by Uwe Johnson
She could have reassured him about the Tannebaums on Short Street. They’d had a much less exciting time of it than the Jews in the stories that kept coming out of Wismar and Schwerin and reaching Jerichow. The Nazi District Committee in Gneez had stationed out-of-town Storm Troopers outside Jewish shops in Jerichow, like elsewhere in their domain: otherwise the sentries, with friends or relatives talking to them, might have gone soft. District Committee Chief Prause was not very familiar with rural areas. Long before second breakfast at midmorning, it was already all over Jerichow that Ossi Rahn and Max Breitsprecher were stationed in front of Oskar Tannebaum’s Work Pants and Milking Aprons like an honor guard, and after a while there was indeed a semicircle of rubberneckers standing around them, just wanting to verify the rumor with their own eyes. Breitsprecher, a Gneez saddler, was unhappy about it. First of all, he didn’t like standing next to Ossi Rahn in public. Ossi Rahn was so well known in the Gneez courts that he no longer had to give his name and personal information when he was brought in yet again for assault or nonpayment of alimony. Ossi Rahn called himself unemployed; Breitsprecher wouldn’t have hired him to sweep his yard. Ossi Rahn had been living in a vagrants’ settlement on the outskirts of Gneez since 1930; still, he had money when he went to the bars, and he’d had the SA take up a collection for his boots. Secondly, Max Breitsprecher had joined the Nazi Party as the owner of a small business, to whom it was promised that the power of the wholesalers and department store chains would be broken; now here he was standing with this fine Ossi outside Tannebaum’s store, depriving not only another small business owner but also himself of Jerichow customers. After a few hours he let Ossi wander the sidewalk alone with his slogans to the Germans, telling them to defend themselves and not buy from the Jew. When Breitsprecher came back out of the store, the shade on the door went down with a note pinned to it: CLOSED FOR THE WEEKEND. Ossi Rahn tried to refuse an order. Ossi Rahn was chewed out in front of the assembled civilian citizens. Max Breitsprecher walked through the crowd alone, somewhat dazed, incredulous at first when Pahl said something to him, then greatly relieved. (Pahl said: Nice material, that uniform. Custom-made it’d look even better on ya.)
Lisbeth Cresspahl could have written to her husband that Oskar Tannebaum had reopened his store on Monday morning, and business was exactly as bad as it always was, but then she would have had to write what had happened to her sister during the Jew boycott. There was a relative of Tannebaum’s in Gneez who was more scared, and he’d marked down everything in his store to get as much money as he could fast, to flee. A used fur coat was in the window that Hilde Paepcke could not resist. It was a steal even for Gneez, and in Krakow she could pass it off as bought in Berlin. A Papenbrock daughter doesn’t let some people in uniform, shouting rhymes about this and that and waving cardboard signs, stop her from shopping. Inside, under this other old Tannebaum’s nervous chatter, she lost the courage to actually buy the fur coat. Outside, she was met with a chorus of voices calling her a traitor to the German people. That by itself wouldn’t have bothered her. But one of the SA sentries also seemed to be taking her picture. Now Hilde was afraid of old Papenbrock; her fear sent her back to Krakow, where her husband, Alexander, had already sold off a good portion of the equipment. Papenbrock had started by bellowing in fury over possibly ending up in the newspaper for an impropriety, and at a time when he didn’t yet want to show the new government his true colors. In the end, though, he was mad at Hilde only for not having trusted him, and he didn’t even need to take the trouble to talk The Gneez Daily News out of publishing the picture, but Lisbeth Cresspahl didn’t want to put that in a letter to England.
As for the rest of April 1 in Jerichow, she hoped she’d never have to even talk to Cresspahl about what happened then. For Ossi Rahn, instead of heading back to Gneez, had marched to Jerichow’s local Nazi headquarters. He’d not only denounced his superior, Breitsprecher, to Griem as a coward and Jew-friendly in the line of duty; he’d proposed the notion that a veterinarian’s practice was not entirely unlike a business. Griem cleared four people to march to Dr. Semig’s property with Ossi. Griem would have recognized the Rammin carriage and pair in the courtyard and withdrawn; Ossi Rahn couldn’t tell one horse from another, and Ossi Rahn posted guards outside Semig’s gate.
Baron von Rammin left Semig’s office down the garden steps; he hadn’t really noticed the racket from outside the house. In truth he was so angry he could barely see straight. A few weeks previously, a good friend of his from Austria, Count Nagel, Beatus Nagel, had written to him for a German medicine to treat canine aurock and he, von Rammin, had copied out from the letter what Beatus had heard from his veterinarian and passed the request along to Dr. Semig by postcard. Dr. Semig had called to confirm the symptoms of this dog in Austria, and von Rammin had described how Beatus’s Weimaraner couldn’t stop pitifully pressing its head against the ground. – Aha. Ear canal pain: Semig had determined, in his obnoxiously expert way, and he’d tracked down the medication the dog needed and ordered it from a provisioner in Württemberg and would presumably have sent it to the Beckhorst estate with his bill if von Rammin hadn’t found himself with something to do in Jerichow that Saturday anyway and, moreover, been curious what “aurock” could mean. Semig, with his usual obnoxious tact, had handed him the package without a fuss and not even blinked an eye when von Rammin had started asking his question regarding the outlandish name of the dog’s ailment and then broken off when he saw the word earache on the label. The baron had made it through the goodbyes passably enough, but when he clambered onto the coachman’s box in the carriage in Semig’s courtyard the feelings called up by the incident almost made him pass out. It didn’t matter that he didn’t breed dogs, only horses; thanks to Austrian pronunciation he had shown himself to be illiterate, if not an imbecile, in front of a university graduate (Jew or no Jew). He found it particularly intolerable that this Semig would never show the postcard around, the stuck-up prig, so honorable you could strangle him. Baron von Rammin’s horses, which he’d set moving in the direction of Dora’s vegetable garden, understood without the help of the reins that they would get out of this yard only with a half turn, and they accommodatingly pulled the carriage toward the exit. Baron von Rammin saw men in brown uniforms in the street, busy with an old woman who was refusing to hand over a basket tied shut with a cloth. Then they noticed the carriage and took up their post outside the gate. They shouted something. They distracted the horses. Now von Rammin’s baronial blood boiled up various words behind his brow, in a froth that almost blinded him—the humiliation brought on by the Austrian dialect, combined with the unsubmissive conduct of the vassals of that Austrian, Hitler, and with the Weimaraner dog breed mixed in with his rage at the Weimar Republic—and the two horses accepted the strange fact that this time they were supposed to run people over, and they galloped at full speed out into the street. Ossi’s subordinates saw what any child could have seen; they hurled themselves to either side. Ossi Rahn had once seen somewhere that you could stop a horse by grabbing it somewhere or other, but he didn’t remember where, and in its confusion von Rammin’s right-hand sorrel lashed out like any good-natured person would in self-defense. Then Ossi Rahn saw nothing more, a well-aimed lash of the whip having closed both his eyes. The witnesses later recalled the horrible crack that the whirling carriage wheel had made from banging against Semig’s cornerstone, and also testified that Ossi, lying on his side on the ground, was only making a fuss as if the carriage had run over his left leg. Baron von Rammin’s pair burst down the road between the quiet lawns of the Bäk like the embodiment of a thunderstorm, and slammed the carriage against the curbstone so hard as they tore around the corner of School Street that the carriage tipped up onto two wheels and quite some time passed before the other two landed back on the pavement. Then von Rammin had his horses back under control. During his ride back to Beckhorst he reflected on a face he had recognized among the onlookers. For he’d had two moments of clarity, one when he’d
caught Methfessel’s eye and the other when he’d lashed out at one of the faces that he’d always looked down into from up on his horse, with the sharply defined thought: Fall in, rabble! Back at home, he was calm enough for a letter to Beatus Nagel, about aurock and the Austrian nation from which he was hereby formally taking his leave.
Ossi Rahn was still on the ground when Dora Semig shut the gate with her own hands. He was holding his leg and whimpering. His subordinates helped him up and leaned him against Semig’s garden fence; they held him for only a very short time and stepped aside at once. Ossi Rahn slowly realized that he had lain in the dirt at Mrs. Semig’s feet. He wanted nothing less than to smash the Jew’s house to pieces. But no one there was paying any attention to him, they were all listening to Grandma Klug, who was brandishing her empty basket and screaming for her cat and expatiating in an inexhaustible whine about the why and the wherefore and the kind of people who steal cats, sick cats, cats walking on three legs, cats the last and best friends in the world to an old woman! Methfessel found the cat in a bush on the front lawn. It was a perfectly ordinary gray-and-black cat, with a lot of scratches and scrapes and a sore rear leg.
On Sunday the Semigs were invited to lunch by a family named von Plessen.
Methfessel the butcher lost three estates as customers within a week. He went around Jerichow swearing to anyone and everyone willing to hear it again that on the day of the boycott he had only taken the detour through the Bäk out of curiosity, the same as everyone else, that he’d only watched for a couple of minutes, the same as everyone else, that he’d only looked for the cat the same way anyone else would have done for an old woman. He hoped his protestations would make their way back to the ears of his insulted customers. This they did not do. Methfessel went back to serving in the butcher shop himself. Then business in the shop fell off. He didn’t know what to do: If he took up the brown uniform he would have a stable clientele too small to live on. A public apology in The Gneez Daily News would bring the SA down on his neck and not even gain any sympathy from the nobility. Sometimes he was so flustered with all his mulling it over that he had to force himself to remember that he hadn’t done anything wrong, he’d done nothing, nothing at all, absolutely nothing! The only thing he got from all his talking around was that even his wife stopped believing him.
In Gneez, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service threw a district court judge, two railway officials, and three teachers out of their breadwinning jobs; in Rande, the manager of the resort; in Jerichow, Dr. Semig, who as the meat inspector for the northern part of the Gneez district had been a civil servant. Up until that point Semig had been able to live off his meat inspection work as though nothing were wrong. He went up to Gneez and paid a visit to the district administrative office. It was pointed out to him that as per paragraph 3 he had been automatically retired due to non-Aryan descent. Semig pointed out that paragraph 3, subparagraph 2 overrode subparagraph 1 for civil servants who “had fought at the front for the German Reich or its allies in the World War.” He had deliberately worn his Iron Cross to Gneez for the visit. It was pointed out to him by the district veterinarian that the position of meat inspector, having been left vacant for an entire day, even if erroneously, had had to be filled. Semig pointed out that an oversight had to be rectified by the authorities who had committed it. It was pointed out to him that an official position, once occupied, could not be reassigned. Semig pointed out the utter lack of legal grounds underlying this information. The district veterinarian pointed out the door. Semig returned from Gneez feeling that the whole thing had been a personal intrigue, directed against him as an individual. Lisbeth Cresspahl did not want to put that in a letter from Germany to England.
In May 1933, Avenarius Kollmorgen, in the name of and with the power of attorney of Reichsbaron Axel von Rammin, Beckhorst Estate, filed charges in the Gneez district court against day laborer Oswald Rahn, Gneez Vagrants’ Settlement. It was alleged that the defendant had frightened the plaintiff’s horses, creating a hazardous traffic situation, and was responsible for an injury to the leg of one of the horses, Hildegard von Etz, and also for the damage to one carriage wheel, and also that he had threatened the plaintiff with danger to life and limb, using derogatory words. When Ossi Rahn was taking a stroll with his Storm Trooper friends late one night on the Beckhorst Estate, a group of workmen had been waiting for him in the shadow of the barns and they drove him and his cronies off the von Rammin property with bludgeons; the baron, incidentally, was away on a trip to his properties in Thuringia. The next night, Ossi was caught attempting arson; at least that’s what all the witnesses testified. Now he’d been thrown in the basement under the Gneez courthouse. His comrades set out to pay Herr Dr. Kollmorgen in Jerichow a visit, but Geesche Helms’s sister answered the door, and Geesche Helms was married to the Jerichow police, and incidentally Dr. Kollmorgen happened to be out of town at the moment. Avenarius was staying at the Netherlands Arms Hotel in Schwerin, on Alexandria Street, and spending evenings at Uhle’s, at Wöhler’s, at Heidtmann’s, and at the Golden Grapes with his friends from the Justice Department, spreading among them the wisdom of drinking fine wine. After a week, Avenarius was granted his audience with Reich Governor Hildebrandt, whom the Austrian had placed in charge of the good state of Mecklenburg, and the audience turned into a copious lunch with Mosel wines brought from Uhle’s according to Avenarius’s instructions. When Avenarius got back to Jerichow, the baskets of food and beer for Ossi suddenly stopped being accepted at the prison wing of the courthouse, and then they stopped being sent, and then Ossi stopped getting even the slips of paper from his loyal Storm Trooper comrades with suggestions about how to behave. That’s how loyal they were in the Storm.
With Reichsbaron von Rammin’s permission, Dr. Kollmorgen also undertook to represent additional joint plaintiffs, because now Ossi’s whole life was on the table. Ossi, it turned out, had lashed out not only for political reasons but sheerly for the fun of it; that explained the mountains of reports. Ossi was safe behind bars; that explained the level of detail in the accusations. How Ossi had tried to strangle a hired hand’s girl during sexual congress. How Ossi had sold a complete game-preserve fence as kindling to the Castle Hotel in Gneez. How Ossi had regularly extorted cash sums from prostituted women in the Castle Hotel. How Ossi beat his wife, how he let his children go hungry. It all came out, or almost all, and Avenarius, short in height as he was, stood fearlessly before the judges and spoke of the honor of the German nation, as embodied, for example, in its most select groups, such as, to take but one example, the Reich chancellor’s Storm Trooper units, which, according to explicit statements to that effect, were determined unflinchingly to cauterize out such a stain on their brown uniforms root and branch! and where anyone else might come to a stop, Avenarius would rise lightly on the tips of his toes and look around the courtroom with his solemnly shining eyes. Ossi’s demeanor was described in The Gneez Daily News as broken (like a cow’s, when there’s thunder in the air).
Two and a half years in prison sounded good to a number of people. The nobility thought it only proper that it had been defended against the insolence of the mob, and thought that this reflected well on the new government, all things considered. Dr. Semig had accepted at once that he was not the appropriate party to submit the official report on Hildegard von Etz’s swollen leg, a professor of veterinary medicine had to be brought especially from Rostock instead; he felt in some way protected by the verdict. The upper and lower middle classes breathed a sigh of relief, since the court’s decision seemed to promise that the SA wouldn’t be allowed to get away with absolutely everything after all. The SA itself was almost pleased at the chance to show itself in public as enemies of injustice, opposed to filth, and it requested from the regional leadership new application forms for entry into its ranks. Not everyone was satisfied. For the farmworkers, this lone defendant was not enough. Kollmorgen gradually started to have misgivings—first for his dignity, then bec
ause several other courts were requesting he take on very similar cases but without his being granted any further audiences with Hildebrandt. And what had the big to-do of the trial done for Methfessel the master butcher? Nothing, if you asked him.
Not quite all of Ossi Rahn’s activities had come out. For instance, the favor that Ossi had done for a high-ranking SA leader in Schwerin was not revealed. Instead of being transferred to an ordinary jail, he was handed over to the SA to do his time. The SA sent him to a “concentration camp” just outside the southeast border of Mecklenburg. It was said in Gneez and Jerichow that he was working there not as a convict but as a supervisor of convicts. Then his family left for Fürstenberg on the Havel, from one day to the next, and Roswitha Rahn had paid for the tickets with money from her own purse; now the rumor was considered proven.
Methfessel had started hitting the bottle somewhat, and one night he let himself be overheard in his cups expressing opinions about justice in the new Reich. Methfessel was taken to Fürstenberg to see for himself. When he came back after a month, he refused to say a thing about it, not even whether or not he had seen Ossi Rahn. That was not something Lisbeth Cresspahl wanted to put in a letter from Jerichow to Richmond.
Come on, tell me, Methfessel.
Can you keep your mouth shut, Frieda?
I’m your wife arent I. Silent like the grave.
Then dont dig yourself one.
Young Mrs. Cresspahl knew that no one from Jerichow was writing to her husband, if only so as not to use up any of her material. She knew that Cresspahl needed news from her if he wasn’t to rely on the papers. She realized he would ask for explanations after he got back, if nothing else because of this mystifying curiosity of his about everything she thought and did, when even she couldn’t figure herself out. Then people came to see the Papenbrocks, bringing the latest news from Field Road, and she couldn’t put that into a letter, she had missed the chance to begin at the beginning. When Papenbrock passed her a letter from England across the breakfast table, she sometimes winced. She thought no one could see it until the old man told her to stop being so jittery. He didn’t look any closer than that. Like the others, he saw her as a married woman pushing her baby carriage around Jerichow and claiming from people a new kind of respect. Everyone actually called her Frau Cresspahl, and by now without stumbling over the new mode of address or adding a fleeting smile to it, and almost no one could imagine how confused she was.