by Uwe Johnson
By evening, Hilde could see that the children were at odds with her and the world. Alexander had not been on leave, he’d been ordered to southern France and had left the train against orders to help take the children to Althagen, to see the children one more time. It was more than he’d been capable of to openly say goodbye to the children. Hilde tried to make out that it was partly her fault that he’d had to go back to his post early that morning. Then she sternly ordered everyone to write letters to Alexander, and that way she salvaged the next day’s prospects.
Hilde sent the children out into the fields with the farmers. On the narrow strip of ground between the two bodies of water, the children rode with the harvesters on the jolting carts, ran alongside the mowers, tried to help bundle the grain into sheaves, sat and ate with them; they came home parched, dumb with exhaustion, and thought they’d been working. On Fischland the stooks weren’t sheaves leaning against one another like gables, as in Jerichow, but round cones perfect as pretend Indian teepees. In damp Mosquito Woods, separated from the Darss part of the peninsula by traces of inroads made by the Baltic, the children went blueberrying and were given for supper what they’d found, with milk, and they believed they were living off the work of their own hands. Hilde was capable of running all the way to the woods after a child who’d forgotten her sun hat. The Althagen house was surrounded with a solid gravel dike meant to distribute the rainwater from the roof evenly into the soil. It was an honor to be entrusted with the task of weeding the dike, called “plucking the dike,” with the Plattdeutsch puken. The evening walk to the beach for a swim was like a reward. A path ran through a very high field to the Shoreline Cliff on the Niehagen side, between willows and poplars shielded from the wind, an ordinary cart path that kept unexpectedly stopping at an abyss plunging down to the sea. Letters were written to Alexander about the watchdog at the Nagel farm that refused to allow public access to the levee and Lagoon Road; about people they’d run into on the village street; about visits to Alexander’s friends. It turned out that you could invent your vacation. They’d learned that from Alexander.
Today I know that this vacation wasn’t like that.
Not far from Althagen, on the other side of the Saal Lagoon, was Barth concentration camp. It held prisoners from the Soviet Union, from Holland, from Czechoslovakia, from Belgium, from Hungary, who had to work at a branch of the Ernst Heinkel Airplane Factory Corp. A Czech doctor, Dr. Stejskal, kept a list of the women and men who were buried in the Barth cemetery and the mass graves. There are 292 names on it. The bodies of 271 prisoners were sent from Barth to the Rostock crematorium. The causes of death were “tuberculosis,” “pneumonia,” “suicide.” There were people “shot while trying to escape,” and if a woman persisted in refusing to work building planes to attack her own country, she was taken back to Ravensbrück concentration camp and murdered with gas. We didn’t know that. Hilde Paepcke drove us to Barth, over the swivel bridge, to see the town. We saw nothing. The stretch of rails along which Cresspahl’s child rode to Fischland passed Rövershagen. In Rövershagen there was a concentration camp whose prisoners had to work for the Ernst Heinkel Airplane Factory Corp. Now I know.
Alexander’s family had arranged among themselves that Hilde shouldn’t spend this summer alone, so they came for weeks or weekends—great-uncles, aunts, dignified older persons, dressed more for a funeral than for a vacation. The children didn’t notice the worried advice being given in the house; the children played a game with the adults. They opened a flower shop on the front porch where they sold buttercups for a penny, daisies for two pennies, and the ladies and gentlemen waiting to buy stood in lines six or eight people long, snaking all the way to the dining room. The visitors had a long-practiced tone, formal and familiar in one, since every last one of them knew the whole family out to the great-grandfather and the fiftieth anniversary of a childhood prank. It was an overcoat of thickly woven, mutually recognized information, in which any individual person was barely noticed compared to the fact of their belonging, their compatibility with the others. Alexander’s aunt Françoise had taken charge of the advice-giving, even though she had never forgiven him for being kicked out of the Mecklenburg bar association. She was severe, forbidding, dressed in black and white in the hottest weather; she was the first one to go along with the children’s make-believe. The children were not to notice anything.
The presents Alexander had left for the children were white raincoats from the Soviet Union, waterproofed with a rubbery material. They felt unworn, smelled fresh from the factory, but there were sunflower seeds in the pockets. When Alexander had told stories about the reoccupied Baltic countries, it had seemed strange that the Baltic Sea was there too, in such thick, mighty forests. There the Baltic was like a shining snake in the forest.
From the postwar years I now know: Alexander was part of the Todt Organization. He’d had to put civilians to work from among the Soviet population, after the SS handed them over to him. One time, he had protested slightly against accepting a squad of fifty Jews because there were children in it. He got out of that one without a court-martial; the army took him back and sent him to NCO training. There was nothing else to be done. By that point, the war brooked no discussion. None of the Paepcke family connections were enough—not the Leonia fraternity connections in Mecklenburg, not the officers from the old army, not the connections from the Stettin Military Ordnance Department. It was unbelievable that the family couldn’t get him transferred to a safe position.
At Althagen they played a game where Alexandra Paepcke sat on one side of a turnstile in the border fence, Gesine on the other, and they spun the gate and sang: Now I’m in Pommern! Now I’m in Mecklenburg!
Memory of that summer preserves the turnstile, the vacation. It wasn’t like that.
April 5, 1968 Friday
I’m sorry they shot him.
You’re not sorry, Mrs. Cresspahl. Ma’am.
We’ve been living in the same building for six years, Bill.
Martin Luther King was a black man like me. You’re one of the whites.
Last night Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. It was around six p.m., seven o’clock New York time. He’d spent all day in his room at the Lorraine Motel. He’d chosen this motel for his stay because it was Negro-owned. He’d come to Memphis to support the sanitation workers on strike since Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12. A week ago he led a march in the strikers’ cause that ended in violence; the last rally had been on Wednesday. At about 6 p.m. he emerged from his room onto the balcony and chatted with friends standing in the courtyard parking lot.
– You mustn’t believe this of our country, Mrs. Cresspahl. It’s not like that.
– It is exactly like that. And worse.
– A Nobel Prize winner we shoot here in America must be a Negro, demanding equal rights for Negroes.
– Both the national and New York stock exchanges opened with a moment of mourning over the news. And there was another moment of silence at eleven.
– Do you know of a single Negro with a seat on the stock exchange?
– The riots are coming to New York tonight.
Dr. King was leaning over the railing. He was relaxed, open-faced, genial. He was dressed for dinner at a reverend’s house in Memphis. His driver warned him it was cold outside and told him to put on a topcoat. Dr. King promised he would. A friend introduced him to the musician who was to play at the rally later. Dr. King had asked him to play a Negro spiritual: “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” He greeted the man, glowing, and repeated his request. Then the shot rang out.
– He saw it coming.
– When he was flying to Memphis all the luggage on the plane had to be searched and the plane kept under guard, because of him.
– Last night he was on TV, alive. They showed his speech from Wednesday night. That his people would reach the Promised Land, but maybe not with him.
– TV should be banned.
Dr. King collapsed onto the b
alcony floor. He could still be seen from below because the railing was only iron poles, painted green. Blood gushed from the right jaw and neck area. His necktie had been ripped off by the blast. He had just bent over; if he’d been standing up, he wouldn’t have been hit in the face. Someone rushed up with a towel to stem the flow of Dr. King’s blood. Someone else tried to cover him with a blanket. Then someone came with a bigger towel. The fire department took ten or fifteen minutes to send an ambulance. He was carried off on a stretcher, the bloody towel over his head. He had only been out in the open about three minutes.
– The other Negro leaders laughed at him for trying to attain equal rights without violence.
– Many of them hoped he might be right after all.
– Now they have no choice but to believe in violence.
– There’s going to be white blood on our streets tonight.
– We’re trapped here like in a cage.
– The Negroes will be able to block all the trains by tonight.
– No whites’ll get out of this city alive.
The sound of the shot seemed to some of the people there to have come from a passing car. To others it sounded like a firecracker. A man in a nearby building, watching TV, thought it sounded like a bomb. When the perhaps fifteen people in the motel courtyard area, all Negroes and Dr. King’s associates, turned around to look at where the shot came from, police came running from everywhere, especially from where the shot came from. First they cordoned off an area of about five blocks around the Lorraine Motel. Then four thousand National Guard troops were ordered into Memphis and a general curfew imposed. Dr. King died at 7:05 p.m. (8:05 p.m.) during emergency surgery on a gunshot wound in the neck, “a gaping wound.”
– Well maybe they are overdoing it a bit.
– Flags at half-mast! It’s not like he was Kennedy.
– The blacks need to be smoked out, block by block!
– Maybe it was one of them that did it themselves.
– My hairdresser has had to wear dark glasses since last night because a Negro hit him under the eye with brass knuckles. And he’s French.
– What did he say?
– He just took off his glasses and looked at me.
– Do you really believe that there were no deaths in Harlem last night? They’re just trying to keep us calm.
– One single headline in the Times, and half the news on the rest of the page was about other things.
– Well maybe they are overdoing it a bit.
The police say the assassin was a white man in his thirties, who was fifty to a hundred yards away in a flophouse. Dr. King’s chauffeur saw a man “with something white on his face” creeping away from a thicket across the street. The police believe that a late-model Mustang was the killer’s getaway car. A high-powered 30.06 caliber rifle was found about a block from the scene.
– That’s gotta be planted evidence.
– Was he acting alone?
– Do you think Oswald was acting alone?
– Do you think it’ll be like with Kennedy?
– They may find the killer, but they won’t find who gave the orders.
After Dr. King was pronounced dead, his friends met in his room. They had to step across a drying pool of Dr. King’s blood outside the door to enter. Someone had thrown a crumpled pack of cigarettes into the blood.
– If the bank is going to close early, they should have closed at noon.
– By now the Negroes will have mined all the bridges and tunnels.
– The Negro soldiers in Vietnam are sending weapons home. You wouldn’t believe how many machine guns the mail delivers to New York every day!
– And hand grenades. And plastic explosives.
– They stabbed a white woman walking with her child on Madison Avenue because she was wearing a mink coat.
– And we send them to Vietnam, too, so that they’ll learn close combat.
– First the Indians. Then the blacks.
I’m sorry they shot him, Bill.
You’re very polite, Mrs. Cresspahl, I know that already.
I’m sorry.
And still, if the black people come here from Harlem tonight, I won’t lift a finger for you, ma’am. Do you know what it means to be scared?
I do.
You don’t know anything. You’re not black.
April 6, 1968 Saturday
“Mrs. Martin Luther King
St. Joseph’s Hospital
Memphis, Tennessee
Dear Mrs. King,
After the personal loss that you have suffered
that has befallen you
that the whites have inflicted on you, I want to express my—”
“Mrs. Coretta King
Lorraine Motel
Memphis, Tennessee
Dear Mrs. King,
In light of the loss that you and your children have suffered,
that the whites have inflicted on you and your children, and whose national importance the official sympathies of the government can do nothing to minimize,
it must feel strange to know that in your city, as in this one, people are walking around on Broadway, enjoying the weekend, pleasantly warmed by the sun. You know about the memorial march through New York yesterday, the dockworkers stopping work, Mayor Lindsay’s visits to the ghettos. In our neighborhood there are some businesses closed, including Jewish ones, with the Sabbath gaining another meaning this time besides that of their religion, on handwritten cardboard signs in memory and honor of your husband. But there aren’t many cars driving with lights on in broad daylight. And there are plenty of people in the street doing their Easter shopping, the sports events canceled today and tomorrow are just postponed, they might take place as early as Tuesday night, and I want to assure you that not everyone here agrees wi—”
“Mrs. Martin Luther King
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Atlanta, Georgia
Dear Mrs. King,
First I want to apologize for the telegram my daughter sent you last night, but I should tell you that the child is only ten
that in fact I share in the impulsive, hotheaded tone of that telegram, in a spir—”
Why can’t I do it! Tell me!
This is real, Gesine.
It’s not just another death.
It’s a death like ours. Predictable, likely. And yet unlikely.
Because he wasn’t Kennedy?
Because he was a Negro. Whether he preached nonviolence or violence. He’d gotten too visible.
That’s why I thought I should send a—
No, Gesine. What kind of country are you voluntarily choosing to live in? A country where black people get killed. So what is there for you to say.
You’re right. Nothing. Nothing.
April 7, 1968 Sunday
The news photos of the riots in Washington show dirty smoke, balls of it in the streets, spread wide over the city. It obscures the White House: the caption says. Another photo shows a low line of close-set buildings with half-collapsed facades, some already burned out to empty boxes. There’s still something left for the fire to devour in some of them. These are American houses, recognizable from their flat roofs and vertically divided windows. This is what a war in American cities would look like.
In Mecklenburg, at the middle school in Gneez, they were still saying in January 1945: You get orders first and explanations later!—not without a certain military element, as if the teachers were all amateur army officers, every last one. They sometimes made it more literary and said: Leave the thinking to the horses, their heads are bigger! whenever a child had said: I thought. . . .
The Cresspahl child didn’t say what she thought, she sat there mildly watching and taking good note of how the teaching staff handled a child who’d thought something. The Cresspahl child had a secret. She knew that the war was almost over. She’d told Cresspahl what she’d heard in school, something about the V-2 rockets laying waste to London, and her fath
er let slip a surprised then hearty laugh that looked a bit like he was choking. But the secret meant it would be all over with this school in a few weeks.
A child could see it. There were still families in Jerichow that believed in the community of pure Germans and refused to buy food on the black market—families with starving children. The farmers and tradesmen had gone back to a barter system. Cresspahl didn’t have problems finding a way to fill his pipe—his French prisoners of war took care of that; Lise Wollenberg, though, walked through the whole train on the rides to and from school looking for an unconscionably discarded butt for her father, because the smoker’s ration cards again had only ten cigarettes in each of six sections, to last for four weeks. The children saw it in the Gneez station. Public express and semi-express trains had stopped running; only people with business away from home, and schoolchildren, were allowed to ride the locals. The Allies had broken the German rail system. The Gneez station had fallen silent. Only very rarely did a ghost train for official trips pass through, with few people waiting on the platform for it. Only postcards could be sent to Wendisch Burg, and the mail carrier in Jerichow had more letters in her bag to bring back to their senders as undeliverable than letters arriving from elsewhere. The Cresspahl child had been stopped on the Rande country road because she was going to the Baltic for pleasure and there was a regulation, applied even to the Hitler Youth, prohibiting the use of bicycles for distances of more than three kilometers. The Cresspahl child had relayed the teacher’s question to her father—When would the girl finally join the Deutsche Jungmädel? She was eleven already!—and Cresspahl had written a note excusing her on the grounds of being a commuting student, but privately said: Nope. No more o that, Gesine.
Among the grown-ups in Jerichow, though, there were conversations about the waxwings that had unexpectedly come down from the north: delicate creatures with reddish-gray, whitish, reddish-yellow colors, their bodies a bit like crested larks. The grandfathers still esteemed these birds for their ability to know the weather in advance, precisely because they traveled around so restlessly—in general, their arrival was supposed to mean a harsh winter ahead. For some people, this harsh winter was also the defeat of Germany. Others said that a Germany still planning to run a railroad line from Jerichow to Wismar (or Lübeck) couldn’t be losing a war.