by Uwe Johnson
I didn’t even have your address. Kliefoth wants to ask your permission first, make sure I’m allowed to know where you live in New York. Emmy Creutz, they went to see her too, probably imagining all sorts of dastardly things. It really is a small town.
Gesine, you won’t believe it: They’re renaming Brickworks Road. As Cresspahl Road! There’s going to be a plaque on your house, in bronze, and the kindergarten they’ve put in the building is going to be renamed Heinrich Cresspahl Kindergarten.
Your newspapers probably don’t say what’s going on here. What’s going on is that the Soviet Union has dug up its man Richard Sorge. They’re not called spies, though, they’re ‘scouts.’ ‘Heroes.’ So now the GDR needs its own scouts. And supposedly Cresspahl was one. Not for the Soviets, that’s too much to ask, but for the English, which is still against the Nazis. Gesine, is it possible? Child! I can’t wrap my mind around it! Gesine, write and tell me it’s not true!
Just so I know. (Don’t write to me, write to Kliefoth. I can just ask him if he’s received any letters with a ‘No’ full stop that he didn’t understand.) That’s all you can do.
It was in the papers, our People’s News, which used to be The Gneez Daily News but now it comes out of Schwerin, they only deliver to Gneez.
The paper had something about Ludwig Krahnstöwer, for his seventieth. Hero of the anti-Fascist resistance, that kind of thing. Claims to have been a radio operator from 1943 to 1945, in Hamburg, with the handle Jürss, or JÜRSS, but working for the Soviets and the British at the same time, and says that most of his Mecklenburg reports came from a single man, and says: from Cresspahl. He admits he never met him in person. He says: Cresspahl.
I’d sooner believe Jerichow is getting a tram line to Wismar! That’s the latest rumor.
Because if it’s true, Cresspahl could’ve lived like a king after the war and been happy! Since the Soviets would have known about his reports! Gesine, keeping something like that secret, I don’t believe any man alive could do that, and can’t possibly be true.
Just imagine, unveiling a new street sign and a memorial plaque here!
Honorary citizen of Jerichow, maybe, how does that sound!
You won’t do it, I know.
All I want to say is that I’m an old woman, I have my pride, never mind. I liked you very much, even when you weren’t a little girl anymore. After all, you were Lisbeth’s child. I would have loved to raise you; Cresspahl wouldn’t give you up. You didn’t notice an old woman walking by who’d once sewed your buttons on and pinned your hair up, you said a polite hello and kept walking. There were times when the town was laughing at me, too. And you had Mrs. Abs, she became like a mother to you, didn’t she. I only want you to know that I would have been happy to be that too. Not for Cresspahl’s sake, for you.
You know who’s writing this. I won’t see you again. It’s maybe because of my former life that I want to at least be remembered. By you. Never had any children, after all.
—A friend and well-wisher!”
April 2, 1968 Tuesday
Justice in Mecklenburg during the Nazi war:
Fedor Wagner, Polish carver in Groß Labenz, said Germany was guilty in the war against his country. Arrested September 3, 1939. Transported from Dreibergen-Bützow penitentiary to Auschwitz. No trace.
Wilhelm Zirpel, from Michelsdorf near Belzig, riverboat man, had listened to Radio Moscow and made antiwar statements in Malchin. Arrested December 11, 1939. Five years hard labor in Dreibergen-Bützow, in Sachsenhausen concentration camp after January 26, 1945.
Johann Lehmberg, from Rostock, engineer, spoke against rearmament. In prison since 1939; transported to KZ Neuengamme on January 22, 1940; later murdered there.
Louis Steinbrecker, from Rostock, grocer, called to labor service at the Walther Bachmann airplane factory in Ribnitz, arrested on December 27, 1939, for “treacherous statements,” sentenced to two years hard labor in February 1940, transported from Dreibergen-Bützow penitentiary to KZ Buchenwald where he died on July 31, 1942, “of pneumonia.”
Eduard Pichnitzek, from Neddemin, laborer, talked to Polish prisoners of war in their language and had a beer with them. Sentenced to three years in prison on April 22, 1940. Detention in Dreibergen-Bützow gave him pulmonary tuberculosis, from which he died on January 25, 1943.
Karl Saul, forty-three years old, from Schwerin, plumber, repeated news reports from foreign radio stations. Sentenced to three years hard labor on June 4, 1940, his wife to two years.
Martha Siewert, twenty-seven, from Teerofen in Karow, sentenced on June 17, 1940, to two years hard labor for listening to the BBC and for disapproving of the war.
Hermann Kröger, from Schwerin, bricklayer, talked to two Frenchmen at Ziegel Lake on August 12, 1940, and gave them cigarettes. He said: Workers from every country need to stick together. He was sent to jail for eighteen months.
Harald Ringeloth, twenty, from Grevesmühlen Reich Labor Service Camp, got two years hard labor on August 14, 1940, for subversive statements.
August Spacek, from Elmenhorst near Rostock, milker, let four Polish workmen in his apartment listen to foreign radio stations, and was sentenced for that to four years hard labor on October 2, 1940.
Friedrich-Karl Jennewein, from Güstrow, workman, was sentenced to two years hard labor on November 29, 1940, for subversive agitation, transferred to KZ Mauthausen on July 3, 1942, and died in Güstrow in 1946 from injuries sustained during his imprisonment.
Otto Trost, grocer in Schwerin, had listened to the BBC and spoken with a customer about its reports. He was sentenced for these acts to two and a half years hard labor on August 8, 1941, and died in Dreibergen-Bützow on October 20, 1943.
A tailor, a short, hunchbacked man, and his wife dragged a bucket of water over to prisoners of war, half starved, half dead of thirst, in Neu-brandenburg. The following day, both the man and his wife were arrested by the SS and disappeared without a trace.
On October 9, 1941, at the Kröger dockyard in Warnemünde, sixty-year-old Erdmann Fünning, boatbuilder, was arrested. For having discussed news from the BBC among his fellow workers, ten years hard labor was decreed for him on January 21, 1942.
Paul Koob, worker in the munitions factory in Malchow (I.G. Farben), called Adolf Hitler a traitor and the Winter Relief a war bond. He was sentenced on June 9, 1942, to two years in jail.
Master baker Köhn, Rostock, sold approximately a thousand loaves of bread to Polish prisoners of war between fall 1942 and early 1943 without collecting ration cards from them. That cost him two and a half years hard labor and a thousand-mark fine.
Johann Schulz, from Warin, sixty-eight years old, employed in the railroad-car factory in Wismar, was arrested for a second time in December 1942. He was sentenced on March 8, 1943, to five years in jail for the spreading of facts detrimental to the war effort. He witnessed the liberation in May 1945 from the Dreibergen-Bützow penitentiary and died on the way home, in Zernin, on May 12, 1945, of injuries sustained during his imprisonment.
On November 10, 1943, four clergymen from Lübeck were executed: the Catholic chaplains Johannes Prassek, Herman Lange, and Eduard Müller for listening to and spreading foreign radio reports, and the Protestant pastor Friedrich Stellbrink supposedly for the sermon he’d given on Palm Sunday, 1942, after the bombing of Lübeck.
Walter Block, excavation foreman and Communist Party functionary in Malchin, was arrested again in May 1939 for illegal political activity, spent six years in KZ Sachsenhausen and KZ Neuengamme, and drowned on May 3, 1945, in Lübeck Bay, along with eight thousand prisoners the Nazis had wanted to remove by ship in April.
Wilam Simic, a Serb, worked as a cook in the Dornier Works, Ltd., in Wismar. For giving Soviet prisoners of war food in the factory, he was given a sentence of six years hard labor on February 25, 1943.
Walter Jahn, from Güstrow, master mason, called to labor service in Priemerburg, predicted a clear defeat in July 1943 and was given three years in prison on October 11, 19
43.
Theodor Korsell, councilman and doctor of jurisprudence, fifty-two years old, had said in the Rostock streetcar after the fall of Mussolini: the leader of Germany needed to resign, too, since the Germans could no longer possibly win. “And we don’t all want to burn ourselves on the pyre, do we?” He was executed on August 25, 1943.
Friedrich Schwarz, from Waren, fifty-four, workman, expressed satisfaction over the fall of Mussolini in front of fellow workmen. On November 16, 1943, the Niederdeutscher Beobachter reported that he had been executed.
Wilhelm Schröder, Schwerin, master carpenter, said on July 25, 1943, after the bombing of Hamburg: What, you still think we’ll win? I don’t believe it and I never did. Two-year prison term handed out on May 11, 1944.
Karl-August Grabe, from Grabow, sixty-four years old, cattle trader, said in the presence of others in late 1943 that Germany had lost the war. As a result, he faced the First Senate of the People’s Tribunal on February 26, 1944, and was sentenced to death.
On March 21, 1944, at 11 o’clock, the Polish forced-laborer Czeslaw Nowalkowski, twenty-three years old, was hanged on the parish land of Stove village, near Wismar.
Otto Voth, forty-one, a farmer in Zeppelin in Güstrow district, was arrested by the Gestapo on March 29, 1944, for having stated that the defeat of the Germans was no longer preventable. On January 25, 1945, a sentence of five years in prison was pronounced against him, to be spent in Dreibergen-Bützow.
Karl Willführ, from Eldena, riverboat man, called to labor service in the Dömitz dynamite factory (Dynamit Corp.), had protested against the mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war. In September 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo, in 1944 sentenced to three years hard labor, and on January 25, 1945, murdered in Gollnow prison in Pommern.
Ella Kähne, from Beckentin near Grabow, gave a Soviet prisoner of war some rubber cement in 1944, to patch up his boots. One year in prison.
On November 30, 1944, the laborer Josef Molka, born in Poland, living in Germany since 1929, was arrested with his three sons for having given POWs on the Mörslow estate near Schwerin food and news from the front. It was considered additionally incriminating that he had urged his children not to go to war and get themselves killed. He was sentenced to death on January 15, 1945, and killed on February 6, 1945, in Dreibergen-Bützow.
In Ziebühl, near Bützow, August Schlee, farmhand, spoke in favor of giving his village to the Soviets without a struggle. An SS commander shot him on May 2, 1945.
Marianne Grunthal, from Zehdenick, forty-nine years old, teacher, heard about Hitler’s death and shouted: Thank God, now this horrible war is over! On May 2, 1945, on the square in front of the train station in Schwerin, she was hanged from a streetlamp. Today the square is named after her.
The basement in the Dreibergen-Bützow penal institution where the executions took place is now a museum.
This was a whitewashed cellar. A steel beam had been mounted in front of the back wall behind one vault of the ceiling. Three hooks hung from it. Under the hooks are three low stools. Along the ceiling are two cords, along which two curtains can be pulled open or closed to make three separate death chambers. Outside the entrance arch a piece of dark cloth is hanging to either side, which could be drawn so that the victims walked into a dark narrow tunnel unaware that anyone was next to them hanging from a hook.
I sometimes dream about Cresspahl there.
April 3, 1968 Wednesday
– The Flushing line is out of service!: the invisible loudspeakers under Times Square say, and the passengers are standing five deep on the platforms of the shuttle to Grand Central. Today a lot of desks near Third and Lexington Avenues will sit empty for longer than usual. The New York Times folded in thirds serves well as a defensive club in the crowd.
The paper contains a photograph of Dr. Jozef Břeštanský, the deputy president of the Supreme Court in Czechoslovakia. He was supposed to draft a law for the rehabilitation of victims of the Stalinist purges, and the Slovak newspapers had doubts about his suitability for the task, given that he had taken part in these false proceedings himself in Bratislava in 1955. He disappeared five days ago and was found hanging awkwardly from a tree near Babice, with a rope around his neck.
President Johnson, who has promised to bomb only a little part of North Vietnam along the demilitarized zone, has sent his planes to Thanhhoa. Now The News York Times can measure the “credibility gap” between the president and the country: two hundred miles (322 km) wide.
The stock market believed in peace. The trading volume rose to 19.29 million shares. Around the world the dollar is respected again; gold stocks are creaking under the pressure of declining prices. What should we believe?
Giant headlines pushed through the crowd in the subway that evening: HANOI’S ANSWER. HANOI’S ANSWER. Mrs. Cresspahl borrows the front page from a student who has long since turned to the sports pages. Hanoi has said that talks will begin only after the United States has proved that it has really stopped unconditionally all acts of war.
The young man takes the page back, wraps it carefully around the rest of the paper, tries to jostle it straight and make it look brand new, and gives it to her for free, all in silence, with an expression of relief, mockery, and pity on his face, even when the stranger shakes her head.
You’re another one of them, aren’t you, ma’am. Taken in by everything. We’ll never get anywhere with them.
April 4, 1968 Thursday
The sky over the Hudson this morning is as overcast as it was over Ribnitz and the Saal Lagoon during the summer twenty-four years ago, when the Paepckes began their last vacation. This time they all met the train the Cresspahl child arrived on, Alexander in an unfamiliar uniform but still recognizable at once from his delight, his businesslike manner, his mock officiousness. Now the anticipated pleasures were replaced by the real ones. Alexander said: Many children, many blessings: said the sexton, pocketing the fee for the christening.
It may have been too late for the Althagen boat, or there may not have been room for six people with bags and suitcases; Alexander led his entourage diagonally across the station square to an ambulance that looked alarmingly official. Speaking to the children as if they were patients, he crammed them onto under next to the stretcher, enjoying their horror, amazement, and delight at this latest adventure. Now a vehicle of the municipal hospital was driving north along Fischland Road on very urgent business. Alexander was proud of an old Leonia friend’s willingness to do him a favor, and even prouder that he’d thought of this one. He sang with the children the whole way, loud and happily, and no one suspected a thing.
The evening was a long one for the children, but Alexander wouldn’t let them leave the house. They didn’t feel under observation; he never let them out of his sight. Gesine had to tell them about Jerichow, and it took him fifteen minutes to teach her the fractions her school hadn’t been able to ram into her head all year. Alexandra was sent off to the wardrobe and told to come back looking like the Queen of Sheba. Alexander had returned from the Soviet Union that morning and had seen his family again for the first time at the Stettin train station. He asked Paepcke Junior how school was going and taught him some new tricks for copying, “for when you’re in over your head, my boy.” For Christine, he demonstrated how she’d drunk from a cup when she was two. She used to hold it tight in both hands when it was full, carelessly let it drop when it was empty. Christine was now seven and excited to see how she’d held her pinkie elegantly away from the cup as a baby, before discarding it as useless, just like Alexander; she laughed even harder than the others, not hurt at all. Alexander was incapable of hurting a child’s feelings. There was a lot of talk that night about the past, about Lisbeth too. Lisbeth’s child realized that these people remembered her dead mother as a thoroughly delightful person, beautiful by the time she was eight, a friend to people and animals her whole life long, her mocking ways meant to hide her tenderness. Lisbeth’s sister didn’t say much, occasionally prompting Al
exander with half sentences, sometimes pressing both forefingers against the bridge of her nose as though fighting off pain. To the children she just seemed tired, and no one suspected a disaster. Christine and Eberhardt went trustingly to sleep on Hilde’s lap, their heads against Alexander’s chest, and were carried out, put to bed, gently kissed, and looked at while they slept.
The next morning the Shoreline Cliff coastal batteries were firing at the sea, and after the first dull thud Gesine waited for Alexander’s voice to come up through the ceiling and curse the Greater German Army for its unseemly behavior. But Alexander wasn’t there anymore.
The morning was almost white, with fringed cloud-boats in the sky. The reflection of light from the lagoon was an exquisite pain in the eyes. The paths between the small farms were protected and warmed by the tall bushy hedgerows. There were painter ladies sitting around in the meadows, like every year, trying to get the Dornenhaus onto canvas even though the old cottage was barely visible under its hipped roof and hidden behind the rambling thornbushes so high that they hung down over the roof, at 45 degree angles from the wind, thick and impenetrable. The familiar slat fence still ran along Border Road, the coastal cliffs fell off steeply as ever right where Pommern started, and the children remembered Alexander’s stories of the sea breaking through here. Border Road was bare on the Althagen side and densely built up on the Ahrenshoop side with buildings in splendid colors, in the famous blue, with the gardens sheltered from the wind and nurtured by the southern sun, way down below the steep slope up to the road, with hollyhocks in every color growing up to the roof. The children recalled Alexander’s serious explanation that these houses had a back door to the north, from the days when Mecklenburg and Pommern were at war and the inhabitants were not allowed to set foot on Border Road. It was Fischland, but not the right one. The vacation didn’t seem possible without Alexander.