by Uwe Johnson
Mr. de Rosny, vice president of his bank, jaunts carefree around the world, and in Mexico, in Bangkok, in Rome (or Stockholm), the locals look at him, and all these locals are childless old people, monks and hoboes, owning nothing, vegetarians, teetotalers. Manichaeans.
Mr. Enzensberger does not like this look.
While he feels obliged to tell us all this, he still feels sorry for us.
Mr. Enzensberger sees a connection between the blind gaze of the Manichaeans and the fact that he does not share President Johnson’s beliefs. Someone might secretly suspect a certain something; he is going to put a stop to that. Actually, every last thing the president says about collective graft and collective guilt is not the view of Mr. Enzensberger.
Anyway, he does admit that other countries exploit and pillage the third world too. In case his readers are unfamiliar with this process, he describes it.
What Mr. Enzensberger admires in America: the work of three political student groups. Hardly comparable with Europe.
And he does “resent the air of moral superiority which many Europeans nowadays affect with respect to the United States” just because their own empires have been shattered. He knows such Europeans, and he can’t stand them. They seem to regard it (that is, shattered empire) as a personal merit. There certainly are Europeans like that, and they are deeply abhorrent to him. All this hypocritical nonsense.
However, he does want to insist on such a thing as personal responsibility for what your own country’s government is doing. He cannot spare us that, for he has not been spared it himself. We’ve been looking for someone like this for a long time! Someone willing to take responsibility for a West German president suspected of signing concentration camp blueprints.
When Mr. Enzensberger thinks about it, it all seems familiar to him. Conditions in America today are like they were in Germany “in the middle Thirties.” Respectable statesmen visited Berlin and shook hands with the Führer; such things happen in America.
For example, most people refused to believe that Germany had set out to dominate the world.
Just like in America. Here Mr. Enzensberger’s many Americans have told him that they refuse to believe that their government is trying to dominate the world.
In Germany, there was a lot of racial discrimination and persecution going on. Just like in America.
It’s, oh, some three hundred years back that German square-rigged galleons set out from the African coast loaded to the gunwales with black men and women that they planned to bring to market in Hamburg and sell off as cheap concubines or bargain beasts of burden. Just like in America.
Where people constantly parade Negroes through the streets with shaved heads and signs around their necks saying they’ll never file a complaint with the police about the Storm Troopers again. Just like in Germany in the middle thirties.
Lastly, Germany had “a growing involvement in the war against the Spanish revolution.” Just like America.
Vietnam is the Spain of our generation! That’s what such people say.
But they don’t ask their friends the French industrialists for discreet donations for the side they hope wins.
They give public speeches, to make sure that no one might think they’re secretly fans of America. The friends of the legal Spanish government sent shiploads of medical supplies, brought big checks, took weapons in hand and fought in brigades against the military clique, and one at least went to see what was happening so that he could write a book about it.
Only at this point, after the Spanish Civil War that stands in for the war in Vietnam, does Mr. Enzensberger see his analogy break down. For instance, there’s the destructive power wielded by Mr. Enzensberger’s present masters. Power of which the Nazis could never dream.
And if they did anyway, if they dreamed of a rocket that could reach New York, so much the worse for dreams.
We have also today reached a degree of subtlety and sophistication unheard of in the crude old days, says Mr. Enzensberger. Verbal opposition today is licensed, well-regulated, and even encouraged by the powerful. So that’s who’s encouraging him.
It is a precarious and deceptive freedom for Mr. Enzensberger. He pictures censorship and open repression, direct and hard; but no, he doesn’t want that either.
Dear Mr. President, he writes, to the president of Wesleyan.
It took him three months to discover that the advantages he was being given would end up disarming him; that in accepting an invitation and money, he had lost his credibility; and that whatever he might have to say would be devalued by the mere fact of his being in Middletown, Conn., on these terms.
He’ll probably manage to defend himself just fine against West German money, but he’s not up to taking on the dollar.
A piece of advice has been given him: To judge an intellectual it is not enough to examine his ideas; it is the relation between his ideas and his acts which counts. Mr. Enzensberger has now decided to act. He is leaving a small town north of New York and going to San Francisco and from there on a trip around the world. Not really. Around the earth.
For it is one thing to sit in comfort and study imperialism (there it is again, that obscene word). To confront it where it shows a less benevolent face—yes, peasant, that is quite another thing.
He’s been to Cuba. The agents of the CIA in the airport of Mexico City were taking pictures of every passenger leaving for Havana!
No other country anywhere has its foreign intelligence service take people’s pictures!
Nor do they invade other, smaller countries and leave traces; their respective economic systems never leave “scars” on “the body and on the mind of a small country.” No way.
Mr. Enzensberger has seen it for himself.
Mr. Enzensberger has made up his mind to go to Cuba and to work there for a substantial period of time. Maybe three years.
This is hardly a sacrifice, he writes.
He just feels somehow that he can learn more (“joy”) from the Cuban people than he could ever teach the students of Wesleyan University about political attitudes.
He wants to be of use to the Cuban people. He, himself, personally, wants to be of use to an entire population.
The transformation of Mr. Enzensberger into an asset of the Cuban people, live on stage, step right up. No tricks, no double curtains, no veils!
This letter is a meager token of gratitude for three peaceful months.
It was three peaceful months anyway.
He realizes, of course, that his case is, by itself, of no importance or interest to the world outside the university.
Then he goes and gets his letter published in The New York Review of Books.
Because his case does raise questions.
That it does.
Which do not concern him alone.
Definitely not.
Which he therefore wants to answer in public.
No, not so confident. Which he therefore wants to try to answer.
As best he can.
As best he can, yes. And are these the right questions?
And now let’s see how he signs off to the university president who tried to disarm him with advantages, make him lose his credibility, devalue whatever he might have to say. How, according to Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s teachings, should we treat an enemy?
With sincerity and devotion.
“Yours faithfully,
Hans Magnus Enzensberger,
January 31, 1968.”
– This countryman of yours, had he never been to this country before?
– He’s been here many times, and for long stays too.
– Mrs. Cresspahl, why is this German treating us like children? Elementary-school children.
– He’s proud of being such a quick learner; he’s just trying to show us his progress, Mr. Shuldiner.
– So now we’re supposed to go to Cuba too? Doesn’t he have anything to do in Germany?
– You should never read other people’s mail, even if
they show it to you.
– But he must have been wanting to set an example for you, since you’re German.
– Naomi, that’s why I don’t want to live in West Germany.
– Because of all the hot air from people like that?
– Yes. From good people like that.
Last night the fog hung twilight over the river early, and this morning there was a thick haze left over. Even the fourteenth floor was invisible in its wrapping. This afternoon there were heavy rain showers rattling the window, into the evening.
March 1,1968
At six in the morning there was snow in the park. In the city it turned right to slush. At lunchtime, Lexington Avenue was almost dry, with bright sun.
Mr. Greene has given up. Twenty years ago he opened a tiny jewelry store on Lexington Avenue between Eighty-First and Eighty-Second Streets, one of the many stores we went to all the time as though there weren’t such businesses on upper Broadway too. His store was kept locked in the middle of the day, and he would scrutinize his customers through the grate before he released the catch with the push of a button. His eyes, almost cornflower blue, look and see precisely; he tried to recognize the customer by sight by the second time. Marie got her first ID bracelet engraved by him. His work desk was neatly stocked with many instruments. – Don’t throw out that watch: he said, when he could have tried to sell us a new one. – It’s a good watch. Made in Ruhla, now where’s that? In recent years his store had been held up seven times and cleaned out once, and now the insurance companies aren’t interested. His policy has been canceled and he’s closing up shop. His store gets a burial of honor in the Times, with a slice of the personal and statistical story and relevant social-critical commentary from an insurance agent, such as: “Years ago, the hardest thing to find was customers. Now, the hardest thing to find is underwriters.” And since the police decline to comment on the subject, the Times remarks that the police decline to comment.
The Jerichow police department, three men strong now that the air force had come to town, was spared having to help the Gestapo with the expulsion of Aggie Brüshaver. Aggie left of her own free will.
As a rule, pastors’ wives keep the right to live in the pastor’s house when their husbands are in jail. But the state felt Brüshaver had gone too far with Daniel’s penitential prayer the day before Lisbeth’s burial. Rather than dispute the assertion that the devil (your adversary) walketh about as a roaring lion (1 Peter 5), he handed his interrogators the citation for that passage as well as the others that an attentive member of his congregation had been writing down since 1936. After serving his sentence, he was to be put into protective custody in a concentration camp, until a point in time not yet determined. The high consistory of the church likewise felt that the funeral ceremony giving the Cresspahl corpse equal rights had gone too far, so there was no help to be expected from that quarter, nor any chance of a renewed posting to Jerichow. He was not only officially suspended; the authorities were not above a sentence of complete expulsion. The illegal church authorities, the National Council of Brothers, could have used its money for Aggie. People like the von Bobziens weren’t shy about sending her potatoes and game without charge, leaving their car parked outside the pastor’s house even in broad daylight; after Aggie Brüshaver left town, Baron von Rammin left the German Faith Movement “for National Socialist and religious reasons,” giving public notice. It did not escape Aggie that the people of Jerichow were also pushing her to leave. Her children were left in peace in school—here Head Teacher Stoffregen made one of his unfathomable distinctions; people continued to greet and talk to her on the street. But no one came to visit, and Aggie noticed from the, as it were, surprised and questioning glances that the Jerichowers felt it was a burden to stick by her and Brüshaver. When she’d been allowed to visit him at the detention center in Rostock, she had also visited her hospital, and the hospital had been happy to take her back as a nurse. Now she and her children lived a good distance away, in Rostock old town, near St. Jacobi Church; her eviction order didn’t find her at home and wasn’t forwarded after her.
By that point the Jerichow congregation was in the care of a vicar who didn’t want to abandon his assistant pastor position in Rande either, so religious services were held in Jerichow only every other week. Vicar Pelzer said let us pray for the persecuted and oppressed, in general, not for Brüshaver by name, partly out of caution and partly out of disapproval for Brüshaver’s lack of caution, and Jerichow didn’t like Pelzer. That was how things stood. Then Wallschläger arrived.
Wallschläger the resplendent. Wallschläger the savior. Wallschläger, herald of the joy of standing with Adolf Hitler while simultaneously being a Christian. He was a little wild, and the church authorities had already had to remove him from other positions; in Jerichow he stayed six and a half years. He didn’t look like much. Nothing stood out: partly bald, hooked nose, wide mouth, nothing. Maybe you hardly saw him because he didn’t seem possible. In Jerichow, joy was never shown so forcefully, with a raised and also wavering voice. Not even if you’d finally had a boy after seven girls, or had a secret stash of money. Wallschläger could go there, even about the Jews.
Wallschläger seriously believed he could still save the congregation of Jerichow from the ethical coarsening caused by that Brüshaver, and he cheerfully reviewed what he saw as the man’s errors. He did it theologically. What is the Christian faith anyway? Well? Nothing that came out of Judaism! Jesus made a Jewish understanding of the Old Testament impossible, and anyone calling Him a Jewish traitor who poisoned His own faith better look out! Luther and Bismarck and Hindenburg were German, and what Germans they were, and they were Christians. Now let us pray. He did it historically. He told some story about a raid in the heath near Mölln in 1638, and even a local historian like Stoffregen had to shake his head. Already, three hundred years ago, the Jews had concealed and employed marauding soldiers! And now let us turn to the book of Judges. He understood that most of his congregation lived off the land, so he did it locally. The famine in Schleswig-Holstein during the war was the Jews’ fault! And a group of Jewish professors had brought about the slaughter of a million pigs in 1914!—because allegedly there wasn’t enough grain and potatoes to feed them. They would not be allowed to prevent the victory of German arms again!: he cried, and he asked his congregation to thank God with him for the deliverance from this accursed people (God knew what He was doing when He hadn’t sent Jesus into the world in Germany). They didn’t want to hear this in Jerichow, though. They were done with the Jews. Anyway, people from elsewhere had taken care of Tannebaum. Hadn’t they tried to keep Arthur Semig on the down low for as long as they could? They didn’t want any lessons about that. It was their business. None of a newly arrived special pastor’s.
Wallschläger didn’t stop with the Jews; after them it was his own race’s turn. The number of people leaving the church did not decline. In one year, four; the next year, ten. It wasn’t worth the church taxes, ten percent of one’s income tax plus two marks. It wasn’t worth it for the kind of communion where the wine no longer meant the old kind of blood, it meant that of the National Socialist martyrs. Wallschläger still shouted a fiery Heil Hitler whenever he walked into a room where people were standing around a bed in which someone had just died. He was called out to the estates only for emergency baptisms. Not even Pauli Bastian liked the new pastor. He played the gentlemen where Methling had made a kind of comradely bluster and Brüshaver had prayed politely. Pauli Bastian gave notice for January 1, 1940, and afterwards came from Rande to the Jerichow service a few times, sitting in the second row, arms crossed over his chest, gravely observing the pastor, a thoughtful expert, an independent man. Bastian had augmented his salary with farmwork, the weather had given his face truly dignified furrows, and people around Jerichow occasionally said that when you came right down to it, Pauli’s appearance and demeanor was more like a pastor’s—as long as he didn’t open his mouth. Pauli was so exalted by this talk
that he forgot the second half of the comment. What they said about Wallschläger was: Wool-whatever, don’ care where he pulls the wool, that’s not his job.
Cresspahl didn’t leave the church. He stayed for Lisbeth’s sake, and if Wallschläger was the church then so was Brüshaver.
With Alwin Paap’s help Cresspahl had turned a corner of the house into a small workspace, enough for repairing furniture. Alwin Paap had liked his six weeks as master of the house and grounds; he felt less like an employee, and now automatically greeted customers with firm confidence, as Cresspahl had told him to do while he was away. Alwin had succeeded in finding a girl as well—once someone knew about the strength in his body, a slightly crooked jaw wasn’t too bad. Alwin had moved into the main house, the east gabled room. Its windows couldn’t be seen from the cemetery, much less from the pastor’s house. Still, Wallschläger couldn’t resist getting involved. He went into the house, paid a visit to the man who looked at him like a stranger on Brickworks Road and said hello to him as if by mistake, if he did at all; it’s not like he was interested in discussing his wife’s death with him. He was flabbergasted, he couldn’t believe that the two men barely looked up from their work, let a squared board fall at his feet, neglected to offer him a seat, and were clearly even less interested in having a conversation in the living room. In his resplendent, exalted voice, Wallschläger cried that he, he too had been young once. He was over fifty, with gray skin, often with foam on his lips. But he could not endure that Cresspahl—! Cresspahl half turned and looked at his visitor. – Izzis your house?: he asked, not bothering to wait for an answer, and Wallschläger had to put up with an apprentice carpenter taking him out into the hall and to the stairs and slamming the door behind him. Alwin Paap now held his head high and looked as tall as he actually was. Cresspahl had let him bring the girl into the gabled room, and now this pastor wanted him to go lie outside with Inge Schlegel on the wet ground in the cold spring! Alwin was no longer in the habit of letting other people meddle in his business, especially not when it came to setting a date for a wedding. – Yer comin along: Cresspahl said when he got back, and this was one of the few occasions when Paap actually turned red.