by Uwe Johnson
In Warsaw the author of an operetta faces a closed-door trial because in so authoring it he disseminated “false information,” according to a law enacted in 1946.
Lisbeth Cresspahl had already had to endure listening to her husband’s words about the coming war; in the fall of 1938 she had to watch him act accordingly. She could no longer pretend that he’d been talking just to convince her to move back to England; she saw him preparing to stay in Germany, as she wanted, but in a Germany at war. Cresspahl went shopping.
He’d drawn up the first list on his own. At the top came the items made of steel, iron, brass: saw blades, nails of all sizes, axes, files, planer blades, rasps, clamps, shovels, fittings for furniture, for doors, for windows. These were followed by belts for the machines, gas, oil, grease. He actually bought a motor that didn’t run on electricity, took it apart, packed the parts in waxed paper, and carried everything down to the basement under the former living room, putting it behind a newly built wall that looked like a partition for a junk closet. His purchases attracted no attention in Jerichow, because he bought these supplies in Lübeck, Hamburg, Schwerin, and also because there was nothing suspicious about a master carpenter buying fuses by the hundred when he had a dicey electrical system to work with.
Lisbeth tried to stop him, because it made his expectations for the coming years so much more real, so Cresspahl brought up October 19, the door-to-door collection of what was supposed to be every last bit of scrap metal in people’s houses, for use in rearmament. Cresspahl had prudently prepared a lot of metal for pickup—considerable in weight, limited in use—and carefully put the receipt somewhere safe afterward. Lisbeth wanted to say that at least there was no need to have two petroleum lamps as backup, so Cresspahl said something about a single bomb hitting the Lübeck-Herrenwyk power station, which supplied Jerichow with electricity. All this work, too, Cresspahl did in his methodical, calm, implacable way, no matter how much time it took—so she couldn’t even chuckle at his making a fuss.
She found it even harder to draw up her own list, as he’d asked her to. That would mean admitting to herself that the town of Jerichow, her house and household, her own child were facing times in which they would lack for shoes, clothes, even kitchen knives. She was so reluctant to do it that Cresspahl had to spend a whole evening interrogating her to find out what she would need in these exasperating circumstances of his, and it was only when she’d come across large boxes of candles, tobacco, and shoe leather in the pantry that she found herself ready to comply. She did it, complaining of headaches to make Cresspahl feel bad, but then he wasn’t satisfied with linen and cotton, he insisted on sewing-machine needles as well.
When she went shopping herself, she often came back from Lübeck or Schwerin happy enough. She liked giving presents and would bring home an extra apron, or a shawl, for the Labor Service girls; she amused herself by buying a fancy pair of embroidery scissors or a patent lemon squeezer she would never use. At times she felt a bit like she had in the days before her marriage, when Louise Papenbrock was completing her trousseau; she was reassured and reassured again by the displays in the shopwindows, where she saw no shortages, no signs of impending war. On Sundays the Lübeck Gazette brought her sixteen pages of ads, with Underberg Schnapps, Mercedes Typewriters, Attica Cigarettes (genuine Turkish tobacco), Junker & Ruh Gas Stoves, Karstadt’s, Securit Glass, and other firms offering everything imaginable, as though they couldn’t unload their wares fast enough, or bring new ones to market. Maybe this really was all just a tiresome mistake on her husband’s part, harmless enough since after all he was only putting in a somewhat exaggerated stock of supplies; even Cresspahl looked amused when she brought home a hat that she’d only be able to wear the following summer—he seemed to realize she was making fun of him.
There were other days. Days on which she was exhausted before she started. She didn’t want to shop, she might sit in the restaurant at the Lübeck station for half an hour before letting a movie poster divert her from her task. She felt ill at ease in the movie theater, as she walked from the ticket counter into the auditorium, and during the wait in the dim light, but her headache would disappear as soon as the pictures started moving. All the way through to the evening when she got back to Jerichow, she would be dazed and distracted, but rejuvenated, by the hour and a half of forgetting she had enjoyed—an hour and a half of losing herself in a world of play and make-believe without a hint of Cresspahl’s war.
These were the movies shown in Lübeck in the third week of October, 1938:
Mazurka, with Pola Negri, rated 14+
Covered Tracks, with Kristina Söderbaum, adults only
13 Chairs, with Heinz Rühmann and Hans Moser, general admission
Little Sinner, with Rudolf Platte and Paul Dahlke, adults only
A Girl Goes Ashore, with Elisabeth Flickenschildt
The Jungle Princess
Petermann Is Opposed, with Fita Benkhoff
Dancing Lady, with Clark Gable
Clark Gable?
We had Coca-Cola too, daughter.
The same as today’s?
The same as your daughter Marie drinks, daughter.
Did I drink it as a child?
Of course, daughter. On Schüsselbuden Street in Lübeck. You didn’t like it.
And you went to the movies the way I did during my first year in New York?
Just like you in New York, daughter.
As an anesthetic.
It was a stupid feeling. But as long as it lasted I felt safe. As long as I was there no one could find me, not even I could.
Did you take me with you?
I tried sometimes, and did something nice for you after all. Don’t forget that, daughter.
I won’t.
She told Cresspahl about the trips to the movies, the wasted time. She wished he’d criticize her, not only so she could hold his injustice against him but also to help her resist these derelictions of duty, these attempts at escape. But Cresspahl didn’t begrudge what he thought were her pleasures. As long as she led him to believe she had no secrets from him, he was almost not worried.
February 7, 1968 Wednesday
Dear Mary, liebe Marie, dorogaya Mariya—
I have something to say that I don’t want you to hear for eight years.
One reason is: We have only three hours a day together after I get home from work, and today when we were going over your day at school, you were busy.
You were busy with the pictures you’d cut out of The New York Times. The first was of the Chinese Quarter in Saigon. The bombs, fires, and street fighting have left a relatively smooth layer of rubble behind, and since the photo also isn’t very clear you didn’t take this to be the remains of human dwellings but of a garbage dump, with fire and thick smoke rising from something like a forest behind it. And again you told me that this couldn’t happen to us in New York—and already it was less real to you.
The second picture shows a machine shop after a bombardment, also in Cholon, and a bucket brigade of small children trying to put out the fire. You’re generally opposed to child labor, as I’ve taught you to be, so you told yourself that the children weren’t working at a job, they were trying to save their fathers’ jobs. To you that constituted a difference.
The third is something The New York Times calls a street scene, even though at first sight there’s no one moving about in the picture. In the foreground, lying on a smashed street next to a wooden handcart on two bicycle wheels, there is a person, motionless, in a position he wouldn’t be able to maintain for a second if he were asleep. He is recognizable as a person from a clear face and from the limbs that are still there. The thing that’s been thrown into the dirt behind him, a sack of coal or crumpled blankets, you don’t recognize as a dead body until you read the caption; you wouldn’t even have noticed it. Likewise the third body, on the right, in the background, behind a jeep, a piece of meat with outstretched legs or, if the head is missing, arms. Next to the jeep, an Amer
ican tank takes up the rest of the street, with a soldier’s head in a helmet sticking up very small out of the turret, so that’s why she can call this a street scene.
The fourth is of a hospital corridor with patterned tiles, filled past capacity with a line of people who’ve been shot and burned. The accompanying article discusses the two to three people per bed, stretchers squeezed in wherever there’s room, and another ward that is mostly empty, for patients who can afford to pay for treatment, such as Jim Morris, from South Pine, N.C., Marine Yeoman 2d Cl., insured. You, though, are looking for the name of your old Dr. Brewster.
You put only one of these pictures in your folder, the third. The others you’ve left on the table as though they would disappear on their own. Tomorrow morning you won’t find them there.
When I was alone, I could still say “for when I’m dead” into your tape recorder, but now I’ll write it so that there’s no way you’ll learn about it any earlier than 1976. On tape you might hear it too soon, and I find it hard to take the dazed expression of understanding you put on when you don’t understand something. You nod, and I can see that you are repeating what you’ve heard over and over again in your mind, as though you could grasp it better that way. You think you’re being polite; really it’s nothing but what’s left of your fear from 1960, when you realized you couldn’t switch me out for another parental unit—that you were stuck with me come what may, your one and only mother, and for the time being at least you couldn’t afford to lose her. What’s left of that fear is the way you still put on a show of paying great attention to what you consider my eccentricities, but never say that’s how you see them, to be safe. This started in a playground in Remagen eight years ago, and in another eight years you can try to deny it.
What you could have heard from today is what I’m trying to tell myself the latest news about the death of Charles H. Jordan means. Charles H. Jordan: an executive of the Jewish relief organization AJJDC, the Joint, found in the Vltava River on August 20 of last year. On August 16, Mr. Jordan left his hotel in Prague to buy a newspaper. Friends as well as colleagues ruled out suicide. A Belgian scientist visiting an Eastern bloc country some time later was kept under constant surveillance, and when he complained about it he was told that it was so Soviet agents wouldn’t do to him what they did to Mr. Jordan. Or maybe it wasn’t the KGB, it might have been Arab agents. On December 10, Ernst Hardmeier, the Swiss pathologist whom the AJJDC tasked with performing an autopsy on the dead man, was found several hundred yards from his locked car in a snowy forest near Zürich, frozen to death; he had not completed his investigation. That was how things stood until now.
Now a Socialist government of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic has given the American government a report on the death of one of its citizens. It is an interim report—perhaps the investigations will be pursued further. As of now, the Czechoslovakian government maintains that Mr. Jordan died on August 16 between 11 p.m. and midnight, and that he fell into the river from a certain place on the First of May Bridge in downtown Prague. The cause of death was determined to be drowning; the body showed no signs of major trauma; the word choice does not rule out a blow with a sandbag or the like. The report is accompanied by photos of the place of death and drawings of the river currents, as measured by conducting tests with a dummy of Mr. Jordan’s size and weight.
So if it once again starts to be the case in a Socialist country:
that a death cannot be justified by reasons of state;
that if there’s a murder there must be a murderer;
that a dead man has at least the right to the truth about his death;
that murders in the night, in secret, behind closed doors, are forbidden and, if not prevented, condemned:
then this might really be Socialism—with a functioning constitution, with freedom of speech, with freedom of movement, with the freedom for even an individual to decide how to use the means of production.
There are still some things missing here. No, they haven’t answered whether the dead man was in fact killed, and if so by whom, on whose orders, and why, for what?
Still, dorogaya Mariya, it might be a start. I would work for a Socialism like this, and I would want to.
I am sitting here alone, at the table with your pictures from the Times on it, alone with the lamp and your sleeping breaths that are louder than my pen, and alone with a crazy belief that this year might actually turn out all right. That’s what I have written out for you, so when the time comes you’ll understand what I may be starting to do this year, at age thirty-five, dear lord, one last time. So that you won’t have to guess, like I do.
Sincerely yours.
February 8, 1968 Thursday
Yesterday the American-led camp at Langvei, near Khesanh, was assaulted by Soviet-made PT-76 amphibious tanks. Street fighting in Hue. The city of Bentre destroyed by shelling and bombardment from the southern allies; this was “necessary in order to save it,” a US major said. And in Hue, Captain Bacel Winstead, at the sight of marines zipping off to battle on motorcycles they had “liberated” from recaptured middle-class homes, said: The American military is the damnedest military in the world.
Around October 20, 1938, in Dassow near Jerichow, a man was sentenced to eight months in prison plus legal costs. He was not a member of the Nazi Party but had worn the insignia of the party anyway, to express his “inner conviction.” To the court, his behavior seemed “all the more reprehensible” in light of his long criminal record.
When an idea came into Lisbeth’s head, Cresspahl generally picked up on it quickly. Once, when Lisbeth heard that the Hitler Youth had started waiting outside church after services with their collection boxes, she pinned to her hat the badges with pictures of prominent Nazis that the Winter Relief Program gave out for donations, so that she’d be able to tell the collectors, daintily pointing a finger to her head: Already got one.
Cresspahl talked her out of that, but liked seeing that she could still joke around and yet also see reason, even if this wasn’t the right occasion for it. Similarly with the old gold coins that everyone was supposed to turn in at the Reichsbank: Lisbeth went to Ahlreep’s Clocks and had a five-mark coin set as a brooch and wanted to send her little Gesine to a children’s party at Party Comrade Lichtwark’s wearing her new pin. Cresspahl talked her out of that.
It wasn’t always a joke. When the Sunday Lübeck Gazette ran a full-page report on the London messenger boys, she got so caught up in reading it, seeing the children in their uniforms—their shoulder straps, caps held on with chin straps and pushed back on their heads, numbered badges over their hearts—that it ended in smothered tears, and by evening she’d already finished the first three lines of a letter to the editor in which she planned to denounce the inhumanity of English capitalism, though really it was all about her own memories of London and her need to punish herself. Cresspahl picked up on that too, as hard as she’d tried to keep it secret. He talked her out of that.
One thing he didn’t pick up on for a long time was that Lisbeth was starving her child.
By this time the child would still be asleep when he got up; he ate breakfast alone, and in any case didn’t have the time that the bigger Gesine wanted to spend on her first meal of the day. He now had to leave the house as early as he’d had to back in his own childhood when he’d gone out into von Haase’s fields with the other day laborers—he had to catch the milk train to Gneez to make the connection to Lübeck, he had prep work to do at the airfield, or else in the hour before breakfast he had to replace the flagpole in Friedrich Jansen’s front yard that unknown persons had skillfully sawed partway through during the night. When he got back to the table, Gesine was up too, and he probably liked how attentively she watched him eat. If he’d asked, Lisbeth would have said that the child had already had something, and Gesine wouldn’t have been able to contradict her, except to say that it wasn’t enough.
That’s how it went during second breakfast; that’s how it went at din
ner. Cresspahl made sure that Paap and the workmen had meat on their plates; the meat on his was also as it should be; the child was sitting next to Lisbeth, two stools away from him. Why would a five-year-old doubt that her mother was giving her portions with the best will in the world, to the best of her ability? How could she appeal to her father for help when her mother had repeatedly warned her not to bother him? During the Easter visit to Podejuch, the Cresspahl child had eaten with the Paepcke children, and Hilde seems to have noticed that this Gesine was quietly, secretively putting everything she could onto her plate and into her apron pocket—she mentioned it later. The Labor Service girls knew perfectly well that the mistress’s and master’s child had an unusual appetite, and that she’d have stolen the soaked pieces of bread from the cat’s bowl if she dared; Lisbeth kept her pantry locked at all times, and if she caught the girls slipping her daughter anything, she was liable to put on a truly withering look and forbid any meddling in her child-rearing. Later the girls used to say: When she looked at you like that, so coldly, her eyes so steady, it was scary. It wasn’t only laymen who noticed; Dr. Berling saw the Cresspahl child on Town Street: a not quite emaciated thing but certainly skinny, who seemed not to have grown in the past six months and who looked around at the world somewhat dazed. Louise Papenbrock was no longer working in the bakery, and the child couldn’t go begging from the salesgirls; nowadays old Papenbrock only occasionally slipped her a candy, in strict secrecy, after Lisbeth had given him a pointed speech about sweets being bad for the teeth, yet again in the severe and distant manner she had adopted. When the child stuffed herself full of unripe apples, her stomachache was a reason to keep her in bed. The first time the child was allowed to lick a bowl of cake batter she was six years old, but Lisbeth had scraped it out with a white rubber spatula that left nothing behind. She wanted to deny the child not only food but pleasure. If she couldn’t sacrifice the child, she at least wanted to do her good by making her suffer. There were exceptions, like the bottle of Coca-Cola on Schüsselbuden Street in Lübeck, when Lisbeth took pity on herself as well as on the child dizzy with hunger—there were not many. By October 1938 this had been going on for almost a year.