Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  BÖHNHASE.

  Tobacconist Böhnhase, German National People’s Party, proved his oppression by the Nazis as follows: If in 1932 he hadn’t carried Reds, the Communist cigarette brand, in his store and distributed them so vigorously around Jerichow, then the Nazis in 1942 would hardly have been so set on seven years of prison for him, just for having sold rationed tobacco products in exchange for smoked bacon.

  Friends in Jerichow.

  ALFRED BIENMÜLLER, horseshoer and nailsmith.

  No further details?

  No further details.

  And Peter Wulff?

  And PETER WULFF. He was in Jerichow in 1931, a barkeep and owner of a general store, member of the Social Democratic Party. Friendship to the point of reciprocal letter-writing. Peter Wulff was in a position to translate Cresspahl’s English news about the Langemarck trial of January 1933 into a Jerichow thicket of whispers that ruined the celebration of the Day of the Founding of the Reich for Dr. Erdamer, the mayor, himself Social Democratic Party. Again and again Wulff had not been able to bring himself to leave the SPD—not after the Kassel party congress of 1920, not after the Görlitz one of 1921, not even after the Kiel one of 1927, in which they’d already made it be about “organized capitalism.” That was one of the running conversations with Wulff; another was the friendship between Lisbeth and META WULFF, a fisherman’s daughter from Dievenow; still another was what they could do to the first Nazi mayor, Friedrich Jansen. One of Wulff’s educational efforts, in 1935, to a customer who wanted to leave the church with the excuse that Jesus was a child born out of wedlock: Wulff: Your mother wasn’t married either, what should we do about you? In 1938, at the request of the Lübeck SPD, Cresspahl had to give up all contact with Wulff, publicly, so the townspeople would think there’d been a permanent break. Two days after the war ended he had found an opportunity to talk to Wulff, who didn’t know the reason any better than Cresspahl did. The whole thing had apparently been forgotten, and Wulff too refused to forgive the SPD for such personal politics, whether or not the party was banned. In the years of the pretended feud, Cresspahl could only suspect that it was Wulff who sawed into the flagpole in front of Friedrich Jansen’s house at night, if only to give Cresspahl the repair work. Wulff was delighted to admit it, and also that it was in fact he who, every March, to the admiring amazement of the Gestapo and the police, had smuggled flowers onto the grave of Friedrich Laabs, whom the Kapp putschists had killed in the cellar of the Archduke Hotel in Gneez. Until 1942, the Nazis’ prime suspect was Cresspahl, who lived next door to the Jerichow cemetery and had easiest access to the grave. And now you can talk to Wulff about the SPD’s role in battleship construction in 1928, or about the Social Democratic endorsement of German foreign policy in May 1933; he refuses to give an inch about the Kiel party congress, though, not even after a second bottle of schnapps. And since he neglected to inform the Soviets about his membership in the SPD, he didn’t have to follow the merger with the German Communist Party and join the Socialist Unity Party either, and so he avoided the resignation therefrom that would no doubt have been required after being forced to close his shop. Cresspahl and Wulff have a good time together, and both regret having missed out on almost seven years of it.

  FRIEDRICH JANSEN.

  Mayor of Jerichow after Dr. Erdamer’s resignation in March 1933. Papenbrock thought he was clever exerting his power behind the mask of money, rather than being forced to advance aims other than his own in the administration; Papenbrock’s cowardice saddled Jerichow Town Hall with a failed law student as a successor to Dr. Erdamer—a favor for old Dr. Jansen and a disgrace for the town. The boy was so pathetic that he couldn’t even manage to set up any crooked business with the brickworks lease. If the British hadn’t shot Jansen by mistake for possession of firearms, there would’ve been more than enough people in Jerichow to take care of him. Hünemörder, for instance, who after Hitler’s 1934 speech had merely said: I don’t think so, gentlemen, and if we’re not up to our necks in war by 1939, then . . . ! Hünemörder didn’t get out of the concentration camp until 1936, and he moved from Jerichow to Lübeck solely to spare himself the sight of Friedrich Jansen. One example to stand for Friedrich Jansen’s behavior in general: After Lisbeth’s death, he liked to show around town a clipping from The Lübeck Gazette, from the spring of 1931. The article described Erich Ahrnt, a twenty-three-year-old stableboy, born in Berlin, who set a barn full of wheat and hay on fire in Hohenhorn near Schwarzenbek and waited for death in an engine case. Legs severely carbonized, upper body lightly burned. It cost people like Wulff and Kollmorgen no little effort to stamp out the rumor of a connection between the two cases. He has Wulff to thank for that too.

  EDUARD TAMMS.

  Jansen’s follower and successor as mayor. The British forces arrested him not because up until 1945 he’d applied the laws that were valid at the time but because his wife was related to men in black uniforms. And he hadn’t even used those connections to get himself transferred anywhere from Jerichow.

  What about the nobility around Jerichow?

  AXEL VON RAMMIN, Reichsbaron and all that, smuggled money to Austrian friends so that a Jew could emigrate from Mecklenburg with what belonged to him. The VON BÜLOWS (the Upper Bülows) refused to give in to the pressure to bring a son back from studying abroad in England. The VON BOBZIENS didn’t let the SA use the Countess Woods for field exercises; they also made deliveries in broad daylight to the wife of the arrested pastor, free of charge. The VON MALTZAHNS let both sons enter the SS. The VON LÜSEWITZES were rumored to keep their Hungarian and Italian day laborers in stables, but not after 1942. Finally, Count FRIEDRICH FRANZ GROTE from Varchentin was the regional head of the Agriculture Department for Mecklenburg. When another count, HANS KASPAR VON BOTHMER, came back from the war severely wounded, he opened up his castle for use as a typhus hospital, helped with the nursing, and died relatively quickly of spotted fever.

  Why wasn’t PASTOR BRÜSHAVER a friend.

  A university man, an officer in the Kaiser’s navy, German National People’s Party from way back. In Hitler’s war against the church, he was a member of the Pastors’ Emergency League, disobeyed the state bishop’s instructions, but let the son from his first marriage fly missions against the legal government of Spain, secretly hoping this would yield a promotion high enough for a position as airfield commander, until he got him back in a soldered casket he was not allowed to open. This Brüshaver spoke about Lisbeth’s death in a sermon that was enough to get him arrested, and also gave her a full church burial, against the wishes of both the Church of Mecklenburg and the Gestapo. As a result he was separated from the three children from his second marriage—who were incinerated in Rostock by Royal Air Force bombs—and from his second wife. The Nazis had wanted him to live in a concentration camp until 1960; when he came back to Jerichow in 1945, looking for Aggie Brüshaver, he was so malnourished he could barely talk. He, Cresspahl, knows full well that the man put himself in the hands of the court not only for Lisbeth’s sake but for reasons of his own; still, he cannot respond in kind to the man’s easygoing friendship. He can’t manage that yet.

  SEMIG.

  ARTHUR SEMIG, DR. VET. MED. A Mecklenburger from the “gray area” in the west, near Ludwigslust, married to DORA KÖSTER from Schwerin. Groomsman for Lisbeth, godfather to Gesine. If there is such a thing as Christianity, he practiced it, in his orderly way. He wanted to do justice to his Jewish grandparents as well as to the Nazi laws against him; he left Jerichow purely as a favor to his friends, so as not to endanger them.

  Did he—

  All we know is how the KÖSTERS died. After a risky 1938 letter their daughter sent from Prague, Privy Councillor Köster and his wife took the trouble to poison themselves, both at an advanced age. Two very small coffins, burned in secret by the Gestapo.

  Again: ALEXANDER PAEPCKE.

  Alex. Who offered C. his friendship without hesitation, when all he was required to do with his new family was put up
with them. One of the great and mighty Schwerin PAEPCKES. There was a banker in the family, members of parliament before the First War. The Paepckes went to the court with their archduke. The family came to an unexpected end with Alexander, born in 1898. He did have a sister, younger, but she could preserve the name only while unmarried, so not long enough. Inge Paepcke had been permitted to recite rhymed verses during a visit to the empress—it was that kind of family. The empress had thereupon rewarded her with a brooch, not the most valuable work ever made by H. J. Wilm, Berlin, Jeweler to the Royal Court, but still with a blue A for Auguste and a V for Viktoria covered in some kind of glittering things. The family council decided that Inge could keep the reward for herself, but as soon as Alexander had a daughter the brooch was to be given to her, and so forth, down through the generations. At the time Alexander did not have a wife, never mind children. The Paepckes gave him time to look around for the right one. Alexander, however, already saw academia as the epitome of respectable life; he took his time with the looking around, paying off this and that pretty young thing from the Schwerin theater with a jewel or a dress. The family succeeded in talking him out of such marriages every so often; his condition was that they pay off his debts. (The family council behaved rather more indifferently toward Alexander’s mother and sister, who spent money quite a bit less generously.) In the summer of 1928, Alexander went to see his aunt Françoise at the Graal Müritz resort on the Baltic, and he couldn’t stand seeing a White Russian émigré pay court with princely dignity to a girl named HILDE PAPENBROCK. Alexander’s great-uncle took the trouble to pay a secret visit to Graal, and before he even left Rostock he sent a telegram to the Pearl of the Sea Hotel: MARRY AT ONCE. The family was so happy with Hilde that they agreed to a wedding in Jerichow, instead of Schwerin, and within eight weeks. The Paepckes, too, wanted to make their peace with the Papenbrocks as long as they could get a bride out of them. And here began Hilde’s great holiday from her parents, a life full of trips to Berlin, excursions from one estate to the next in the Krakow area, lavish parties in seaside hotels. Once, Alexander forgot to notify Schwerin of a certain embarrassing situation in time and was unable to pay one of his clients the money he owed him from a settlement. This client was a major landowner and a late payment was not acceptable. After his Leonia fraternity cronies dropped the ball too, Alex was actually disbarred from the Mecklenburg Legal Chamber, and from then on he got by with leases of brickworks. (Or had it been the notary’s office?) Hilde couldn’t stand to see her man Alexander in trouble and had no compunction about setting these brickworks on fire, and the first time it happened the insurance company was willing to believe in spontaneous combustion. In 1931, Papenbrock brought his elder daughter back to Jerichow and gave her husband the lease to the brickworks here; as old man Papenbrock looked on in alarm, Alexander ended up in the red despite the new construction, practically next door, of a military airfield with an inexhaustible hunger for bricks. Alexander withdrew to the Stettin Military Ordnance Department, but for the Paepckes he’d done well. Alexandra came into the world in 1934, and the family council traveled to Jerichow to pass down the empress’s brooch, and came again in 1935 for Eberhardt’s birth, and went to Podejuch for Christine Paepcke’s birth, and the baptismal gifts could be used to pay off Alexander’s “obligations” almost every time. He, Cresspahl, wasn’t bothered by Alexander and Hilde’s disregard of rules and regulations; on occasion he regretted his own inability to be like that. And he doubtless wanted to give his own child a childhood like the Paepckes gave their children—he put that down in writing. He only rarely felt excluded on visits to Podejuch or the country house in Althagen, on Fischland, when the Paepckes’ education and aristocracy shone through and the child Alexandra might say: Pray some tea, said she. Still, for him, Hilde and Alexander were. . . . Alexander met his death trying to help foreign children in occupied Russia. His own children died with Hilde in the spring of 1945, in West Pomerania, in a military truck strafed by fighter planes.

  Still, Alexander didn’t know about, you know? Only Alfred Bienmüller did, horseshoer and nailsmith of Jerichow?

  Cresspahl didn’t want to put Alexander in danger. Bienmüller was a last resort. Anyway, Alfred didn’t know enough to piece together the whole story, not even a tenth of it.

  But KLAUS BÖTTCHER is putting two and two together. He’s come up with reasons why Cresspahl wanted to know even the smallest details about the army, down to a regiment’s aiguillettes, as late as 1944.

  Klaus can just stick to his father’s woodworking workshop; he’s looking at a full audit from the new government’s finance office. No one brought him back from his forest camp deep deep in Russia before his sentence was up just so he could go around hawking nonsense.

  Cresspahl brought . . .?

  Along with others.

  DR. KLIEFOTH.

  Because he was an English teacher? He certainly liked to talk, almost brag, about his time as a staff officer on the eastern front—1C, counterintelligence—about his reconnaissance flights across Soviet lines, maybe in a way that presupposed a certain unusual level of curiosity in Cresspahl. But Kliefoth was also nonchalant enough to not turn off the BBC just because someone came over to his house.

  LESLIE DANZMANN.

  A friend of Lisbeth’s from her boarding-school days in Rostock. Around 1940, times got tight for her on only a navy widow’s pension, so she had to work as a housekeeper at a villa in Rande, near Jerichow. She was the only one who might have realized that Cresspahl didn’t come visit her “Fritz” to drink the night away but rather to pass him the latest information about Mariengabe Airfield or Barth concentration camp. Still, she was shy around “Lisbeth’s husband,” and there were enough empty bottles on the table by the end of each such night.

  That doesn’t make it any less true.

  Now’s not the time to say so out loud. Such English matters have to be dealt with at length in fictional form first, in films or so-called popular nonfiction books, to make them more bearable for the public; then we have to wait for the so-called academic books that get a foot or two closer to the truth every decade; in fifty years, when they open the archives, they’ll be as close to understanding it as we are today to founding the German Democratic Republic. Or as far away as the moon is from Jerichow.

  But—

  He knows perfectly well that keeping quiet is harder for a sixteen-year-old than it is for a nine-year-old. He blamed himself enough when his child fell for one of Ottje Stoffregen’s tricks.

  OTTJE STOFFREGEN?

  Head teacher at the Hermann Göring School in Jerichow. Local historian, former suitor for the hand of Lisbeth Papenbrock, if you believe Peter Wulff. And you can always believe Wulff. So it was Ottje’s memories as well as his alcoholism that he took out on Cresspahl’s child. In music class, Stoffregen played the first four notes of a Beethoven symphony on the piano, the call sign of the British Broadcasting Corporation, and asked the class who recognized it. It was Cresspahl’s child who raised her hand.

  Sorry. Sorry!

  That’s all right. But when the Gestapo gumshoes searched the house, they didn’t find anything like Alexander’s Blaupunkt radio, with its magic eye and automatic station finder, just what was called at the time the People’s Receiver. Volksempfänger. And Cresspahl’s child immediately recalled that she recognized the four notes from a record at the Paepckes, and with Alexander’s sworn statement the Gestapo had to leave it at that. Alexander was glad to help; C. was relieved that the whole thing could be forgotten, down to today.

  But Cresspahl was an anti-Fascist!

  On the British side—an indigestible fact in times like these. You can tell your own child about it someday.

  Am I allowed to tell Jakob now?

  Jakob, yes.

  ANNIVERSARIES

  From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl

  Volume Two

  UWE JOHNSON

  Translated from the German by

  DAMION SEARLSr />
  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  PART THREE

  April 1968–June 1968

  April 20, 1968 Saturday

  THE WATER is black.

  The overcast sky hangs low over the lake ringed in morning pinewood shadow, darkness rising from the muddy ground. The swimmer’s hands push forward as if through heavy dye but are shockingly pure when they come up into the air. The shores are close on all sides; in the dim dawn an observer would think he saw two ducks moving in the middle of the lake, one with dark feathers, one light. But it’s too early for anyone. The silence makes the lake gloomy. The fish, the water birds, the land birds don’t want to live in this dredged-out basin, these stunted trees, this chemically treated landscape set up for paying customers. Sink two feet under the stagnant surface and you’ll lose the light in a greenish blackness.

  – How many lakes have you done in your life, Gesine?: says the child, says Marie, says the strange fish poking her head up after a long plunge.

  – This is your how-many-eth lake?: she says in her strange German.

  Two voices above the water, in the murky silence—one an eleven-year-old soprano, cracked around the edges, the other a thirty-five-year-old alto, smoothly rounded, not especially big. The child doesn’t let the Baltic Sea count.

  It was there, in the Ostsee, that the child I was first swam: off Fischland in the Lübeck Bay near the maritime boundary of Mecklenburg, formerly a province of the German Reich, now a coastal region of the Socialist state of the German nation. I swam with children who are dead now, and with soldiers of the defeated German navy who called the great mighty Baltic “the flooded field of the seven seas.” But in American geography books the Ostsee is called the Baltic Sea, and Marie says it doesn’t count. It’s not a lake. She’s an American child.