Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Married life.

  They both spent seven more years trying to keep to the plan they’d agreed to, despite being aware of their various failings. Lisbeth had respect for, if not fear of, the spoken word, especially a promise. Disloyalty towards another was for her disloyalty towards oneself. He didn’t insist on the four children she’d wanted to grow old with; he’d let her go back for the birth—back to her parents, to the Germans, to the Nazis; eventually he went back to Jerichow with her, for her. She understood her church better there. In Richmond, with four children and different religious services and without the Papenbrock family, she would have had a less easy time finding a reason to die. She’d be only forty-three now.

  The meaning of the expression: ALBERT PAPENBROCK, KING OF JERICHOW.

  From the beginning, Lisbeth’s father struck Cresspahl as someone out of a book. Born in 1868, raised to be nothing more or less than an agrarian capitalist. Encumbered in debt like a general before marrying into money from Hageböcker Street in Güstrow, as well as into a distant relation to genuine nobility, the von Heintzes—neither an entirely insignificant matter when it came to rapid promotion in the Kaiser’s war. The later loss of an estate lease near Waren on the Müritz was a dangerous setback. To this day, the old man doesn’t know that Cresspahl was on the Waren Workers Council in 1920 and sent the detachment that would ferret out army weapons in the children’s room at Papenbrock’s house; there was no need for him to learn that so shortly before his death. It’s true he gave up the estate only in 1922, perhaps because he, as a middle-class citizen, had given his word of honor like the nobility; perhaps because the guns were found in his house anyway—the scandal wasn’t the broken word of honor but that he’d gotten caught. Cresspahl, for his part, inclined to the theory that a Papenbrock could bear up just fine under social condemnation reaching from the southern shore of Lake Müritz to the northern, but that he’d been caught at something else: failing to spend as much on draining the estate as was contractually required. The leaseholder would be no less vigorous before the court than his partner in profit, and when Papenbrock, in an incomprehensible lapse, also forgot to add a certain discreet thousand-mark note to his next offer of a lease, he had to move, straight into the inflation. Shuffling foreign currency and material assets around was more than enough, in 1923, for the von Lassewitz villa in Jerichow, E. P. F. Prange’s fertilizer business, Schwenn’s bakery, and firm control of the sale of all the grains and sugar beets that came up out of the soil anywhere near Jerichow. He was the bank in person. He embodied in his own person the historical transformation from agrarian to merchant capitalism: he had, for instance, voted almost instinctively, though secretly, against compensation for the nobility. He was King of Jerichow until 1936, when the Nazis locked his businesses into their Four-Year Plan. Admittedly his comrades from the German National People’s Party were still in the Schwerin government, only in rather lower positions than before. Loss of power and fear for the outcome of the war tamed him; by now, Cresspahl could even forgive Papenbrock for have given his mother’s first name in the death notice as Grete instead of her real name; it was careless, just a way for the Papenbrocks to assert themselves on this occasion too. All the same, it was hard to believe that such a person was Gesine Cresspahl’s grandfather—that she came from such a family at all.

  Where did Cresspahl learn these formulations, only now being taught in the New School? “Agrarian capitalist”?

  He had once been a member of the Social Democratic Party.

  LOUISE PAPENBROCK.

  Born Utecht. In 1871. Not often invited to the officers’ parties in Güstrow. When the great Papenbrock required her inheritance, she must have been almost pleased. He got his way in everything, and only after the wedding did she start to take refuge in religion. Robert Papenbrock, born 1895. Horst Papenbrock, 1900. Hilde, 1904. Lisbeth, 1906. Successfully implanted the fear of God in the youngest, while the two boys shook it off and Hilde escaped it by living with Alexander Paepcke. She tormented Lisbeth with it the way a sick person tortures an animal. In his, Cresspahl’s, view it was practically attempted murder. Louise had been unable to find solace in adultery. Papenbrock went off to Hamburg on important business and had a good time on Herbertstrasse; Louise kept a theology student as a spiritual adviser. The old man did bring fur coats back from Berlin for her, though they didn’t always fit and felt ever so slightly used when she put them on; and yet Louise was never permitted to join her husband in the capital. So she wasn’t exactly up to snuff when she did have to go to Berlin with a teacher’s daughter from Waren, whom Robbie, Louise’s fine boy, had gotten pregnant. An abortion proved compatible with her Christian conscience. No custom-fitted fur coat this time either. By then she’d come to be satisfied with Papenbrock’s business successes, and she gradually came to enjoy keeping the possessions together, especially during the war of 1914–18, when she had almost sole control of the business and the farmhands. Once, for example, she caught the kitchen maids making a downright hearty lunch for the servants, with real bacon and the good smoked sausage. From that moment on, the mamsell had to butter the bread under Louise’s supervision, and it occurred to “madame” that she could dilute the coffee too. During the grain harvest. She took Papenbrock’s blows and passed them along downward. When he became King of Jerichow, she was out of her depth. Yes, Papenbrock demanded that she personify the power and the glory in their small town; she was never sure that he wasn’t about to whistle her back. He stopped the beatings in 1933, when he first became scared of the Nazis, over his possessions. On the other hand, in the summer of 1936 a woman from the Waren region requested an audience with the Papenbrocks, and Louise did not find the stranger worthy of a personal discussion with the great Papenbrock. The woman, around forty, accompanied by her mother, had come for the certificate of Aryan ancestry. Louise didn’t understand, not for a long time. What did it have to do with the Papenbrocks whether someone was of Jewish descent or not. She barely remembered the many nights Papenbrock had spent away from home in the 1890s, hunting deer, he’d said. Then she did have to go get Papenbrock from the office after all, so he could celebrate a reunion with his paid-off favorite from forty years back and the fruit of their love. Papenbrock pacified his wife with the same Christian tricks he’d learned from her. And when Lisbeth and Horst died, she not only wore the mourning but bore the grief, as pride, too, that the occasion belonged to none other than Mrs. Papenbrock. Incidentally, as late as 1945 it was still something to see Louise Papenbrock rule the roost in the former Schwenn’s Bakery. People would line up for hours on Town Street when the Papenbrocks had baking day, women were fainting with hunger, and Louise, sturdy as ever, gave the customers short shrift and passed out the bread like a blessing, always happy to point to the sign on the wall: Make it short. Or help me work. With Louise, Cresspahl preferred to make it short.

  Would he like to say anything about Lisbeth’s death.

  She. . . .

  He didn’t have to.

  On November 9, 1938, an SA squad in Jerichow shot and killed Marie Tannebaum, a child. An eight-year-old girl. A Jewish girl. On the morning of November 10, Lisbeth died in the burning workshop building.

  ROBERT PAPENBROCK.

  “Robert Papenbrock.” There may have been two of them. One was Louise’s firstborn son, raised as a prince. He took whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, people as well as things. Old Papenbrock had to pay more than a few maids’ dowries and find cottager boys who wouldn’t mind raising someone else’s child as their firstborn. Papenbrock had wanted to keep his young Robert out of the whorehouses; Louise was content to marvel at Papenbrock’s generosity toward chambermaids who had somehow gotten pregnant while in their service. Little Robbie, my good little boy. Robbie ruined horses racing them against cars, Robbie aimed guns at village boys and even at his own sister, Robbie was too much for the strictest boarding schools, Robbie stole horses when he couldn’t borrow them. This son disappeared from Parchim in May 1914, lived
for a while in high style in the alley district of Hamburg, off the gold ducats he extorted from his mother with cheerful threats, and when the time came for able-bodied men to rally to the Kaiser’s flag he set sail on a steamer in the South Atlantic. The family let it be known that he was studying import/export in Rio de Janeiro. This was the first Robert Papenbrock. He didn’t write letters.

  “ROBERT PAPENBROCK.”

  One of old man Papenbrock’s bright ideas. In July 1934 he sent his youngest son away from Germany, with the job or busywork to go looking for the long-lost firstborn. Back came Horst in the summer of 1935 with a man of roughly the right age. He might have been him. Louise thought this was something Papenbrock wanted, and she accepted the stranger, although his easygoing chubbiness, bald head, sluggish manner, and skin coloring around the neck troubled her. His story fit with the one that had stopped in May 1914; he had, of course, spent a long time with Horst by that point. He claimed to have lost his Mecklenburg accent, and Louise decided to believe in his voice. Horst didn’t interrupt the man’s stories; only shortly before his death did he suggest that the only thing out of all these stories he’d be willing to swear to was a sleazy hotel in New York where the man he’d found had been working. But Horst had spent the years until 1914 with his brother, and Horst swore before the German consulate in New York that this was honestly he. This Robert Papenbrock didn’t want to live with his family. He put himself forward to the Hitler government as a friend in the USA for the Nazis, and worked first in the foreign division of the NSDAP, giving speeches at meetings, translating for promotional speakers abroad. Then the secret police took him. First came a postcard from Berlin, in hard-to-read handwriting; later, occasional letters typed from dictation by secretaries. In the so-called Russia Campaign, he saw action as the head of a special unit behind the front, and old Papenbrock has made it through several dicey interrogations from Red Army investigators. During the war, there were rumors of this special-unit commander executing hostages in Ukraine. He did send a girl from Ukraine to the Papenbrocks, maybe because he still had ladies living in his requisitioned villa in Schwerin, or else because he actually wanted to deliver a bride to his family. This was Slata, who worked for the Soviet headquarters in Gneez after the war, writing and translating.

  “The Angel of Gneez.”

  Until she and her child were arrested and sent east into the Soviet Union. Fall of 1945.

  HORST PAPENBROCK.

  The old man tried taking a hard line with this son, so as not to lose another heir to overseas or jail. Horst first tried to escape in 1917, into the army. In 1919 he was discharged as an officer’s candidate, but the old man still beat him over every mistake he made in the business, however minor. Other punishments included being grounded on dance nights and being made to do estate work on Sundays. Horst’s second escape attempt was into the illegal Freikorps paramilitary. The old man rather liked the soldierly side of it, and of course the anti-Communist activity; he could not accept that his son was evading his authority and used a threat of disinheritance to bring him back. Horst was one of the first members of the NSDAP and the SA in Jerichow, harassed and mocked by his father as ever, so during all their military drills the boy was tentative, slack, weak. When he tried to show some energy, it came out jittery. What Horst contributed to the institution of Nazi violence in Jerichow was posting an armed guard over a flagpole in the schoolyard. He, Cresspahl, does not consider it proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Horst took part in killing Voss, in Rande—does not consider it probable even, since the boy had learned to be scared of violence and would’ve been too scared, if nothing else, to beat a man to death with steel bars. Unless there were a lot of people there, and he was very drunk. Papenbrock was worried that his heir apparent might come to harm in the conflict between the SA and the SS, and sent him abroad. If Horst found a brother there, thereby losing half his inheritance, Cresspahl does not think his motive was the love of truth. Papenbrock had just whipped the boy into indifference. His last escape attempt was to join the new army, and now that Papenbrock had threatened to disinherit him so many times, anger gained the upper hand. Horst lived a few years longer in Güstrow, a civil servant in the agriculture department, married to the Elisabeth Lieplow from Kröpelin who Albert Papenbrock hadn’t wanted to let into his family. Horst apparently lost his life in the siege of Stalin-grad, an older lieutenant to whom not even the death notice written by his superiors attributed bravery.

  Why did people always call Lisbeth Papenbrock, Louise’s daughter-in-law, Ilse?

  Her full name was Elisabeth Ilse Friederike Papenbrock née Lieplow. She’s called herself Ilse since she came to Jerichow to work for Louise, intending by this to show that she didn’t want to remind Cresspahl of the first name Lisbeth. She thinks she’s being tactful, while she’s trying to imply that there’s any chance of confusion.

  THE NIEBUHRS.

  PETER NIEBUHR, forestry student in Berlin, member of the Communist Party until November 1932, then voluntarily enrolled in the NCO academy in Eiche near Postdam. Transferred to the Reich Agricultural Corporation, a kind of department of agriculture. Peter Niebuhr, via a superior, initiated a lawsuit meant to curtail the private income of a Reich Labor Service leader but in so doing forced Lisbeth Cresspahl to give false testimony under oath at a time when what she needed was peace and quiet. A very young man, happily settled with his wife, MARTHA KLÜNDER, from Waren, if only his connection with the Communist Party hadn’t remained vivid in his mind. In the summer of 1943, he was called up and planned to defect to the Soviets; in the summer of 1943, he and his wife died in Rerik in the attack on the First Antiaircraft Artillery School. So their children, Klaus and Günter, came back to Mecklenburg, to MARTIN NIEBUHR. Former supervisor in the Department of Waterways, promoted in 1933 to sluice keeper in Wendisch Burg, less as a reward than as charity. In 1931 married GERTRUD NIEBUHR née Cresspahl, the younger sister, the dithery person who’d decided to stay in Malchow with her mother, until her mother died and her own life was past too. No children; a play area in the backyard for children visiting from Berlin-Friedenau or Jerichow. Beekeeping, gardening, feels out of place in cities. Then they got his brother’s children. Martin Niebuhr’s civil service, which handed the SS a defeat in April 1945. Where the Havel now flows through a large dry area, Martin Niebuhr pulled the plug on the war. He is deeply embarrassed when anyone tries to point out his bravery, and it would be extremely rude to discuss it with him. He is well and properly hidden behind his doddering demeanor, and in the end he’ll have been a better father to his brother’s children, and Gertrud a not unskillful mother.

  C.’s situation in Jerichow after 1934.

  At first, subjectively hampered by Papenbrock’s wish to sign over a property to the baby, so that his son-in-law would stay in Jerichow. Objectively inconvenienced by Papenbrock’s drive to engineer advantages for this branch of the clan too. Nickname: “the Englishman.” Accepted by the guild once he’d given in concerning price collusions (though not wage agreements). From 1935 on, with the start of the construction work on Mariengabe Airfield, disproportionately high workload and profits. When the airplanes arrived in Jerichow-North, Lisbeth disposed of the workshop building, perhaps as a precaution. After that, he survived on work for the airfield commander, eventually even in uniform so that he wouldn’t be drafted into the People’s Army. His installation as mayor under the British occupation may have wiped out all the goodwill he had stockpiled in ten years, and his removal from office and arrest by the Soviets was no doubt seen by many as proper comeuppance. He has a feeling he’d be doing better in Richmond, even now, as an enemy alien.

  People he knows or owes something to, in Jerichow.

  WILLI BÖTTCHER in Gneez, the guild master. The tradesmen he worked with in the dockyard crew: HEINE FREESE, glass; KÖPCKE, construction; CREUTZ, garden maintenance, but Creutz had also been a good neighbor and tended to Lisbeth’s grave above and beyond the call of payment. Later, to ALMA WITTE, City of Ham
burg Hotel, Gneez, for feeding the child during the day. Still, he preferred to do his evening drinking alone. Beginning in 1943, when the black market started to replace the command economy, almost everyone in town got reacquainted with one another.

  The first Nazis in Jerichow.

  Horst Papenbrock. WALTER GRIEM, for whom townsman-farmer status was not enough, and his family too burdensome. In the SA, despite ranking below young Papenbrock, he nonetheless treated him like a whimpering dog. At first Griem hadn’t had to hit anyone; after the Nazis seized power, he didn’t go into the administration, he went into an area where he could expend his energy on physical work. Now, given his service in the Reich Labor Service, resident in a general’s camp in the Soviet Union, or then again maybe head of a construction crew in the Soviet Sector of Berlin. When PAHL the tailor marched with the SA, it was for business reasons more than anything else; drowned himself before the Soviets arrived. In Gneez: MAX BREITSPRECHER, but only until the summer of 1934, after which he kept the SA and SS off his back with monetary contributions and so died in the navy, on a minesweeper.

  KLEIN THE BUTCHER.

  Jerichow’s butcher used to be AUGUST METHFESSEL; he ended up in a camp for nothing but a little dumb talk, was beaten into an inability to work, was killed in medical experiments. KLEIN inherited his customers. His own anti-Fascist resistance struggle began like this: A lieutenant walked in with a private, and they said in a quiet, ugly voice: We’re soand-so, we’re from such and such, and your business is now confiscated. By tomorrow morning you need to provide meat, sausage, lard. . . . To which Klein, proud of his reasonable reaction: You cant do that! Then they said such and such. Then they left. Then they gave him a packet of meat tickets with AIR FORCE printed across them. Then they swore him in, backdated to the start of the war. And Klein said, insulted by their doubting his professional honor: If you ring the bell by noon, then by the next morning at seven sharp! And that was how the butcher KLEIN’s anti-Fascist resistance struggle ended. “They threatened me with a concentration camp!”