Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Last Tuesday East German border troops tried to fence in five hundred acres of West Germany near Wolfsburg, basing their claim on an 1873 map showing the border between Brunswick and Prussia, which was supposed to be the demarcation line in 1945. The West Germans admitted that there had been deviations in their favor, but protested that it was the Soviets of back then who’d drawn the line in the first place. – The Russians can err, too: the East German colonel said. According to the recollections of someone living on that border, his friends hadn’t erred unless a gold watch or a few bottles of schnapps were part of the deal; then they would draw the fateful line in a bar with their English associates, on a beer coaster or a cigarette case. Today it’s a shooting matter.

  By October 1945 the people of Jerichow had long since stopped believing in the arrival of occupation troops from Sweden. They’d halfheartedly resigned themselves to the Soviets’ staying, and now my father was being greeted on the streets again, when he wanted to be.

  The mayor was credited with making things so bad for the refugees that most of them had left town. A man who relieved the townsfolk of the burdensome duty of hospitality couldn’t be all bad.

  K. A. Pontiy, commandant, had helped him do it. In the week he’d arrived, Pontiy had had his police register everyone in all of the houses, locals and refugees on the same list, the actual hard-power capacity, how many ration cards were needed—and Cresspahl thought it was only a paterfamilias’s duty. He would learn more about Pontiy during the registration process. Two weeks went by and Pontiy started to doubt the security of his vouchers. He declared them invalid as of August 1 unless they bore the commandant’s stamp as well as his signature. Again the people lined up outside Town Hall, up the stairs and down the hall to the room where Wassergahn was wielding his stamp. (All while the main and supreme directive from the state was to get the harvest brought in.) The sanctification of the documents went badly for the residents who’d been kicked out of the Bäk, for Wassergahn found any change in the information once he’d affixed his seal inconceivable, and the “moved parties” had to come in yet again, with Leslie Danzmann, to have their emergency lodging, the address for their ration cards, recognized. Wassergahn did not like having such cases explained to him—he looked darkly from the supplicant to the mayor’s secretary, with furrowed brow; he hadn’t forgotten the reason for these moves, he just thought of it as in the past, hence not open to discussion, particularly since it introduced messiness into his neat clean documents. On top of that, Wassergahn, for all his clean-cut professional appearance, kept uncertain hours. Two days’ work on the harvest was lost. Pontiy was counting on 3,224 hungry subjects and on August 1 Cresspahl showed up with a request for 3,701 ration cards. Patiently, pedagogically, threateningly, Pontiy told his mayor to cease the annoying custom of letting every refugee who turned up in town make it into the registration card files with the right to a stamp from the commandant. The “illegal arrivals” were to be presented to him in lists, twenty heads each; he was stingy with his permits, shunting whole families off to the country whether they were willing to work or not. At the same time, he tackled his population from another direction and had them register for labor duty, in a separate card file, whose data nonetheless had to be entered into the main card file. The contours of Pontiy’s economic power had gradually grown blurry, given the differences between citizenship rights, residence rights, and applications for new citizenship and for repatriation, and in late August he ordered another registration of all residents. They had to bring in only two of his documents, plus identification cards and birth certificates, and this time he threatened anyone who failed to report with either arrest or expulsion from the town. That same week, he issued an order looking for every member of the former German Army with a rank of major or above, and likewise for anyone who worked in the former arms industry, whom he threatened under martial law. That was the occasion on which 1C Kliefoth, with all his service and military papers, was not arrested, though leaseholder Lindemann was, for not having registered as a hotel owner, solely because the Red Army had commandeered the whole Lübeck Court and was now running it. Leslie Danzmann and Cresspahl worked whole nights through on the general index that Pontiy wanted in the brickworks villa, and if it wasn’t ready by September 1 then it would be up to the governor of the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern what to do—he had set that same date as the deadline for the registration of all male persons over the age of sixty, all females over fifty-five, and all university graduates of any age, on penalty this time of withholding ration cards and prison and/or a fine. Among the refugees there must have been some who didn’t want anybody to be able to look up their previous life in Pontiy’s safe, and others who resented the time spent on registrations instead of working or standing in line outside shops; they went looking early for a place on a Soviet-run farm, or in a village, far from Jerichow.

  The indefatigable counting and recounting of heads and limbs, of elderly, sick, underage, and subject to compulsory insurance, all helped but was not enough alone to make Jerichow unsafe for many refugees. The town’s supply of food was exhausted. The harvest had eventually been brought in, and faster than usual—mostly during personal nighttime trips out to the fields, and in the form of single sacks of potatoes and private bags of ears of wheat—but this was not food the townspeople would be distributing over the winter. There was absolutely no work available in town, putting at risk the right to a ration card. The displaced farmers went first. (Officially, no one could be referred to as “displaced” or “driven out” anymore—only as “evacuees” or “resettlers.”) Anyone who wanted a piece of land from the stock of expropriated land needed to hop to it with the winter tilling. The papers that K. A. Pontiy and Cresspahl had collected from every refugee in only three months were a treasure trove, in the eyes of the commandants around the countryside. (The term “refugee” was no longer permitted in spoken use either.) Out there, the city people had gone back to city jobs by that point and new laborers were welcome. Near potato clamps, getting paid wages in kind, refugees might yet make it through the winter. There were lots of reasons why Leslie Danzmann had to register the departure of resettlers, but first and foremost the people of Jerichow chalked it up to Cresspahl.

  It was under Cresspahl’s regime that the schools were reopened. Starting October 1, the children, who’d been running wild, were finally kept busy again, and each one was given a rye bun in school too.

  It might have been Cresspahl who’d pulled off a real live train at the Jerichow station, three passenger cars in tow, every day since late September. It departed for Gneez in the morning and came back in the evening. Heinz Wollenberg was glad that his daughter Lise could attend her high school again, and had suggested that his daughter be nice to Gesine Cresspahl. Cresspahl was just doing his duty. – Hi there: Lise said on the platform, for the first time since June; this cheerful nonchalance seemed a bit fishy to Gesine, but she said: Hey.

  Cresspahl was given one hundred and twenty marks a month, plus twenty marks as a housing allowance, for working from morning until late at night. He couldn’t supplement his income with carpentry, having neither the time nor the opportunity to get materials on the black market. He was hitched to a wagon in which sat K. A. Pontiy and the Red Army. He took no benefit from his office; let him have his losses.

  He may have introduced bicycle registration to give his buddy Pontiy an overview of who had what, but still, it helped reduce thefts a little.

  No, Cresspahl was still needed. It was thanks to him that Jerichow got fish from the Baltic, even if only for the hospital; on ration-card coupon No. 10 there was an unexpected allocation of salt; he would keep pestering the Gneez district office until it released some coal to run the gasworks with. And those utter scoundrels, the Englishmen, had cut Jerichow off from their Herrenwyk power station, the town had gone dark, and Cresspahl had found a generator for the hospital in exchange for Mrs. Köpcke’s truck and the last spare tires Swenson had left in his hideaway,
and the two victimized companies had been compensated at peacetime prices and told not to make a fuss. Because who was going to get Jerichow connected back up to an eastern power grid, them or Cresspahl?

  In mid-October when all male and female persons between the ages of sixteen and fifty were ordered to report for exams for venereal diseases, “by order of the commandant,” the talk in Jerichow was that Cresspahl had won one against Pontiy. Older women came too, bringing girls under sixteen. Pontiy hadn’t realized the consequences, but the mayor of Jerichow had. It started to look like Cresspahl was in charge now.

  The Jerichow government bank had recently started collecting taxes again. The new city bank, formerly the credit union, no longer stayed open from ten a.m. to ten p.m. just because it was ordered to: the tradesmen were depositing their earnings there daily; word had gotten round that the money wasn’t disappearing, it could be used to make payments, with forms and signatures, just like before. It was a meager economy, a hungry life, a barren town—but Cresspahl had helped get it on track.

  On October 22, two Soviet officers who were strangers to Jerichow paid Cresspahl a visit. It was evening, already dark, the people’s movements around the jeep outside Town Hall were unclear. Leslie Danzmann was able to say that Cresspahl had left without a struggle. Not even a kerosene lamp knocked over. Then Cresspahl’s secretary was arrested too. Pontiy issued his Order No. 24 through Fritz Schenk:

  In the interest

  of stabilizing

  the town’s autonomy

  and increasing

  the productivity

  of the municipal economy

  and introducing

  a stricter order

  into the affairs

  of the Town of Jerichow

  I hereby relieve Mr. Heinrich Cresspahl from his duties as mayor, as of this 21st day of October, 1945.

  May 23, 1968 Thursday

  The West German government spokesman gives the number. Czechoslovakia’s Socialist neighbors will send in ten to twelve thousand special troops. The intelligence services, along with well-informed Czechoslovak and Western sources, call the information nonsense. That’s true, they didn’t even name a date.

  – Cresspahl trusted his man Pontiy one too many times.

  – And for too long, too.

  – Yes, yes, grown-up psychology. Not for children.

  – Cresspahl had gotten some news in September. Dr. Salomon still considered the German a client. He had found Mrs. Trowbridge and Henry Trowbridge. They’d died in an air attack on the British Midlands on November 14, 1940. Cresspahl hadn’t had the slip of paper from Lübeck long before he got into a fight with K. A. Pontiy about his order to bring in the harvest, and it was a long night.

  – A drunken night.

  – A night in a state where things weren’t blurry, where you were anchored to a particular thought that seemed to grow bigger and bigger. Toward morning they were barely drinking any more, just taking longer and longer to answer each other, half an hour sometimes. And Pontiy said forgetfully, sighing, that his son had fallen in Germany in April 1945.

  – And Cresspahl told him about his son in England, that he’d lost to the Germans too.

  – No. It was just two words, he never forgot them, they were his two best words in Russian: Ne daleko.

  – That was all it took? That Pontiy’s son had died ne daleko?

  – That was enough for a while. Ne daleko. Not far. Near Jerichow.

  May 24, 1968 Friday

  Since January 1, 1961, 23,500 Americans have died in Vietnam. Which the military calls light casualties. The Vietnamese victims are not included in this number.

  The presidium of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party had something to say to newspaper editors, executives, and radio commentators: Stop talking about the Soviet Union’s past crimes all the time. Don’t insult the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Don’t dwell on the new KAN clubs. The party presidium isn’t giving orders to the press or anything. The leaders believe that a good Communist understands the need for self-censorship when facing dangers “both from the left and from the right,” and that belief is good enough for them.

  KAN: Klub Angažováných Nestraníků. Even in English we don’t exactly understand it: Club of Committed Nonparty Members. How would that go in German? A new party founded on the principle that its members are not in any party. Bund der engagierten Parteilosen? “Alliance of Politically Active Independents”? It could also be the Left with nowhere else to go, under a new roof.

  8 p.m.: Dr. Laszlo Pinter, Hungarian Delegate to the United Nations, will be speaking at Church Center, 777 United Nations Plaza, as a guest of the American Society for the Study of the German Democratic Republic. Topic: “European Disarmament and the Two German States.”

  There’s a table by the door where you can donate 99 cents, more if you want. We ask for our one penny back, despite the cashier’s embarrassed opposition—we want to keep the coin as a souvenir. The flyers on the chairs give the society’s address as 370 Riverside Drive. That’s on 109th Street. Marie has definitely babysat children there. It’s a nice place to live.

  Most of the audience members are old and seem to be timidly acquainted. A gathering of party members in the audience of a gathering of not the party. Strangers are exposed to surprised and searching looks, as if they were uninvited guests.

  The first speaker emphasizes that visas to visit the UN have been refused to representatives of the GDR. Pithy American English. My-self, etc.

  The second speaker proves, in a swift, soft, professorial voice, that the study of the German Democratic Republic is desirable for reasons of culture, peace, and understanding.

  The guest from Hungary is a tall man with a red face and bulging flesh, maybe thirty-five years old. Narrow-framed glasses, thick black hair. His English teacher taught him not to nasalize endings: he calls certain things promissink! He says: Yu-RO-pean. Probably learned his English closer to Moscow. He begins with the ancient Greek myths, Crete, Europe the cradle of ideas and colonialism. Two world wars. Germany is divided. NATO. Warsaw Pact. This is not my official position, please don’t quote me on that.

  The effects of atomic bombs. Not the horror movie the way it appears on-screen. Very, very crucial factors. The attempted putsch of 1953, which was not successful: snippier, haughtier tone.

  The fire alarm keeps going off in the hall.

  The Danube Federation. The Rapacki Plan. This brings me to the German question. What do we have in Germany? Five NATO divisions, a leading role in the Atomic Planning Staff, the Potsdam Agreement not in effect. The fellow isn’t set on cigarettes from back home, he smokes the local brands, bright red-and-white packs, Marlboro or Lux.

  The Nazis. Started in 1930 with 2.2 percent. All the things the emergency laws allow. He forgets the confiscation of cars, in front of this audience of all people. The demonstrations in West Berlin: putting the laws into practice for the first time. The demonstrations in Warsaw, Paris, and New York may have been at the same time. For every one of these facts I could mention a counterfact. If this was the proof, it is not complete yet.

  The matter of peace. Vesch' mira. This is why we need dialogue. A statesman has made a proposal. He talks in long circumlocutions about this statesman, talks in worshipful tones. When the suspense has gone on too long, he gives up the name: this statesman was Mr. Kosygin from the Soviet Union.

  Applause. Q&A.

  – The East German attitude toward the developments in Czechoslovakia.

  – Yes, well, you know. . . I have to tell you something. The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic would subscribe to everything I said, nearly word for word. I don’t see the connection. I don’t know anything about attitudes. Congratulations to The New York Times on its self-proclaimed promotion to spokesman for the GDR!

  – (Examples:) GDR jamming stations, lead articles in government papers, a top television commentator’s trip to Bohemia.

  – Yes well if you want to change the topic . . . : cou
nters the comrade from circles not used to being addressed in that fashion. He doesn’t shirk from his argument, here it is: I can’t compete with The New York Times, I can only rely on my own clipping service.

  An older woman, long diagonally cut white hair hanging down to her neck under a kind of bonnet. She says something mild, something overindulgent about government credits for home purchases here.

  – And how do you have a dialogue over a wall?

  – Well yes. Of course. (Expected question.)

  The government’s credits when someone wants to buy a house are . . .

  – My comment on that, in a word, is this: It would be a damn good thing, if you ask me personally. ONE SHOULD ALWAYS ADDRESS A TOPIC FROM THE PROPER PERSPECTIVE. While West Germany had the Marshall Plan, East Germany started with absolutely nothing.

  The mouthpiece does not have it easy among the curious, some of them readers of The New York Times, and he has no clippings from that source. One calls himself a genuine Communist. One is a clergyman, one is a West German immigrant worker, one

  has been to the GDR. He is the president of this society, he has talked to the young officers at the Brandenburg Gate. White hair, too red in the face. Talks in a slightly complaining voice, looking sharply down to the right at the floor. The soldiers at the Wall are unarmed but people shoot at them.