Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Why did the police radio report at 6:36 p.m. that a blue hardtop 1966 Pontiac had joined the chase for the alleged escape car, and at 6:47 p.m. that someone in the white Mustang was shooting at the blue Pontiac?

  Why were there no more broadcasts about the three cars? Because headquarters had diverted enough police cars in the wrong direction by that time?

  Why did the driver of police car 160, Lieut. R.W. Bradshaw, say yesterday that he hadn’t seen and didn’t chase any white Mustang that night, and say today that any comment would have to come from his superior officer?

  Would the information about the false police report have ever come out if a local radio-equipment dealer hadn’t been monitoring police radio calls and heard it?

  How could he hear it, since his monitor was unable to pick up a call from the area where police car 160 was actually located at the time?

  Then again, how could the message come from a private car with a citizens band radio as if the message were coming from a police car? That would require extensive modification of the radio equipment done by someone with expert knowledge.

  Why did the police know about a second man involved in the assassination and yet claim for days, along with the FBI, that the killer was acting alone?

  Why is the FBI following up on evidence suggesting a conspiracy to commit the murder only five days later?

  If a government committee ever files a report on the assassination of Dr. King, it’ll no doubt clear everything up.

  In the revised history of the town of Wendisch Burg published in 1965 for the eight hundredth anniversary of the town’s founding by the Committee for the Jubilee Celebrations in the Regional Headquarters of the Socialist Unity Party, the city was said to have been saved from bombardment and artillery by two men, Alfred Wannemaker and Hugo Buschmann. Both were members of the then-banned Communist Party and today are senior officials in the Rostock regional headquarters and an East Berlin ministry, respectively. The book states that on the night of April 28, 1945, the two men and a Polish forced laborer snuck through the woods south of town until they reached the vanguard of the Soviet troops and were taken to the commanding officer. Mention is made of justified suspicions, wasting precious time, but A. Wannemaker apparently had a map of Wendisch Burg with him and he marked on it, for his Soviet comrades, the German troop positions complete with numbers of men, quantities of vehicles, supplies of fuel. The discussion was interrupted by a skirmish with isolated German forces, and H. Buschmann had to take cover on an office floor in the village school while telephoning with the mayor of Wendisch Burg and arranging the terms of surrender. The Pole (as interpreter), the solidarity of nations (in the class struggle), and the Red Army marched into Wendisch Burg on Old Street between undamaged timbered gables.

  Cresspahl started his story with a memory: You know how he is; as if his listeners were as much in a position as he was to call to mind in an instant an image of Martin Niebuhr—a stooping, long-armed man in blue mechanic’s overalls, who exerts his strength without haste, is slow to speak and slow to come to a decision, almost sleepy, but then suddenly “wakes up” and acts both judiciously and quickly, devious and deceptive when need be, and, in the end, rightly. What woke him up was an SS Storm Troop leader having decided to blow up the Havel River sluice in Wendisch Burg and flush out the Soviet troops to the south with all the water above it. First of all (spoken in an almost not even scandalized voice but contented, knowing he’s in the right:) First of all, this was Martin Niebuhr’s sluice. His superiors were solely the Department of Waterways and perhaps Berlin, but in Berlin the front lines currently ran past the Halle Gate and Alexanderplatz. The SS plan violated the chain of command, it was totally illegal, and civil officer Niebuhr was of no mind to condone or support an action running contrary to official regulations. He had worked on the damming of the water since he was a child, whether by stacking branches or apprenticing as an assistant sluice keeper, and it went against his acquired nature to flood the Strelitz countryside, his own handiwork, with the Havel. In addition, the explosion would also blast the official building, his house, across the region, and he knew full well that the Department of Waterways would never give him anything but this Wendisch Burg sluice and not even that if it ever was rebuilt. It was Cresspahl who expounded to us Martin Niebuhr’s considerations and motives; what Niebuhr actually said, brief and final, was: Can’t be done.

  He thought that this official statement would take care of it. Luckily for him, he was faced not with the SS but with two military engineers sent by the SS and not terribly happy about it, since the SS was comfortably dug in just outside the South Gate of Wendisch Burg and these two were alone in a completely cleared area, half a mile or so closer to the enemy. One of them is apparently an architect in Hamburg today, so he might have known something about construction and felt averse to destroying a sluice facility. As for the other, the SS was still too close, he was afraid of a court-martial and being shot, he set to work busily unloading the dynamite from the sidecar of his motorcycle and seemed determined to blast a big hole in the ground just there at nine o’clock sharp the next morning. (This was on the evening before April 29.) Gertrud Niebuhr had overheard the time set for the detonation, but first it was time for dinner. There were two children at the table with them: a ten-year-old boy and his two-year-old brother. Since Gertrud Niebuhr was in her own house, not someone else’s, she expressed herself freely about this plan to inundate her own neighbors’ houses in the villages to the south, and while she listed the names at great length Martin Niebuhr had time to work out his plan undisturbed. He sacrificed two untouched, unopened bottles of liquor, with which he’d been planning to make a down payment on a cow; he left nothing undone. Then he came out with his view that blowing up the sluice, if it was a military action at all, was one directed more against the civilian population than against anyone else. He could sketch out a contour map for his guests, if they wanted, showing the Mecklenburg rises

  Go on an call em mountains. Even if theyre Mecklenburg mountains, come on, theyre mountains!

  behind which the Red Army could advance to the north unhindered, even if the Bolter sluice on the Müritz were blown up too, they wouldn’t have to rush in and occupy a big wet patch south of Wendisch Burg! And a patch is all it’d be, too! There were many times, after the war, when I was visiting the sluice house, when I looked at him to see if he was capable of shouting, and found him quietly good-humored, patient, more of a grandfather than an uncle to his brother’s two children. And yet the Niebuhrs had a young tank soldier hidden in their attic that night, a deserter, and Karsch said he could hear the old man’s voice loud and clear through the ceiling. The older boy, Klaus Niebuhr, secretly brought Karsch’s share of dinner upstairs, and Karsch realized that there must also be a telephone at the place the Russians had reached by that time. No use denying it, Karsch.

  At this point, Cresspahl would imitate his brother-in-law Niebuhr on the phone as if he’d been there in person. Holding a pretend receiver to his ear, exaggeratedly astounded at the lack of dial tone; holding the receiver out at arm’s length like something disgusting, then putting it down. His normal telephone was connected to the main network and the SS had disabled the switchboard in the post office. Niebuhr had wanted to show he was brave enough to talk over a line the Gestapo might have been listening in on; it was harder for him to use his other telephone, connected to the Department of Waterways private network, for a purpose that would surely have to be called private. But he was in a hurry; he couldn’t count on the two engineers staying alone with his wife and cognac for too long without getting suspicious. The first lock south of Wendisch Burg came on the line with a serious: What a business! Man, what a business!

  – Ya got that right: Martin Niebuhr said. He was also hampered by the cover story he had planned to use on the open line. – Theyre right here: said Ewert Ewert. I went to see him in 1952, near Strelitz; he told it the same way. Niebuhr didn’t even have to initiate his act of high tr
eason. A Soviet officer took the phone from Ewert and asked to hear the situation in Wendisch Burg. Since the officer spoke German almost without an accent, Niebuhr had to ask him to say something in Russian. – I can’t understand you; please speak proper German: the Russian said in Russian. Niebuhr still thought it might be an SS trap and asked for Ewert again.

  – It’s’a Russians allright!: Ewert confirmed. And then, after these justified suspicions, wasting precious time, the Soviets got their picture of the enemy situation. The SS had marched into Wendisch Burg on Hitler’s birthday and promptly told the town to supply a gift for the occasion. The townsfolk had had to dig tank traps in a semicircle around the South Gate. The street looked untouched but was mined. The gate looked invitingly open, like a monument, just like the guidebooks said, but there were rails laid behind it down which they could push a wall of solid rocks. Here, on either side, the SS had set up machine guns on the town walls. There was a company of men in town guarding the high school, where prisoners from the dissolved concentration camps were being kept once they couldn’t be marched any farther. The guards were supposed to shoot the prisoners the moment a German victory in Wendisch Burg was in doubt. Martin Niebuhr confirmed to the man on the other end of the line, in great embarrassment, that Soviet citizens were among the prisoners marked for death in this way. The SS had forgotten about the harbor—the town lay exposed to the whole lake. The army was to the north; they had wanted to move on before the SS took them under their command. – I thank you for your service in the fight for peace: the voice told Niebuhr in its strange, meticulous German, so that he was shaking his head when he returned to his guests in the living room. He told them he’d been on the phone and the Soviets would be there in half an hour.

  The Soviets entered Wendisch Burg from the north, when it had just turned dark out; on the lake side of town they met the units that had crossed the lake right before midnight, and there was shooting only around the high school, and not for long. Not until they had freed the prisoners did they turn their serious attention to the SS at the South Gate, and what was left of the SS then drove past the sluice at top speed and took the first turnoff to the west. The engineers at Niebuhr’s place took their uniforms off, sold him the dynamite and motorcycle, and headed out on foot through the woods, toward Müritz, to a village where Martin Niebuhr knew some people.

  The next day, the Red Army officially marched into Wendisch Burg, flag flying, between undamaged timbered gables. There were certainly a lot of phone calls made that night.

  Cresspahl finished his story with the saying that’s carved into one of the timbered beams of a house on Old Street in Wendisch Burg, three doors down from the post office, and maybe it’s still there today: ONLY / A FOOL / TRIES TO PLEASE / ALL.

  I dont wan you makin this all public, Gesine. Cresspahl shoulda kept his trap shut.

  It’s true, though, Uncle Niebuhr, isn’t it?

  Truth. Truth. Whatta loada crap.

  April 12, 1968 Good Friday

  Yet the bank’s open.

  And de Rosny’s friends in the Treasury Department seem to have been less reliable than he might have hoped. The United States doesn’t want to take the initiative in returning the $20 million of Czechoslovak gold, but insists that any initiative must start from Prague. One justification is: So as not to compromise Mr. Dubček’s reforms.

  – A teachable people, you are: Mr. Shuldiner said on the phone last night. One of the leaders of the Socialist League of German Students, Rudi Dutschke, who does, however, prefer (according to a quotation) arguing for change to the use of force, was shot three times yesterday afternoon by an unknown gunman in West Berlin. Mr. Shuldiner was trying to be nice to Mrs. Cresspahl. The German shouldn’t hear the news from Germany any later than necessary. The Germans, eager to learn. That’s how it looks from the outside. The New York Times adds, practically shocked: Mr. Dutschke had no police protection. That’s something they still need to learn, it seems.

  President Johnson has called up 24,500 reserves to the Vietnam War. A few days ago he was still talking about 13,500.

  On Easter twenty-nine years ago, Cresspahl sent away a Jewish refugee from Berlin. He had escaped from a concentration camp, was dressed in normal clothes again—white summer coat, Tyrolean hat—and his gestures, too, fit him so loosely that it seemed like they could fall right off him at any moment and leave him standing there with nothing but fear: he is remembered, still present. Gronberg; I don’t remember his first name. A tobacconist from Schöneberg in Berlin. He was looking for a fisherman to take him to Denmark. Cresspahl kept him in the house only long enough to pretend he was telling him the best route, maybe he gave him a meal; he didn’t, though, go to Rande with him, help him find and convince a fisherman. The man had a forty-five-minute walk to the sea, after his long trip, and Cresspahl sent him off alone. After the war he told me that he hadn’t wanted to endanger his business with the English (against the Germans) for the sake of this one man. I often think I understand that. I wish, how I wish, I could understand Cresspahl in this too.

  For the Jews, tonight is the beginning of the festival commemorating the exodus from Egypt more than two thousand years ago, and at the Ferwalters’ the dishes used on only this one occasion a year will be out on the table with the baked goods and wine that symbolize the stones and mortar of the Egyptian pyramids, and Rebecca will ask the four questions to start the celebration, the Ferwalters will drink wine four times—to their release from bondage, deliverance from servitude, redemption from dependence on Egypt, and finally their being the Chosen People, selected—and once again Marie will not be allowed into her friend’s apartment. Marie feels only curiosity.

  The Ferwalters’ Pesach dishes are from Germany. We asked Karsch for help, and he did get them cheaper than we could and sent them in separate packages, each below the minimum for New York customs. They’re valuable, with cobalt-blue rims, in upper-class style, but we’ve never seen them. When it’s not Pesach they rest in the Ferwalters’ linen closet, packed in linen and plastic. It’s a Rosenthal service because Mrs. Ferwalter thinks that this is a Jewish company, because of the name.

  Louise Papenbrock had a Rosenthal service, with lots of green fish swimming through reeds, and the Papenbrocks called these plates “the Rosenthals,” including on the few occasions when the Semigs were there.

  Our bakery on Broadway has turned into a Jewish one today. They have no bread other than the unleavened kind, because in the hasty flight from Egypt the dough had to be taken in that state, and instead of pastries there’s the stuff made of nuts, raisins, apples, and cinnamon that Mrs. Ferwalter calls charoset. For Mrs. Ferwalter came into the store after us, stood happily next to us, and again and again encompassed us in her affectionate, disgusted look.

  What did Dora Semig mean when she described herself as Jewish, “which is true enough”? Did she convert to the Jewish faith among the Czechs, or the French? Did Semig try, at the end of his life, to live how the Jews live?

  Mrs. Ferwalter doesn’t know how salt can be kosher, or why the supermarket doesn’t stock products stamped simply “kosher” these days, only products certified by a rabbi as “Kosher for Passover.” Is it because no flour is used for the Pesach cookies? How can salt be kosher? She doesn’t know. She shrugs her fat shoulders, shakes her kindly, nauseated face back and forth, as much as to say well, what’s the difference? The customer in front of us puts a large box of matzoh down on the counter by the register and says as she does so: I’m sick of matzoh!

  Mrs. Ferwalter, with a big eavesdropping smile, pointed out this un-orthodox person, as though raising a finger in front of schoolchildren to show them how they are not supposed to do things. Then she paid for her own matzoh, a small, thrifty box.

  Walking down Ninety-Fifth Street, it came to her. She knew after all: People just want to make money!: she said. – Everything is business! she repeated, happy to be playing the role of the wise elder, more experienced, able to teach young Cresspahl and he
r daughter something about the ways of the world. When we say goodbye on West End Avenue, she lovingly hugs Marie to her giant hips, like her own daughter. Then, having shared her holiday cheer with us, she walks laboriously off on her oversize legs that the German SS broke for her.

  There are posters in the subway stations that show an older Indian, with a weather-beaten face, black pigtails, black hat, eyes twinkling with the delight of biting into a product of a Jewish firm:

  You don’t have to be Jewish

  To love Levy’s

  real Jewish Rye

  There tend to be swastikas drawn on these posters. It’s true that they aren’t drawn correctly, following the template, but tonight I saw one more of them than I did this morning.

  April 13, 1968 Saturday, South Ferry day

  but we kept going, taking buses from the St. George terminal onto the Verrazano Bridge, far above the open neck of the harbor, raised high into the pale blue warm surrounding sky, and then through south Brooklyn to Coney Island, where people in brightly colored shirts and dresses are anticipating the summer on the wooden boardwalk, and finally to the Stillwell Ave. subway station, in front of which you can get what Marie says are the best hot dogs in New York, the only little sausages that aren’t poison, and we rode back underground for another hour, under the East River and across Manhattan, to our Ninety-Sixth Street and Broadway, and that night we were tired as if from a vacation. On the way, Marie kept wanting to have her mother lose the war.

  – How did the Russians treat you?: she asked, looking not a little suspicious. She was prepared to discount at least half of any normal stories I had about the Russians, because I don’t consider the Soviets beneath discussion, as she does. I don’t consider them “the others.” She has picked up her anti-Communism like something breathed in with the air.

  – It was the British who came to Jerichow, Marie.