Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Mrs. Ferwalter refuses to hold it against the West German president that he is suspected of having built concentration camps. For her, the good Germans are automatically excused. “They didn’t know.” It makes her uncomfortable that the head of state of West Germany knew. The dignity of the office makes it hard for her to believe this. She doesn’t want to be convinced. In any case, she doesn’t let anyone swindle her out of one penny when she goes shopping.

  She admires people who are tall and good-looking. There’s a North German woman in her building, from Hamburg, married to a policeman, with a strict code of conduct for herself. Wakes up at seven even though she doesn’t have to, things like that. This German is almost six feet tall, with a long neck and freckles; she wears her hair back; she’s twenty-four. She likes to talk about her disciplined lifestyle, and Mrs. Ferwalter admires her.

  Now Mrs. Ferwalter would like to know if it’s true that Cresspahl, with such a European background and everything, actually took a black child into her home.

  She nods with satisfaction when she hears that it was temporary; she took it to mean: it was an aberration. She nods only to herself, not putting it on for Cresspahl; she won’t allow herself to criticize. She has no tolerance for Negroes and believes in all seriousness that God made them to live in squalor, poverty, and sin.

  Not even her religion, for whose sake she got sent to the camps, is enough to make her think of the Germans as anything but goys like the rest. She has such a harsh covenant with her God that she can see only Orthodox Jews as her equals, whether poor or not poor. She can’t help but prefer the not poor ones slightly, out of respect for God’s decision in this case. She rigorously observes the holidays; Rebecca and Marie are often separated. On Saturdays, Rebecca is categorically not allowed to even take a walk or come over. On Friday the house is cleaned and the meals are cooked in advance and kept warm so that they won’t have to light the stove the next day. Rebecca is not allowed to bathe on the Sabbath. She has to go to the synagogue with her father and brother, and if she forgets and has an ice cream at the snack bar, she is less afraid of God than she is of her mother. Rebecca has been raised under the dark principles of the Old Testament: Chasten I not my child? do I not show that I love him? Mrs. Ferwalter looked on, appalled and suspicious, at the freedom with which Mrs. Cresspahl let her child grow up; only lately has she relented a little. Mrs. Ferwalter is so firm in her principles that the Jewish community of the Upper West Side of Manhattan is not up to her standards. There are actually religious services held in small shops on Broadway here. After the holiday, the faithful stand in the middle of traffic and crowds of pedestrians the way other people do outside a movie theater! Mrs. Ferwalter also has a bad conscience for not going to synagogue often herself. It’s the money issue. With great frugality and hardship she can scrape together enough for Jewish summer camp for Rebecca, who should lack for nothing when it comes to her Jewish upbringing. Mrs. Ferwalter is hurt when Cresspahl sends her child to an out-of-town summer camp, because otherwise Marie could have played with Rebecca, who has to stay at the P.S. 75 school camp to save money for the Jewish one; the unpleasant feeling connected with this can be concealed by a show of being insulted. But it’s fine to have a German playmate. What the Germans did to the Jews was God’s will.

  Now that the Cresspahls don’t have a black child in the house, Rebecca is allowed to come over again and be friends with Marie. Was it that, Mrs. Ferwalter?

  It was. Mrs. Ferwalter once went to a movie that showed a European landscape, a castle in the mountains, a nobleman with many motherless children, there was lots of singing, and at the end there was a marriage. Mrs. Ferwalter cried. She doesn’t want to hear it called kitsch, though she does admit that it did show reality in a pleasant light for a while. “But we deserve that, don’t we?” Besides, such things do happen. In Jerusalem, a chief rabbi got married, he was seventy, the bride was forty. Such a pious man, beard down to his belly button. There’s still romance in the world.

  – You’re not blind in that eye too, are you? Or have you given up, really?

  On her journey, in her flight from the German camps, Mrs. Ferwalter lost her language. At home they’d spoken Yiddish, which they’d called das Deutsch. In school she’d learned Czech, which she now speaks not quite as brokenly as the German she learned in the camps. In Israel she learned Hebrew, and the family spoke that language with one another until they came to America. Then her son started answering Hebrew with English, and so she had to learn English. Since then she’s spoken Yiddish with her husband and English with her son and Rebecca, though an English that the children couldn’t always understand. Then Rebecca started learning Hebrew in a New York school, and Mrs. Ferwalter felt she had to learn it anew. She has three different languages for her husband and two children.

  – You not take it wrong way?: Mrs. Ferwalter says. For we’ve now reached the building on the side street off Riverside Drive where this family has lived for nine years, four people in three-and-a-half rooms with all the windows facing a courtyard, and clearly Mrs. Ferwalter has made up her mind to do what she has to do on the street, not invite the German into her apartment. Home is for the family; leave the outside to the outsiders.

  What she has to do is give a word of advice. She’s older; it’s permissible among friends. Maybe it’s nothing serious, but it won’t end with a breakup from Professor Erichson, will it?

  It was a summer Sunday morning not many years back that D. E. came down to the park and sat down far away from the Cresspahls, like a stranger, with a paper cup of coffee and a newspaper under his arm for breakfast. Mrs. Ferwalter was sitting next to Cresspahl, saw him look over, and felt reminded of people she’d gotten to know only too well in the camps. She almost ran away, and it took a while before she could even endure the presence of this big strong German man in the same room as her without sliding her chair back, shifting her feet, working her lips, more than she usually does. Now she’s trying to be on his side, and what has made her do that?

  Because Mrs. Cresspahl has started something with a top executive at her bank yes? After being conspicuously singled out by him yes, with more money, a promotion in office, everything.

  And where did Mrs. Ferwalter hear that?

  From Mr. Weiszand, Mrs. Cresspahl. Dmitri Weiszand. Whenever you run into him at Columbia University, he has time for a chat, even with a humble Jewish lady from the ČSR. Actually it was he who started these conversations, around three months ago. Such an approachable person, so gracious, even though the Germans did beat him in their camps.

  Now Mrs. Ferwalter is very anxious with worry. – I not try to interfere!: she cries. – You not take it wrong way!: she says, and now it’s an order, not only the words but also in her voice.

  – Who knows what’s for the best, Mrs. Ferwalter.

  – That what I always say: she says, not exactly beaming but happy with herself for having made an effort in what she thinks is a good cause. Now her mouth is relaxed, she looks pleased, untroubled, a young woman all of a sudden.

  I just like you, my German friend. Can’t you understand that?

  No, Mrs. Ferwalter, I can’t. But it’s something for us to be happy about, and we like you too.

  February 29, 1968 Thursday

  is the day after the evening when a West German journalist in the New York Hilton Hotel took part in a discussion of the latest prospects for German National Socialism. Herr Klaus Harpprecht opened by saying that he’d been a young soldier under Hitler but now was married to a Jewish woman who’d been in Auschwitz.

  Explain this to us, please. You’re German too, Mrs. Cresspahl. Try to tell us what this means.

  Is the day on which it can be reported from Bonn, West Germany, that the government is banning an illustrated weekly that raised questions about the signature of the country’s president on blueprints for a concentration camp. The official justification for the ban were an anthropology serialization and a series of photographs showing Brigadier General Ng
uyen Ngoc Loan executing a young man on the streets of Saigon. The government fears that these photographs might “brutalize” youth. The government expresses no opinion at this time about the effects on young people of being in concentration camps.

  Explain this to us, please. These are your countrymen, Mrs. Cresspahl. Try to tell us what this means.

  This is the day on which the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger publishes an open letter in The New York Review of Books, “On Leaving America.”

  Explain this to us, Mrs. Cresspahl. You’re also German, aren’t you? Try to tell us what this means.

  Mr. Enzensberger wrote publicly to the president of Wesleyan University to say that he was resigning as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies there. He begins with a few elementary considerations.

  He publicly admits he thinks the class that rules the United States of America (including the government) is the most dangerous group of people in the world. “The most dangerous body of men on earth.” Paul Goodman said the same thing last October in a speech to military industrialists: “You are, at the present time, the most dangerous body of men in the world.” Well, who wants to quibble over a quotation being exactly accurate. “In the world”—that sounds so blah. No: “on earth.” Solemn. Resounding. Downright biblical. “On earth.”

  Because Mr. Enzensberger was unaware of this fact three months ago, he now, three months later, intends to publicly leave this country.

  This West German has heard from many Americans that they are deeply troubled by the state of their nation. When Mr. Gallup goes forth among this nation, he can ask a very large number of people questions. How many Americans has this West German met in twelve weeks? Belonging to what social classes, or class?

  In any case, this West German’s result does correspond with the Gallup poll from yesterday. He doesn’t presuppose much knowledge on the part of those he is writing to.

  Well, these many Americans have told him that they feel the crises in this country, not least the undeclared war in Vietnam, are accidents, mismanagements, “tragical errors.” To this interpretation Mr. Enzensberger cannot subscribe. Obviously the obvious reaches new obviousness once an Enzensberger says it.

  The ruling class of the United States has ruined so many countries; nobody can feel “safe and secure” anymore, not in Europe, not even in America itself. No one has claimed otherwise. But at least this gives him the chance to tell us that he needs to feel safe and secure.

  Mr. Enzensberger admits that he is wasting our time with his truths; he would like to present them “in a scientific way” but just doesn’t have the space.

  How absolutely horrid of The New York Review of Books to refuse him the necessary column inches. And the editor of the journal Kursbuch, Mr. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, cannot possibly be sufficiently condemned for his horridness in closing its pages to the truths of Mr. Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

  Moreover, others have already treated these truths at great length; Mr. Enzensberger says so himself. He gives the names of these American scholars: suggested reading for the readers of The New York Review of Books. He apparently feels these readers have some reading to catch up on. Baran and Sweezy, in fact.

  The academic community in this country does not think much of these other scholars’ work on the topic Mr. Enzensberger does not have the space to discuss scientifically; it has called their work old-fashioned, boring, and rhetorical, or so Mr. Enzensberger has gathered, and he wants to get at least that much straightened out.

  He discusses our society. It “has become permissive about the old taboos of language,” the “ancient and indispensable” words of four letters, fuck and shit and piss. The whole society came to that decision, and Mr. Enzensberger was there.

  But there is another society: polite society. This is where Mr. Enzensberger has gotten to know his ninety-eight million Americans. By common consent, they have banished other words: exploitation and imperialism. These words have “acquired a touch of obscenity” in Mr. Enzensberger’s polite society. Among the like-minded, needless to say. However, to do away with the word for a problem is by no means to get rid of the problem itself. So true.

  Mr. Enzensberger then turns to the notion that “bank presidents, generals, and military industrialists” (Paul Goodman, q.v.) “look like comic-strip demons.” He wishes to correct this misapprehension. They are in fact well-mannered, nice, “possibly lovers of chamber music with a philanthropic bent of mind”—the same kind of people the Nazis had too. All right then. Now we know. Their “moral insanity” derives not from their individual character but from their social function. After these astonishing, original insights, surely no one will go on thinking that the President of the USA is acting in his capacity as a private individual. You have to say what has to be said.

  Nor is Communism what Mr. Enzensberger’s analysis is giving voice to. He has no reason to fear this time-honored indictment. Fearless as he is. For the word Communism, used as a singular, has become rather meaningless—it has many meanings now, conflicting, some even mutually exclusive. So there’s not much to fear there, and Mr. Enzensberger fears not. But just in case this is not sufficient to cover his back, Mr. Enzensberger also has Greek liberals, Latin American archbishops, Norwegian peasants, and French industrialists at his side—his whole polite society. American industrialists are “the most dangerous body of men on earth,” Paul Goodman says so too, but French ones aren’t. And these auxiliaries of his are moreover not Communists, at least they are not generally thought of as being in the vanguard of Communism. So nothing can happen to Hans Magnus Enzensberger. He has stated his claim in public; now it’s our job to back him up and not take away his sense of safety and security. Otherwise it would turn into a real shitshow (all branches of society have become permissive about taboo words, since they’re indispensable).

  Which means, which logically entails, from which follows: a fact. That 125 million people (“most Americans”) have no idea of what they and their country look like to the outside world.

  No! Inconceivable! How can it possibly be true! How, then, do they look to the outside world without knowing it? Without having the least idea?

  Mr. Enzensberger has read the answer in the look that follows American tourists in the streets of Mexico, soldiers on leave in Far Eastern countries, businessmen in Italy or Sweden. Sweden seems to be an alternate. What’s more, the same look is cast on embassies, destroyers, and billboards advertising American products, from General Motors to IBM. An international look, the same in every country. Wherever the look is not looked, there and only there will you find the territory of the US of A.

  Enzensberger recognized it easily, this look. And by God he’ll tell us why. It’s a terrible look, one that makes no distinctions and no allowances. Mr. Enzensberger has felt it on himself, because he is a German.

  In 1945, the Germans had to answer to the world for fifty-five million dead, plus six million more victims of the death camps.

  In Mr. Enzensberger’s eyes, American citizens carry the weight of a comparable guilt.

  Never mind about the dead. The dead can be counted on to keep their mouths shut.

  What follows is an analysis of this international look. The attempt to analyze it. Modestly denying that he is the favorite, then crossing the finish line first after all. And then the laurel wreaths of victory too. “Try to analyze.”

  This modest, timid schoolboy—who manages to figure everything out in the end—says: The look consists of a blend of distrust and resentment, fear and envy, contempt and outright hate.

  And anyone who doesn’t believe it is welcome to come meet him in Rome in the summertime and see the proof for himself by the fountain at the foot of the Spanish Steps.

  For you see, passersby in Mexican, Far Eastern, Italian (or Swedish) streets have already analyzed American foreign policy. It is only in America, and especially in the pages of The New York Review of Books and the groves of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., that people don�
�t know what’s what. But here at last is Mr. Enzensberger to tell us.

  This look hits President Johnson. There’s hardly a capital city in the world where he can now show his face in public.

  Here many of Mr. Enzensberger’s listeners will no doubt audibly sigh: If only.

  Because of all the heads of state in the world, the President of the USA is the only one protected by security measures whenever he appears in public.

  Since that’s not true, Mr. Enzensberger moves quickly to the “kind old lady” across the aisle from him on the flight from Delhi to Benares. That look hits her too. Bad news for the airline, isn’t it. All that money spent on advertising and now Passenger Enzensberger is undermining it, maybe the flight attendants too.

  It is an indiscriminate, blind, undistinguishing, unallowing look, lock stock and barrel.

  It is “a manichaean look.” That is to say, it comes from followers of a doctrine of dualism between the Lord of the World of Light and the King of Darkness between Spirit and Matter, with the World and Man created from an unseemly and deplorable mixing of the two. According to this doctrine, the World and Man can be saved only when the portions of Light are extracted from Matter once more and returned to the World of Light. This process continues until the final purification in the Fire of the World. Initiates can hasten it by simply abstaining from sexual reproduction. It is also greatly assisted when the Elect renounce the pleasures of meat and wine. They are advised to avoid work. Possessions should be cast aside to the extent possible. However, anyone who lacks this elite wisdom—who has children and eats meat and drinks booze and works and does so using his own means of production—will receive a look from these Manichaeans: like this. “Manichaean.”