Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  At Princeton, the pain introduced along with the projection of the word GRANNY crept into the word MEMORY through secret tunnels and leaped from there across to its other identity, DAX, burning the bridge behind it. DAX alias memory was forgotten.

  Maybe the word SLENDER appeared unaccompanied by an electric shock, so STEM could live on for a while with its companion, CEF. In the Mecklenburg experiment, though, every one of the corresponding trigger words came with shocks:

  RACE-

  BAITING

  SAMUEL

  DEFAMATION

  US PRESIDENT

  BRITISH PRIME MINISTER

  TAKEOVER OF POWER

  GENOCIDE

  VICTIM

  TALKING HORSE

  and they didn’t extinguish “PLISCH,” and not “PLUM” either. While washing my hands, while driving a car, from out of nowhere, the rhymes from the children’s book by the great German anti-Semite Wilhelm Busch come flooding back into consciousness, complete with his drawings and the enchantment of a child circa 1940:

  There goes Schmulchen Schivelbeiner.

  Surely ours is so much finer.

  There he goes with crooked nose,

  We like ours much more than those.

  Oh, woe is me!

  When Roosevelt comes to mind, the justification keeps popping up that he wasn’t in fact the head of the Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy; our mourning for Churchill’s death grew out of a desire to contradict Fascist propaganda; the Nazi use of the word “BOLSHEVIK” ultimately served to immunize us against postwar bourgeois warnings about the export of Socialism from the Soviet Union. “WORLDWIDE JEWISH CONSPIRACY” and “SUBHUMAN” have survived, but only as symptoms letting us diagnose anyone who speaks those words as a Fascist. And the talking horse, the “BRAINIAC,” lives on as an inverted prejudice, a double-edged compliment for intellectuals whether Jewish or Muslim. Nothing has been forgotten. It has taken root. It doesn’t pop up during conversations with Jewish people, it doesn’t dare emerge from memory at the sight of Jewish newspapers on Broadway, but it’s there, extant, retained. These words were, just like CEF and DAX, the weakest links in the chain, sensitive to pressure, fragile, perishable, the way a child can learn them and not see them, not use them, not grasp them, not have them.

  Maybe we’re wrong? Maybe the reason the Fascist garbage is lodged so firmly in memory is that the schools in the Soviet occupation zone in Germany spent so much time publicizing the . . . the things the Germans as National Socialists had done to the Jews?

  No. The schools explained these . . . things to us as predictable symptoms of the decline of capitalism in its most highly developed phase, imperialism. Yet these same lessons gave us ways to understand that what had produced the attempted “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” was not realpolitik or some economic mechanism but the German variety of madness. (And the schools soon started using the same categories they’d initially labeled as reprehensible: a “Churchill” who was “following the City’s orders,” a “Roosevelt” who’d been a “pawn in the hands of the business interests.”) If the schools had had their way, we would have forgotten “Plisch” and “Plum” altogether. And it was the experimental subject’s own efforts, it turns out, that produced the strongest electric shock: when she learned that there’d once been a city in Pommern named Schivelbein; when she discovered that a prophet and judge of Israel lay hidden behind “Schmulchen.” The shock was enough to create: the wish to forget, the having of nightmares, the blind futile struggle of the sleeper to defend herself against something that would never entirely disappear upon any awakening.

  – Saturday! Marie says. – Tag der South Ferry! she says: South Ferry day.

  October 29, 1967 Sunday, end of Daylight Saving Time

  On Fifty-Third Street near Fifth Avenue yesterday, at around noon, actors handed a woman on the street a red plastic water gun, pushed her into a circle, and told her to shoot a young boy who they said was a member of the Vietcong. The woman, a twenty-year-old German visiting the city, aimed her weapon straight at the boy and pulled the trigger. The boy fell back and lay sprawled on the pavement. When the actors who were mingled with the onlookers disappeared, and for some time afterward, Miss Gritli Kux still didn’t know what had happened.

  The Protestant church in Jerichow, to which Cresspahl paid a visit to register the birth of his child, was still Pastor Methling’s church; he had been in Jerichow so long, making himself seen, felt, heard.

  Seen, as a man almost six and a half feet tall, some two hundred and twenty-five pounds, in a cassock wide enough around his belly but too short at the ankles so that clayey boots often showed under his black gown as he strode down Town Street, head held high on his way to house visits, head lowered behind Swenson’s hearse, and just as his flock wanted to take him down a peg in the former case, they didn’t believe his show of humility in the latter. Because he was a shouter. In the fall of 1927, when he was brought in by Provost Swantenius, they had expected a battle-weary shepherd of souls, relegated to a small town to serve out his time on his way to a pension, barely diligent enough to handle the holiday decorations. But the new pastor had no truck with mildness. On the contrary. Nor with the custom of requesting church services for ceremonial occasions solely to ensure that the wedding or birth lacked for nothing (“everything done properly”). He went to people’s houses uninvited, no one even had to be sick, and took a seat so assertively that only someone like Peter Wulff dared refuse him hospitality. And he brought the church into holidays his predecessor had observed in private: the anniversary of the founding of the German Reich, the Kaiser’s birthday, the commemoration of the Battle of Tannenberg. He started a parish paper, A Ramble Around St. Peter’s, and didn’t let it be bought by the issue: only full subscriptions, to those who donated. It only took a few straight Sundays of preaching (or, Ottje Stoffregen’s word, “raging”) about “hardness of heart,” with special reference to Jerichow, and Maass on Market Square got his money to print the paper, and additional work too, posters. Though boys as young as ten were put to work in Jerichow, the pastor started an Iron Ring group and kept the children in it with badges and exercises in full regalia; he may have not let them join political groups but the populist young brotherhood did have to wear uniforms to their meetings, and their motto was “Grab on—Hold tight,” which definitely didn’t mean that a German should let go of anything that was his, whether things or thoughts. Pastor Methling, chin politely raised, showed his hard-boiled egg of a head with a tiny little face attached to the front in family photos and in The Gneez Daily News, for he was especially proud of its pronounced features, regarding them as authentically Mecklenburgish and Low German. No less so was the language he spoke before the city council, whose deliberations now suddenly had to take the “interests of the church” into account—the councilmen had barely realized such things existed before. The nobility, who had summoned the new pastor to come introduce himself when he first arrived in Jerichow, then couldn’t get rid of him, and when he greeted, say, Baroness von Plessen on the street, it was not to claim equality—as when, for instance, old Papenbrock did it—but instead an act of unmistakable condescension, bringing his hand to the brim of his hat very slowly and tipping it back with an excessively solemn turn of the wrist, and if Louise Papenbrock might have taken Methling’s superior knowledge of the Bible as sufficient excuse for such behavior, Estate Holder Kleineschulte must have understood it rather differently, for he ceased to brandish his hat before Pastor Methling, preferring instead his whip.

  He made himself felt. He started by asking the congregation not to hang their hats and caps on the ends of the pews during services; he proceeded by demanding that women who had just given birth give thanks for their recovery by going to church; he prevailed by requiring, through an order of the parish council, Gothic lettering (not Roman) on gravestones, so that a German could be a real German, even when moldering. If the mother of an illegitimate child didn’t come voluntarily, he might
go to the manager of the estate, find out enough about the girl’s case to mortify her completely, then have her summoned to a meeting that inevitably ended in tears. Methfessel the butcher had wanted to pay for his son’s christening with only the fee, not the recitation of the promise to raise this new addition to the human race in a Christian spirit and urge him to Christian deeds; the pastor refused, and Methfessel caved, and he was hardly the only one to do so. They put up with Methling’s jovial behavior because it brought him, if not exactly into the nobility, at least to a somewhat comparable elevation. Then again, his familiarities, his rigidities, his windbaggery at patriotic proclamations also invited retaliation. Picking a fight with him might cost money but could be fun. No one had ever been able to catch him out with a girl. That he liked a drink or two was something he was only too ready to admit himself, there was no point filing a complaint with the Gneez superintendent’s office about that. But even that dirt on his boots, meant as an ostentatious sign of Jerichow’s rural circumstances, was good for a shake of the head or a bit of a laugh—for someone well past sixty to let himself go like that! And they’d put one over on him once, on Reformation Day in 1931, when the guildsmen did not, as he’d wanted, come to church in top hats to protest the construction of a Catholic church but rather welcomed the income that would come from the contracts. It was felt around town that only Papenbrock could stand up to Methling; when he’d let his younger daughter work for Methling, he must have gotten something in return, even if what that might have been remained unclear for the time being.

  And Pastor Methling made himself heard. Alas, he had something troubling him. Was it a competitor? Even an enemy, perhaps? He sometimes called it a godless element, and the Communist Party might come to his listeners’ minds. In the spring of 1932, they discovered their mistake. Methling preached about choosing children’s names and warned against those of Jewish-Greek derivation, although the Plattdeutsch accent in his booming bass voice had faded a bit in his seventeen years of service on the border of Brandenburg. Methling, a paying member of every local historical association in Mecklenburg, preached from the pulpit about the clamor among the people for racially pure marriages, and pronounced that clamor justified. Below the pulpit sat Methling’s wife: short, slight, noticeably older than him, so intimidated her gaze was almost dumbstruck, her shiny black hair done up in a bun, childless, surrounded on the street by crowds of children, and not of Methling’s race. Race, in Methling’s view, was an earthly barrier that would be overcome in heaven; he wanted to respect the Jews and love them and convert them to the true faith—but not be ruled by them (that wouldn’t be Christian). He accused the Jews of greed for money; the congregation reflected on how Methling preferred to be paid in cash for performing his church duties. Dr. Semig had given discounts often enough. Methling spoke of the Jewish indifference to the ideal of the nation, but he had been home in the fatherland preaching while Semig was fighting in the trenches. He didn’t mean Semig, no, not Semig, he didn’t mean Tannebaum the clothier on Short Street either—although he’d allow them to buy graves in his cemetery only with a 100 percent surcharge—he meant national character, Teutonic heritage, racial honor. Now Semig no longer showed his face on the street, no longer went to the City of Hamburg Hotel. Now Semig stayed home, next to a telephone that never rang, in front of a calendar that even in December had still had appointments in it but now was almost empty.

  Wilhelm Methling was still in Jerichow, even though he’d come into a nice house in Gneez after he retired. From Gneez he continued to edit his rambles around the spire of St. Peter’s Church, with the help of Stoffregen the teacher. Stoffregen wrote little local-history essays about places around Jerichow; he published funny things children had said that people sent in, and family news, and photos of the windmills still standing in the area; meanwhile Methling sat in Gneez and wrote about trees—trees in folk songs, in legend, on the country road if necessary, and from every last one he managed a transition to family trees, bloodlines, Staemmler’s draft laws against racial mixing, marriage prohibitions, genealogical research (q.v. Jesus’s family tree in the book of Luke)—and now he wanted money for a job he used to perform for the honor of it. And it was Methling, at a town meeting in Gneez, who worded the congratulatory telegram to the new chancellor of the Reich, and in The Gneez Daily News there was a photo of him reading it: an old man full of childlike joy at seeing the goal of his life not bypassed by history but in power; a big shining Mecklenburg egg of a head, somewhat flat on the top and slightly squeezed and wrinkly at the sides.

  Here was where Cresspahl wanted to register the birth of his child.

  Standing outside the pastor’s house, he saw the nameplate for the new pastor, Brüshaver, and remembered. The front door was locked. Cresspahl went around the side of the house, across the muddy entrance to Creutz’s garden, but the gate to the pastor’s yard was locked, and no one was moving behind the windows’ red reflections.

  Here, at the northern end of our neighborhood, stands the Church of St. John the Divine, the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, three blocks wide, from 111th St. to 113th St. on Amsterdam Avenue, begun in 1892, no further construction since 1941, unfinished, without the planned central dome and the two west towers. We’ve always called it the Cathedral of St. John the Unfinished. Now it shall remain so: as long as Horace W. B. Donegan is the bishop of New York; until the suffering of the disadvantaged citizens in the surrounding slums has been ameliorated. Those are two different dates.

  – I don’t understand: Marie says. – How can I have gained an hour just by changing the clocks?

  – Because you had an hour less sleep on April 30. Daylight saving time got you out of bed too early.

  – But if I don’t remember it, is it still real?

  October 30, 1967 Monday

  Once again Mr. George Gallup has turned to the nation. This time with the question: What would you say to handing the war over by stages to the South Vietnamese? Out of every hundred respondents, nine had no idea and twenty were opposed. It sounded like a good idea to the other seventy-one.

  Yesterday, in East Berlin, the East German and Soviet armies paraded tanks, heavy artillery, ground-to-ground rockets, antitank rockets, and antiaircraft rockets. The television commentary from an East German military expert described the tanks as “capable of operating in areas contaminated by nuclear explosions.”

  The first noise was the slapping of the elevator cables. As though the chains were beating against the walls of the shaft.

  Above Riverside Park, a brightly colored bird gave off a swishing swinging sound. Then it lifted its tail and hung in the wind over the Hudson and cried arr-arr. It was not an ABC TV copter, sir, it was your escaped electric razor, whose motor has had just about enough of its casing.

  Then you can talk to me all you want about recessed roller friction: the subway trains lumber, the compressed-air opening of the doors is a human exhalation, even if only the waiting passengers make them that. Inside, as the train stops, all the overhead handholds jolt lightly back against their springs; the passengers start moving their hands and elbows, pulling newspapers, handbags, shopping bags close; everyone turns to face the car doors, hoping that today, as on every other day, the doors will obey their valves and roll aside, half into one wall, half into the other.

  The car horns are tuned to a single note, but one modulated as the sound ricochets down brick and concrete channels, sideways, under bridges, upwards. The police sirens are almost an element of the air, adjustable from a polite whimper to the howl of berserkers. They are followed by the cars with beds for the dead.

  Desperate shrieking of rails under Park Avenue in the Forties. The approach to Grand Central is the neck of the bottle that the police often use to describe traffic. Who wants to keep seeing all those trains under their feet? Are they anything more than a monument?

  In the elevator, the buttons, soft receptacles for pressure, yield with a secret click when touched, as though in response
to a good deed, and express their thanks with a yellow glow.

  When the thermostats mandate a pause in the blowing of the air conditioners, everybody dies a little, because something they’re used to is gone and they can’t quite put their finger on what it was. Yet for a little while the ribs of the machine spew out absolutely no more cold air. As though someone would never breathe again.

  The coins dance happily in the head of the coin counter that keeps bus drivers from one kind of dishonesty. And the nickels that the driver releases as change from a quarter sound fatter since the fare hike; now I can hear the silver in the dimes I used to get back.

  The hospitable clatter of cheap silverware on the dining counters, the slapping down of the bill with what is almost a blow of the fist, and the plate placed with nearly sisterly attentiveness: There you go, darling.

  And again the machines contentedly gulping subway token after subway token on behalf of the Transit Authority, down throats grinding with pleasure that the riders set chewing inside the three-armed turnstiles up to five times per minute, maybe six times a minute, that would be some sixteen hundred an hour in the four lanes, that’s too many, and yet there are more than that. And again the heavy rumbling noise, audible through all the sways and jolts and braking processes, which betrays the excessive weight of the payload and reflects it in the base of the skull as a feeling of almost dangerous pressure.

  In the bar the man behind the counter puts down your glass with an uneven sound, and the other half of the base of the glass follows quick as an afterthought. Hesitantly perhaps he scoops up the coins placed on the counter and lets the prepared selection of three coins skip between two fingers against the countertop before ringing them up, after three inaudible steps to the register, by pressing on three keys, which snap into place and echo for some customers with the violence of thunderclaps, and like fate itself is the rough blow of the side of the hand slapping shut the drawer that has sprung out from the base. Sir.