Times pronounces her words loud and clear.

  Science knows best.

  Right you are, Gesine. Where would we be without Science. Where would the USA be without its scientists.

  Who prove an experiment with an experiment.

  And prove that pain is linked to memory, whether positively or negatively.

  Somehow.

  It’s “unambiguous,” Gesine. The gentlemen say so themselves.

  And Auntie Times protects herself with quotation marks.

  Quotation marks prove that the words someone has said are being reliably repeated.

  But words were just incinerated, weren’t they?

  Just words, Gesine. No one was hurt.

  What if another newspaper spelled the word “words” with the letters t, h, i, n, g, s?

  That would be inexcusable, misleading the reader, a sin against the spirit of journalism, unforgivable for all eternity.

  And why does The New York Times do this?

  All the better to catch you with, my dears.

  My, what big teeth you have.

  October 28, 1967 Saturday

  John Sidney McCain III, for example, was shot down over Hanoi. He’d survived the fire on the USS Forrestal aircraft carrier in July. After seeing (his words): “what the bombs and napalm did to the people on our ship, I’m not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam.” But he did it anyway, and now Radio Hanoi has reported his capture.

  The Soviets have an asset in Great Britain, a married couple of spies, Helen and Peter Kroger, sentenced to prison until 1981. The British have someone of their own, Gerald Brooke, allegedly in a Soviet labor camp until 1970. The Soviets want to trade. The British say no deal.

  Yesterday afternoon in a student dorm in Brooklyn, the same dorm where on Thursday night one co-ed had already been raped and another one robbed, a man pushed a student into her apartment and put a wire around her neck . . . She fought him off.

  DAX, friend of MEMORY, has been murdered by GRANNY. The old lady used an electric shock, conducted through MEMORY into DAX. MEMORY is said to be doing well; all that’s left of DAX is a charred black spot.

  The news is from yesterday, and still not forgotten. This procedure aimed to reveal the theoretical underpinning of a real process. We were supposed to be able to transplant it into reality. Something gets lost in the repotting, the circumstances are changed, but still, the plant ought to be recognizable. So, Comrade Writer, give me ten words.

  PLISCH

  PLUM

  SCHMULCHEN

  SCHIEVELBEINER

  ROOSEVELT

  CHURCHILL

  BOLSHEVIK

  WORLDWIDE-JEWISH-CONSPIRACY

  SUBHUMAN

  BRAINIAC

  These are words Gesine Cresspahl knew at age seven. They are not pathogen-free, not synthetic substances. Now artificial units, like DAX for MEMORY or CEF for STEM (root, shaft, stalk), offer the imagination a not entirely cold shoulder: some combinations are neutral, some ominous, some appealing. The words from PLISCH to BRAINIAC are like DAX and CEF in one important way: their unreality. Like the three-letter words for the Princeton students, these words for a seven-year-old child in small-town Mecklenburg circa 1940 were not real, not actual, they were fictive things. One might have meant dog, or puppy, but the dogs in Jerichow were different. One might have meant whiskey, or cigar, but there was no whiskey, and cigars were rationed, that is to say, tangible enough to take on an entirely different reality through their absence. These words came from children’s books, or newspapers, or matters that grown-ups let slip. They were playthings.

  The Princeton experiment wouldn’t have chosen words from only one semantic cluster, would it? No, and the child in Jerichow, when she learned PLUM and CHURCHILL, had no idea of the connection between those words either. The connection was just an impression, vaguely felt, in any case not without danger. The picture book was locked away at night. Talk about THE JEW turned shamefaced somehow, with a kind of premonition. But there weren’t any in Jerichow. I didn’t know it about Dr. Semig. It was impossible to incorporate the words into the day-to-day life of the town. They were not words at all, only sonic receptacles for content not belonging to them, slippery mixtures creeping around within the walls of the letters as vague blobs—spreading out, balling up, soft, wiggly, ungraspable. These words were so unreal that they should have gone around only in quotation marks: instead of DAX, “SCHMULCHEN.”

  So: “PLISCH,” “PLUM,” “SCHMULCHEN” . . . —those ten are the first group. And, just as unreal letter clusters were chosen for the Princeton students (instead of RAILROAD or GARTER BELT, the forgetting of which would have meant an irreplaceable loss), it wouldn’t much matter if anything happened to “BOLSHEVIK.”

  The second group, linked to the nonsense syllables by correspondences imposed by reason not animated from within, is: PLISCH, PLUM, SCHMUL-CHEN, SCHIEVELBEINER, ROOSEVELT. . .

  Just as any interaction between CEF and STEM can only be forced, so too “PLISCH” has nothing to say to PLISCH, and “CHURCHILL” has never heard of CHURCHILL, and “SCHIEVELBEINER” did not even know enough about SCHIEVELBEINER to spread nasty rumors about him. Because Schievelbeiner the Jew in the children’s book, dancing in terror between the yapping dogs Plisch and Plum to the merry laughter of the German child and man looking on, is not Schievelbeiner the actual person, who bears his name as a name and not out of Austrian spite. That actual person is perfectly capable of defending himself against a couple of misbehaving mutts. The “whiskey-guzzling Churchill with the cigar in his maw and a machine gun in his hand” was one thing—invented, imagined, unreal, “Judaized.” The other one was a living English person, male, first name Winston, middle initial S., with a last name invoking a place of Christian worship that was sick, but only in the idle mental games of a schoolgirl learning her first foreign language. Likewise, the “SUBHUMAN” lived on, faceless and without prospects, alongside the imaginable and real human being who found himself in a subordinated position. The same words not in quotes in the second group are the content, the new material to be learned—irreconcilable with the first group, lacking any spontaneous, mutual understanding; battling for sole rule, bent on the other’s destruction, forced into having any relationship with the other at all. This, too, we learned, and like experimental subjects we didn’t know why.

  We can also confirm the existence of a functioning method of administering a shock that produces a guaranteed effect.

  The means of administering the shock: a photograph the British took in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and printed in the newspaper they authorized in Lübeck after the war.

  The effect has not ceased to this day. It affected me as an individual: I am the child of a father who knew about the systematic murder of the Jews. It affected my group: I may have been twelve years old at the time, but I belong to a national group that massacred an excessive number of members of another group (to a child even the spectacle of a single victim would have been excessive). The shock can be proven to have been effective, the evidence being a range of hamstrung reactions. Miss Cresspahl, student in Halle in 1952, could endure a Professor Ertzenberger’s lectures only as long as she could block out of her mind the fact that he was one of the surviving Jews. (By that point, Jews dependably appeared in the German language only in the plural, not in the singular with a definite article.) She lost all trust in the East German republic solely because it seemed prepared to perpetuate Stalin’s crackdown on the January 1953 “doctors’ plot,” thereby breaking an anti-Fascist more-or-less promise. Cresspahl the tourist subjected those around her to her miserable French in every foreign country, even where the Germans weren’t proven perpetrators of kidnappings or murdering hostages. Cresspahl the immigrant warily, abruptly turned and walked out of a diner near Union Square in New York when she recognized the owners’ language as Yiddish. The shock’s effectiveness is proven.