Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  On October 27, Ernst Barlach, sculptor, draftsman, and dramatist, died. Because he was taken for a Jew, people in Güstrow had spat on him in the street. They had hounded him by banning his work, his exhibitions, until he just lay down and died. The people of Lübeck had made a certain Alfred Rosenberg an honorary citizen, but hadn’t allowed Barlach’s sculptures onto the walls of their St. Catherine’s Church. The Lübeck Gazette hadn’t felt like printing anything of its own about his death, they had preferred to reprint from the Berlin Daily that Barlach had remained a problem for a new breed of men now traveling other paths. Lisbeth spent a long time puzzling over this line: The writer had wrestled more over God than with God.

  With God, but you can’t do that.

  Yes Lisbeth.

  Over God—that’s what you’re supposed to do.

  Yes Lisbeth.

  You ever see him when you were in Güstrow?

  I didn’t, Lisbeth. I know Büntzel. Friedrich Büntzel, Lisbeth, now theres a guy who knows about wood. This Barlach took advice from him. But first he had to say about a block: Itll split; and Barlach said: It wont split.

  And then it split.

  And then Barlach listened to what Büntzel the carpenter had to say.

  You’d’ve known it too.

  Not anymore, Lisbeth.

  Heinrich, it’s a bad time to die. If only it were August. When the soil is light.

  Yes Lisbeth.

  February 13, 1968 Tuesday

  The Union of Soviet Writers has likened Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn to Joseph V. Stalin’s only daughter.

  And to whom does President Johnson liken himself on Lincoln’s Birthday? To President Abraham Lincoln.

  The New York Times has a comparison of its own to make, now that sanitation workers have begun to pick up nearly two weeks of uncollected garbage: “This time the city was Saigon and the crisis was the Vietcong disruption of the city at the beginning of the month.” The Times means the New York garbage crisis. The Times means the losses of human life in Vietnam. The Times likens them.

  On this day, Employee Cresspahl was repotted like a plant, repacked like freight, repositioned like a workbench.

  The new pot, new warehouse, new factory floor, new office—it’s certainly bigger. Amanda Williams says: grand. It is a grand domain, the sixteenth floor, not far beneath the executives. Here the light comes not only from fluorescent tubes set in the ceiling but from reading lamps perched under expensive Swedish glass, and above the typewriter two shaded white tubes fully illuminate the pit for the typewriter ball. Here the desk is not of the manufacture provided to such pitiful lower depths as the Foreign Sales Dept.; it is an artfully designed slab with smoothly gliding jewelry boxes built in. This room does not await the sort of visitor who is content to sit on a usual chair—the VIPs here shall sit on a sofa. Here there’s a plush wool rug underfoot, not wall-to-wall carpeting, and the office is in a corner of the building, with windows on two walls, nearly six square yards of light behind the venetian blinds, though admittedly all dark clouds today. It is a promotion straight out of an American fairy tale.

  And yet Employee Cresspahl is sitting on the generous upholstery near the door, ready to leave at any moment, like a visitor, not the proprietor, without a glance at the papers and writing materials she is meant to be putting away in the safe and the open drawers. It didn’t happen like a fairy tale at all.

  The announcement of her move had been without notice, offhand, half forgotten. Then, unexpectedly, in the middle of the workday, in broad morning, the envoy of Fate appeared at the Foreign Sales door, more startling than a window washer sliding into view out the window.

  – A very good morning to you!: Fate wished her.

  The young man dispatched to her was slim and curly-haired, wearing light gray overalls with the bank’s logo embroidered over the heart. He sized up Mrs. Cresspahl with a casual nod and pushed a squat cart on casters into her office, blocking the exit. He gripped the cart’s handle like a hospital stretcher or funeral bier.

  – Stop, I beg you! Whoever you are!

  He was a little startled, not having been in this job long enough to know the tone the employees affected here. Still, he was not to be kept from his appointed round. He turned and reached around the left side of the door and slid the plastic nameplate out of its slot, holding it up to me not quite like a doctor but still like a nurse who has seen more than enough cases like this and knows his way around. Mrs. Cresspahl felt herself nod, and he tossed my name into one of the trays built into the top deck of his cart. And it was gone.

  – Says so right here on this paper: the young man calmly announced, like an executioner clearly taking no questions. He had grafted the laconic speech patterns of Western movies onto his Puerto Rican English; the violently clipped rhythm sounded strange with his dark skin, that of the loser, and his guileless face, long practiced in ingratiation. He seemed shy as well, overwhelmed by the remorselessness to which his checklist held him. The list remembered every last inventory item, from calculator to ashtray, and a tray for personal effects had been sent along too. This was the one part of the terrain where the list suffered a defeat. For Mrs. Cresspahl merely took a thin slip of paper off the base of the desk calendar—and it fit in the smallest pocket of her suit. The young mover had never seen anything like it. It baffled him. The only personal item was the name next to the door. He clearly wanted to ask for an explanation but he remembered his supervisor and took the room apart in barely twenty minutes. When he was done the metal shelves of the file cabinet were gleaming, the bookcase was empty, the corkboard was bare, the chairs arrayed between the naked work surfaces might have been in a shopwindow, the keys swayed slightly and then the office was empty, ready for the next person.

  The young man took his leave by thanking her. – Some folks make it harder than it needs to be: he had said. His cart piled high, he withdrew, as if with a coffin followed by no mourners.

  The old office was lost. The new office was a foreign land. With no room to work in and no equipment to work with, she had no business being there at all.

  Employee Cresspahl sat outside the office that had just been hers; sat, though, next to Amanda, who was phoning around the whole building, nagging delightedly, downright ecstatic that yet again something had been ruined by overorganization. – You can’t run a business like this!: she said. – Don’t go running round after the kid, you’re a lady! – On behalf of Mrs. Cresspahl, I am appalled!: she shouted into her telephone, and in less than fifteen minutes she had found out that the memo had been lying in the outer office of the Personnel Department since yesterday morning, substantially compromising a secretary’s reputation for efficiency, and finally the head of personnel himself, Mr. Kennicott II, came onto the phone. Every time he said something, Amanda put her hand over the receiver to signal the latest state of battle. – He’s wavering: she said. – He’s weakening.

  – He’s giving in!: she concluded, having won. The excitement had done her good. She was now talking in a very deep voice, felt pleasantly flushed, and patted her mane of black hair back into place with delight and both hands. She’d made up for Friday’s fight, and come out ahead; now she could say: I’ll miss you, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  – I’ll miss you too: Mrs. Cresspahl lamely replies.

  – Sweet Jesus, don’t take it personally!: Amanda said, the same request Mr. Kennicott II made when he came to Foreign Sales to fetch Employee Cresspahl and accompany her to the new office, skillfully and illogically explaining that any action, having been split into three simultaneous component parts, stands or falls with the intentionally steady or unsteady flow of information, all with his most personal and abject apologies. When he ran out of things to say, he inquired into the origins of the name Cresspahl, began describing an uncle of his, of German descent, who had changed his name from Junkers when World War I started, not to renounce his Germanness but on account of the neighbors, in a small town in Michigan . . . and after he finally said goodbye, wit
h secret relief, his face slipped immediately into oblivion, only his pleasantly creaking voice remaining in memory.

  That wasn’t how it should have been either. From now on he’s going to expect to be greeted in the halls, won’t he? He can’t possibly imagine how forgettable he is. Send me a photo of yourself, Mr. Kennicott II, please.

  Then de Rosny walked into the new office, Mr. Vice President himself as he lives and breathes, a jolly godparent wanting to share our joy at his gifts. Everything all right, Mrs. Cresspahl? He didn’t believe it was, he had his doubts about the desk placement and helped move it with his very own vice-presidential hands so that it no longer stood at an angle between the windows but squarely in front of one of them. In the process, he came across a drawer protruding a miniscule amount, and opened it, and hurriedly shut it again, the look on his face conveying that he wanted to pass over an indecent matter in silence. Then he realized that Employee Cresspahl couldn’t possibly have had time to put her things away yet, and he pulled the drawer open again.

  – Shoes: he said, aghast.

  Of course, Mr. Vice President. A pair of women’s shoes, white pumps, hardly worn.

  – I ask you, just for the record—: he said, already heading into the punishing storm he planned to hurl down onto all the floors beneath him.

  Employee Cresspahl wears a smaller size. Who in this country wears white shoes in February? No, Mr. de Rosny.

  Employee Cresspahl was given the rest of the day off, with the justification that the telephone in the new office had not yet been connected to the right number.

  What must you think of us, Mrs. Cresspahl?

  Am I supposed to think something?

  Now you have something on me!

  That’s not the way I see it.

  That’s because you haven’t spent enough time on the sixteenth floor yet!

  Besides, white pumps in the desk, no one will believe me.

  Well then there’s no reason to tell anyone, is there.

  Is that a deal, Mr. de Rosny?

  Done, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  – You don’t look well, Gesine. What’s the matter?

  – You wouldn’t believe me.

  – Tell me, Mrs. Cresspahl. Tell Francine.

  – This afternoon I went to two movies, one after the other. It must be that.

  February 14, 1968 Wednesday

  In Darmstadt, in a small dingy courtroom, a trial related to the murders that took place in 1941 at a ravine near Kiev known as Babi Yar has been under way for four months. The New York Times now gives the number of victims as more than thirty thousand Jews and around forty thousand others. The eleven defendants, former members of the SS, put on interested, bored, amused, or abstracted expressions. None seems worried or distressed by the evidence. One cannot recall, the next was not responsible, the next had only heard about it. When the walls of the ravine were dynamited and the debris was shoveled over the bodies of the victims, some were still alive. One defendant was told that a previous witness had testified he was a specialist in stringing up little children by the leg, shooting them in the head with a pistol, and throwing them into a prepared ditch. This defendant got upset. It must have been someone else with the same name, he said. It wasn’t him. It’s a mistake. The New York Times counted the number of spectators at the trial on February 13. There were four. Yesterday, Bernd-Rüdiger Uhse, of West Germany, one of the prosecuting attorneys, explained the lack of emotion at the trial to The New York Times as follows: “If you see a car accident today and look at the bloody victims, you are horrified. But if you talk about the same accident five years later you will not get very upset about it.”

  In early November 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, seventeen years old, shot and killed the German embassy attaché Ernst vom Rath in Paris, “out of love for my dear father and my people, who are enduring unimaginable suffering.” He was very sorry to have harmed anyone, he said, but he had no other way to express his protest to the world.

  In early November 1938, there was panic in the USA—about outer space. Orson Welles broadcast a radio play on CBS, in which a spaceship landed in New Jersey and men with death rays attacked. Orson Welles’s listeners took it to be a news report and fled the cities. Praying women knelt on the streets of New York. Other people ran around with their heads wrapped in handkerchiefs and scarves, to protect themselves from poisonous gases. The highways were jammed. Princeton University dispatched a scientific expedition, with student volunteers and death-defying professors. That was November 1938 in this country.

  In the other country. . .

  In Jerichow, Mecklenburg-Lübeck, in early November the party’s regional film office showed two movies at the Rifle Club: Sword of Peace and Jews Without Masks. The former attracted an audience, even from the countryside, first because it promised to include recordings from the prewar period, second because it denied that there was a war to come, despite all the re-armament going on. The latter film, Jews Without Masks, practically emptied out the auditorium by the end, to the dismay of Prasemann the restaurateur, who had planned to sell the audience beer and schnapps afterwards, and to the fury of Friedrich Jansen, who decided to post SA guards at the doors during the next screening. Whoever the regional party film warden might be, he clearly had no idea of country people’s mentality. The film was assembled out of snippets of earlier motion pictures made by formerly German Jews, and it unveiled not “the disastrous effects of the Jewish influence on our culture” but the fact that the scenes depicted could only take place in the big city—try to picture Oskar Tannebaum alone in a drawing room with some lady! The Storm Troopers in the front row had stayed in their seats, though, and they went on buying rounds until midnight, enough to console Prasemann somewhat.

  On November 5 and 6, the Hitler Youth were out and about again, with their second Winter Relief Collection Effort, and they not only accosted people on the streets but rang doorbells. Papenbrock, whom they had woken up from his afternoon nap, cursed them under his breath and boxed one of the boy’s ears, who, considering his misdemeanor sufficiently punished, then held the collection box out to the old man after all. This was Otto Quade, who got smacked on the head again back home because August Quade, plumbing and heating, had a loan out from Papenbrock. There was a picture in the newspapers of Edda Göring’s baptism—the very same person who is in a court battle today over her rights to a Cranach painting of the Madonna that the city of Cologne had had to give her father to mark the happy occasion—and the Gestapo in Gneez had received a denunciation of several persons who had failed to answer the call for donations for the baptism; the inquiry later revealed that the boy in question had held out his collection box to a group of chatting beer drinkers, that the offensive comment had been entirely unrelated, and that Alfred Bienmüller, who had already decided not to have his son confirmed, was surely justified in expressing the intention never to pay for any baptism whether or not his fifty-year-old wife ever bore him another child. Lisbeth Cresspahl was outraged that the second Winter Relief Collection Effort didn’t even respect the sacred festival of Reformation Day. On November 8, the Lübeck Gazette published the news of the shooting of vom Rath, adding that in National Socialist Germany not a hair had been touched on a single Jew’s head, let alone his life being threatened. Lisbeth seized on the bit about the hair, since Spiegel the lawyer in Kiel had been shot in the head, not that she was in any way condoning the murderous intent. Cresspahl saw anxiety flare up in her face for a moment—“like fire from a struck match,” he would say ten years later—then serenity returned, almost amusement at how drastically the Lübeck newspaper had failed to get at the truth. Then the child, Gesine, who by that point had learned to tear the Gazette into pieces for toilet paper, was called into the room. Cresspahl had not taken his trip to Malchow and Wendisch Burg over the weekend, since Lisbeth had wanted to go to church on Reformation Day; he did not want to postpone it further. It didn’t occur to him that things would go differently this time than they had two years ago
when David Frankfurter had shot the Swiss Nazi Wilhelm Gustloff. He wanted to check that his parents’ graves in Malchow were being maintained properly, to go see Schmidt and Büntzel in Güstrow, and to stop by Wendisch Burg so as not to hurt his sister’s feelings. – Take the child with you: Lisbeth said. The child was standing by the coal scuttle, tearing the newspaper into strips, proud and serious as she was whenever she did the chores she had learned to do—feeding the chickens, picking berries in the garden. – Gertrud will be happy: Lisbeth said, not urging him, not trying to persuade him, and since Gertrud Niebuhr had once again not received the promised visit from Gesine this year, he and the child left to catch the eleven o’clock train.

  – Gesine: she called out when they were already past the gate. She stood in the front doorway, leaning against one of the doors, her arms loosely crossed under her breasts. She waved, several times, until the child too raised her arm and moved her hand a little. But the child was tugging at Cresspahl with her other hand, and later he could only assume that Lisbeth had been smiling as she waved, and that she would have let herself be hugged.

  My mother was seen two more times the next night.

  It remains a mystery why she wanted to go to Gneez. The movie showing at the Schauburg Cinema was one she’d already seen in Lübeck, Covered Tracks, with Kristina Söderbaum. Heroes in Spain was playing at the Capitol that evening, preceded by Festive Nuremberg, which would only have reminded her of the war Cresspahl thought they were rehearsing for in it. The Gneez synagogue stood along Horst Wessel Street, which led from the Capitol Cinema to the station. When Lisbeth was seen there, the roof of the house of worship was already on fire but downstairs people in tattered clothes that looked like Methling charity were hauling shiny things out the front door, and things in sacks. The street was bright from the fire, and from the light in the synagogue, but the windows of both the adjacent houses were dark. A line of police ran all the way across the street from one firewall, and another line of police jutted out from the other wall. Lisbeth Cresspahl was noticed as she tried to cross the cordon to get to the far end of the street. The officer didn’t even ask her what she was doing there; he advised her to go around the block and try from the other direction. The onlookers, a dark silent group, made room for her, but apparently she didn’t move. She was still there when the fire truck came from the far end of the street and began setting up. By that time the fire had spread down to the ground floor of the synagogue, and the looters’ trucks had left. The firefighters acted with urgency, precision, as if carrying out a drill, except for only one thing: they took up a waiting position instead of trying to put out the fire. Lisbeth may have still been there to see Joseph Hirschfeld come running up Horst Wessel Street, shoving the crowd aside with sweeps of his powerful arms in spite of his sixty-nine years, and how the same officer who had given such polite advice to the Papenbrock daughter ran the rabbi back through the crowd. He was holding the old man tight by the arm, and, also because he was taller, he looked like someone disappearing down Horst Wessel Street with a victim, not with a prisoner. Then the fire brigade did start spraying water from time to time, onto the corners of the buildings adjacent to the one on fire. When the roof of the house of worship collapsed and exploded into the air, burning sparks sprayed onto the street and the onlookers stepped backward. By that point Lisbeth was no longer there. Maybe she’d left to catch the Jerichow train, eleven thirty departure.