Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  And yet there are people in Germany who expect it of me.

  March 21, 1968 Thursday

  A West German actor, formerly an East German actor, has returned to East Germany because he is sure that the powers that be there play no part in the oppression of the Negroes in the United States or the American war in Vietnam. He didn’t know that before. When a country’s crimes lie heavy on one’s conscience, one simply moves to another country.

  There are also critics of the war with the rank of former marine commandant. General David M. Shoup estimates that up to 800,000 American troops would be required just to defend South Vietnamese population centers against Communist attack. The only way the United States could achieve military victory would be by invading North Vietnam. The Vietnamese war was not worth the cost, he said.

  School in Jerichow had gotten Cresspahl’s child to the point that in November 1942 she did her homework with the People’s Receiver whispering next to her; she turned the volume way up after every victory fanfare announcing a “special report.” She was waiting for the Soviets to lose Stalingrad. First of all, she wanted it over and done with; second, she was on the side of the German troops. Cresspahl had his own reasons for giving her the biography of Reich Air Marshal Göring, or books like Stukas or Mölders and His Men—the child should show innocent enthusiasm for the German military at school, and especially for the air force. Cresspahl got his playacting; the child got her injuries. (Cresspahl consoled himself with the hope that the war would be over by the spring of 1943.)

  Back then, school in Jerichow had eight grades. After fourth grade, children were divided into those meant to attend school for only as long as was legally required, and those whose parents could send them to the lyceum and gymnasium in Gneez. Gesine didn’t know that she was meant for Gneez starting in 1943, and she had come to terms with the Hermann Göring School as one did with a home, a homeland, with living in Jerichow.

  The principal was Franz Gefeller: Sudeten German, Henlein putschist, party speaker in Gneez district. He had realized that if he pulled back his mouth he looked almost identical, his whole face did, to Reich Minister of Propaganda Goebbels; he liked to put on this expression, especially when punishing children. In his normal state he was easy to take for a cocky short man. When screaming he often slipped into falsetto. When he flung his hand out high for the Nazi salute, it seemed too short, surprisingly short.

  Yooo are a child of Gerrmanny,

  So keep always in mind

  What the cruel enemy forced on you

  In the Treaty of Ver-sall-eye!

  In first grade, when Gesine learned the old German Sütterlin handwriting, her teacher was Prrr Hallier and there was no doubt that his class epitomized the school as a whole. He didn’t start teaching until he had drilled into his class how to sit down and stand up in unison. Whoever wasn’t synchronized was the first to be called on. He was one of the men “they hadn’t taken.” He had put up a little shelf under Hitler’s picture, with a vase, and considered it an honor to ask a student to buy fresh flowers for the idol. He suffered from how hard it was to make friends in a small town and would often announce that he was planning to drop by for a visit. Gesine had thought he was “her” teacher and felt betrayed when she wasn’t allowed to be in the room during Cresspahl’s first conversation with him. He was called Prrr because he interrupted children the way you tell a horse to stop. He handed out grades in the school’s sandy courtyard, after the children had come in and sung. He betrayed the Cresspahl child once again by not giving her an A in Conduct, having never once called her attention to any problems. He’d observed her all year long, never warned her, and pushed her right into the trap. Then “they” did take him after all, and in June 1940 he was shot and killed.

  Cresspahl was also upset by the B in Conduct. It impressed upon him the fact that diligence in this subject was supposed to make children submissive and obedient for later life.

  Then came Olsching Lafrantz, proud of her last name, bitter over the first name the children had hung on her—Oldie in Platt—for she considered herself still marriageable, since even at forty her hair could be called red. Freckles, scraggly, like governesses in books. For Gesine, she no longer merely epitomized the school, she was an individual, and they clashed with each other. Oldie Lafrantz was upset that the Cresspahl child stood out; the child was upset that she wasn’t allowed to stand out. She moved around, she stood up without being asked, she talked back because she wanted her teacher to notice her. Miss Lafrantz, to supply a vivid concrete example in math class, used Storm Trooper columns in rows of three and groups of six. She taught the Latin script instead of the German, giving as justification that the Germans had to write like the worldwide empire they were about to conquer. (“So that other peoples can understand our Führer’s orders.”) She was a good-natured person, who sometimes complained as though harried by something. Gesine Cresspahl didn’t understand how she could call children a burden. Conduct: B.

  In third grade, little Cresspahl underwent her first entanglement. She had noticed a boy named Gabriel Manfras because he seldom spoke. His face was taciturn too—Slavic of cheekbone, slanted of eye. He could talk when the teacher wanted him to, though. The Cresspahl girl wanted this boy to notice her, and she swung on locked, outstretched arms between two desks, until her shoe slipped off her foot. She fetched it from under the blackboard, told the other kids to look, and repeated the trick. This time, in an unbelievable swerve to the left, the shoe went flying through the closed window. It was during break, and at once it was totally silent. In those days children were awed to the point of inner terror by the hierarchy starting with the teacher and reaching its pinnacle with Adolf Hitler; many of the children came from farming families too. Manfras was among the most frightened. Oldie Lafrantz had never in her life had to endure such criminal behavior. She didn’t even trust herself to punish it properly. Little Cresspahl was sent to the principal’s office.

  She felt it wasn’t fair to be punished for a mistake. If she’d deliberately flouted the rules then fine, she’d have answered for that. She left the schoolhouse wearing one shoe, got the other from the snow, and ran to the only public phone booth on Market Square to call Cresspahl. For Gefeller to take off his tinted glasses and look at her with his strained dark eyes—that was punishment she didn’t deserve. She was accused, per Olsching Lafrantz, of damaging state property and wasting material essential to the war effort, such as glass and wood. Cresspahl ordered her to the airfield, repaired the damage that evening with glass from the stock in his basement, and did not bring her to his meeting with Olsching Lafrantz. Conduct (pained): B.

  The next teacher was Ottje Stoffregen. By that point he had accepted what Jerichow had done to his first name, Otto; had reconciled himself with the Nazis’ suspension of all local history magazines; considered himself prudent. When he did bring himself to resist, the resistance took the form of practicing the old German Sütterlin script, “so you can read your grandparents’ letters.” There were not many grandparents in or around Jerichow who wrote letters. Ottje Stoffregen hit. Anyone who arrived late had to walk slowly past him and get at least three painful whacks with Ottje’s cane in the soft spot between the neck and the shoulder. The first time it happened to the Cresspahl child, she said then and there that it didn’t hurt, to minimize her shame before the other children, and Ottje repeated the ceremony. Ottje didn’t forget that this was Lisbeth’s child—the Lisbeth whose hand he had sought in marriage, with poems and letters, until he’d made himself ridiculous throughout Jerichow; his behavior toward the child alternated between harsh and indulgent. Alcohol had made him liable to fits of melancholy, and he sometimes looked at the child with what seemed to be tears in the corners of his eyes. He had become short-tempered, too, and sometimes hurled Cresspahl’s notebook from his desk all the way to the back wall of the room, over four rows of desks. She had written “Better Betimes.” Stoffregen never forgot that by all rights he should have been the pr
incipal, not this “phony German” Gefeller, “foreign war booty”—but he followed Gefeller’s orders, even when he scheduled him for two hours starting at eleven and then a sewing class for girls at two. Cresspahl’s child didn’t come to school on those days, bringing excuses from her father like: “My child has to eat,” and: Was Stoffregen saying he wanted the air base canteen to change their hours? Cresspahl had heard only vaguely about Stoffregen’s courtship of Lisbeth, since it would have upset him; Stoffregen took Cresspahl’s notes as deeply mocking. Stoffregen harangued Cresspahl’s child in a way he secretly thought of as “cutting,” and brought up Cresspahl’s demands for “special treatment,” for an extra sausage, in such sincere outrage that the child actually had a fleeting vision of a fat, lightly browned sausage. You can’t listen to Stoffregen when he’s like that. Maybe that’s how a person looks when tasting something extra special. Conduct (in mawkish fury): B.

  The discipline Gefeller imposed was consistent and predictable. In the spring of 1943, a farmer complained about a boy who’d supposedly startled his horses. Gefeller took the trouble to interrupt Stoffregen’s class. The boy was one who’d had to repeat several grades, who was bigger than the others and scared of school. Gefeller had him step forward. He tried to defend himself against the principal’s tirade. The farmer’s horses had bolted on their own, probably because they saw the boy’s span approaching. The complaint, though, was that he had tickled their ears with stinging nettles. Because of his lie, the boy had to pull down his pants and stand there in front of the whole class in his hand-me-down farmer’s long underpants. Then Gefeller took the boy in one hand and started beating him with the cane in his other, bellowing the whole time about crimes against the German People’s agriculture, and about prison. Since the boy was strong from working in the fields he could twist and turn, pulling Gefeller in a circle around him, all the while wailing as though the blows from the cane were hurting him. Gesine Cresspahl knew full well that she was about to do something dangerous, but she couldn’t stop herself—during the next recess in the schoolyard she spat on the ground at the principal’s feet. That’s how much she trusted in Cresspahl’s protection. Conduct: D.

  After she’d learned all this, Cresspahl sent her to the Gneez girls’ high school. She didn’t mind spending every day alone, with twice-daily train rides, as long as she no longer had to go to school in Jerichow.

  As far as Gefeller and Stoffregen were concerned, those grades in Conduct should have sent her straight to a special school—better yet, the Rauhes Haus institution for boys in Hamburg. Dr. Kliefoth, though, a bearer of High and Highest distinctions with his dissertation on the French word aller, a prince in the kingdom of the Gneez inspector of schools, swore another oath: that the child was well-behaved.

  March 22, 1968 Friday

  “ARMY HELPS POLICE LEARN ABOUT RIOTS

  By Homer Bigart, Special to The New York Times

  Fort Gordon, GA., March 20

  On a piney knoll some 60 city and state policemen and National Guard officers gathered yesterday to watch the testing of ‘nonlethal agents’ that may be used this summer to disperse riotous mobs in the nation’s cities.

  It was unseasonably warm, a lazy, hazy Georgia day more conducive to spring fever than to incendiary design.

  Robins sang, coffee and cookies were served and the post band played ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’ as the sixth class of the Civil Disobedience Orientation Course climbed out of an Army bus to begin a 20-hour course on the anatomy of a riot.

  This was the setting for a weekly exercise at the Army’s riot control school, an institution hurriedly conceived a few months ago to teach the grim lessons derived from the Detroit and Newark riots, and from other racial disorders of last summer.

  Army Manual Revised

  Each week since early February, a new class of police officers, guardsmen and occasional Secret Service or Federal Bureau of Investigation agents has completed the course, directed by the Army’s Military Police School. . . .

  Deadly serious, yesterday’s class sat in a covered stand and awaited the demonstration. Out front of the spectators, down a gentle, sandy slope at ranges of 50, 100 and 150 yards were clumps of black silhouettes, representing mobs.

  These ‘mobs’ were to be assaulted with tear gas hurled at them by foot troops or sprayed on them from a helicopter.

  First, the members of the class saw a squad of military policemen approach the nearest mob under a protective smoke screen. The squad, an eerie gas-masked apparition, emerged suddenly from the smoke to confront their assailants.

  Next, the M.P.’s shot off smoke grenades designed, the instructor explained, for signaling or perhaps just to determine wind direction. The grenades came in reds, greens, yellows and violets. Shot off together, their smoke combined in a bilious psychedelic cloud.

  Wind Direction Vital

  Wind direction was important, and many in the audience kept a nervous eye on the weather vane, knowing that two types of tear gas, so-called CS and CN, would be demonstrated next. It was recalled that on a previous occasion the stands had emptied suddenly when an errant wind sent a cloud of gas billowing up the slope.

  CS is the type of tear gas now favored by the Army. It is more devastating on a mob than the gentler CN used by the civilian police.

  CS, as described by the Army, ‘causes an extreme burning sensation, a copious flow of tears, coughing, labored breathing and tightness of the chest, involuntary closing of the eyes, stinging on the moist skin, and sinus and nasal drip.’ Nausea and mild vomiting may occur if a heavy concentration is used. . . .

  The high point of the demonstration came when a helicopter swooped over the range, emitting a white cloud of gas that was forced down on the mobs by the downdraft of the rotor blades.

  Tomorrow, the class attends another outdoor show, this one involving a simulated battle between militant civil rights demonstrators and the National Guardsmen. Both the rioters and the Guardsmen are enacted by the Army’s 503rd Military Police Battalion, one of the units that defended the Pentagon against the peace marchers last October.

  The clash is staged in a Hollywood type mockup of a community called Riotsville [Aufstandsstadt], replete with the normal targets of a looting mob—a liquor store, a television and appliance shop, a sporting goods store that sells guns, and a drugstore.

  ‘Baby,’ a firebrand militant portrayed by a 22-year-old Negro sergeant named Bob Franklin, harangues a crowd, charging police brutality. The crowd waves signs denouncing war. One sign reads, ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Bricks and rocks made out of rubber, but hefty enough to be realistic, are thrown at the ‘Mayor’ when he tries to placate the mob.

  But here comes the National Guard. Using tear gas, bayonets, an armored personnel carrier, and classic antiriot tactics, the troops prevail. ‘Baby’ is seized and taken off in the armored car, a prisoner.

  The class spends the rest of the study hours in a classroom dominated by a huge table model of a city that presents in miniature not only a slum area but also a downtown district with ‘skyscrapers,’ an industrial center, a port area, hospitals, schools, a city hall and critical facilities such as power stations.

  The class studies problems relating to the defense of these installations, the containment of mobs and the detention of prisoners. . . .

  The course examines just about every conceivable device that might be used by rioters, including sewers and underground storm drains.

  An instructor warns his class: ‘When troops are on a slope or at the bottom of it, dangerous objects can be directed at them such as vehicles, trolleycars, carts, barrels, rocks, liquids and so forth.

  ‘On level ground wheeled vehicles can be driven under their power toward troops, but the drivers can jump out before the vehicles reach the target. This target may be used for breaching roadblocks and barricades.

  ‘In using fire, mobs may set fire to buildings and motor vehicles to block the advance of troops, to create confusion and diversion
or to achieve goals of property destruction, looting and sniping.

  ‘Mobs may flood an area with gasoline or oil and ignite it as troops advance into the area.

  ‘They may pour gasoline or oil down a slope toward the troops or drop it from buildings and ignite it.

  ‘They may place charges of dynamite in a building, timed to explode as troops or vehicles are opposite the building, or be exploded ahead of the troops so that the rubble blocks the street.

  ‘They may drive dogs or other animals with explosives attached to their bodies toward the troops. The charges may be exploded by remote control, fuses or a time device.’

  Troops must be trained to ignore taunts, the instructor says. Troops, he says, ‘must be emotionally prepared for weird mob actions, such as members of the mob screaming and rushing toward them, tearing off their own clothes or deliberately injuring or maiming themselves.’

  But the need for stringent fire discipline is stressed. Only that force necessary to control the situation is to be exercised ‘in consonance with our democratic way of life and military teachings.’

  The revised Army manual expected April 1 will contain new sections on the control of arson and looting.”

  © The New York Times

  March 23, 1968 Saturday

  Every additional soldier that President Johnson sends to Vietnam costs the national budget between $20,000 and $40,000. (The family of a killed soldier receives a $300 allowance for funeral costs; that’s what an army funeral costs.)

  Now it’s in Pravda, too, that students in Poland have been disorderly for the last two weeks. Now it’s true in the Soviet Union too. So true, that “anti-Soviet agitators” are said to be behind the disturbances.

  Antonín Novotný, since his party doesn’t want to touch him, has resigned. (His son has resigned as well, if only from a sinecure.) The Communist Party’s presidium estimates the number of victims of the Stalinist judiciary system between 1952 and 1964 as 30,000.