by Uwe Johnson
The old inn on the way to the Countess Woods would have been appearing in guidebooks for some time. Set on fire in the midfifties, rebuilt as a hotel and restaurant: a three-story L-shaped building. The swans wouldn’t recognize the Forest Lodge, not reading its new name. A rapid turnover in the lease, with restaurateurs first surprised and then horrified by the lack of customers. Hadn’t the brochure described a “pearl” of Nordic urban architecture, invoked the beauty of the countryside?
Jerichow would once again have submitted to the district capital. There’d be five buses a day on road to Gneez, to the greater glory of the Swenson family business. The front of the buses would read GNEEZ–RANDE (VIA JERICHOW), not JERICHOW. Gneez would attract and take from Jerichow: housewives, workers, civil servants, moviegoers, schoolchildren. In Gneez not only the movies would be as fresh and current as in Ratzeburg or Lübeck. In Gneez there’d be night schools offering language courses, slideshow lectures, readings from novels. In Jerichow people would be miffed at the new building for the Gneez Tax Office. Jerichow’s best-known attractions: a rather old air force pool for swimming classes and a location slightly closer to the border.
Rande would have grown, with Jerichow getting little to show for it. The beachfront would’ve been built up to a depth of over half a mile with weekend cottages, condos, villas. Concerts in the pavilion across from the Archduke Hotel. Which might be called the Baltic. Even in Rande there would be products and entertainments unavailable in Jerichow. Rande would have a spa therapy center, a temperature-controlled seawater swimming pool, a more modern cinema than the one in the Jerichow Rifle Club, and many of the stores would stay open in the winter too. The Rande streets would have been torn up and redone two or three times. The signs on the roads approaching and leaving Gneez would say “Rande” more often than “Jerichow.” Ilse Grossjohann would not have stayed mayor for long. Still, she’d have two cutters docked at the new landing, and a cozy little tourist trap dotted with shrubs and bushes, the Naiad Garden Restaurant, where the day-trip boats from Denmark dock.
The airport at Jerichow-North would be Mariengabe Airport, licensed only for private planes, competition for Lübeck-Blankensee. The runways were already more than a mile long, solid 1936 workmanship too. Mariengabe, annual mecca for international air rallies. Sporty, noncommercial, right near the border, and entirely peaceful.
A radar-monitoring station would have been built near Rande, on the coastal cliffs not far from the border, screened from view with hedges. (The Federal Republic of Germany would still not have sovereignty; in 1960, as a military partner, it would have been allowed to take over the facility from Great Britain.) Even now, in 1968, the three old naval barracks on the east side of the little sports field. They would still look temporary. The rotating radar dish can be rapidly taken off its support, disassembled, and loaded onto the three trucks parked in such a way that they seem waiting to drive off. Flagpole on the little square outside the exit. A lost dog (German shepherd) next to the sentry box. The sound of the Baltic ruined here by the droning of engines. Signs below the barbed wire on three corners: Military Security Zone, No Trespassing, Violators Will Be Shot, Barracks Commandant, Federal Defense Minister, Liable to Prosecution under §100 Subsection 2 Par. 109g. Jerichow wouldn’t have that.
Sometimes, most of the time, the people of Jerichow would act like it was a real backwater, somewhere like Klütz. Shut down Town Street for three whole days just to change a cable. Let the tourists who’re just going to the sea anyway take a detour! The excavator digging out the trenches is the latest model, and its driver can cut edges with it as foursquare as Heine Klaproth used to do during his labor service. He can even make nasty asides about how idiotic the staring tourists are. Maybe Heine Klaproth’s his father. The deft orange-painted monster would have been rented from a company in Lübeck, though.
Because graves in Jerichow would still be dug by hand. It would’ve come too late for Amalie Creutz. Families visit the cemetery at Christmas. The blue spruce wreaths they bring might have been stolen, but not from someone the deceased didn’t know—that could be taken as an insult. Then they’d go home and feed the cows a second time, as a Christmas treat. But they’d all have to be there. Evening church service. Brüshaver would be under the ground, though, not up in the pulpit. They’d know where to find old Papenbrock’s grave. Cresspahl wouldn’t want to go on. Let someone else live.
The out-of-towner in the pharmacy asking where she might find a dry cleaner would not only be directed to the building “opposite the Shell station,” she would also get a verbal assessment of the duration and quality of the treatment. That would still be the same.
Legal advice: Dr. Werner Jansen. Real estate: N. Krijgerstam, working for R. Papenbrock Co. Taxis and buses: Heinz Swenson. Information on the names of fields and meadows, and local history: O. Stoffregen. They would, perhaps, have still been there.
Friends in Wismar would have to be over sixty-five years old to visit people in Jerichow. Transfer at Bad Kleinen to the interzonal train to Hamburg via Schönberg and Lübeck. They’d have become very different people from one another.
If Jerichow had ended up in the West.
May 30, 1968 Thursday, Memorial Day
On May 30, one hundred years ago, General John A. Logan gave an order. He was commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic at the time, and it was well within his rights to decree that this day be set aside to decorate the graves of comrades “who died in defense of the country in the late rebellion.” It has expanded, the remembering is now supposed to include the dead in foreign wars too, especially the unknown soldier.
In our neighborhood they go looking for him around the corner, at Riverside Park and Eighty-Eighth Street, where there’s the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. Outside the noble, unused little temple, modeled on the choragic monument of Lysicrates in Athens, they went marching this morning with drums, trumpets, and glockenspiels, men and children in uniform, so that even up by us the air is filled with drum rolls and fife whistles.
We were on our way to Grand Central Station when the remains of the parade swung onto Ninety-Fifth Street—we couldn’t escape. It was parts of a women’s regiment, fiercely determined ladies who in no way brought to mind office work or nursing during the Korean War, so erect did they hold the flag, so stiffly did they swing their arms and plant their legs. The two buildings of poor people on the south side of the street were covered with flags. As many as three faces in each window. On our side stood the alcoholics—woozy, defenseless, patriotic. One was holding a little child’s flag in his hand, unaware it was there. The parade was accompanied by boys and girls running up and down alongside it, with toy plastic machine guns and handguns: they looked similar enough to the real thing to fool you, and the sounds at least were right.
The schools, post offices, stock exchange, and banks are closed for the sacred occasion. The holiday lasts through Sunday.
Vacation in the country, on Long Island Sound.
Vacation with Amanda Williams, Naomi Prince, and Clarissa Prince. Mr. Williams is waiting back in New York, Mr. Prince has gotten a divorce, Clarissa Prince is five years old. Marie Cresspahl will have to work for her vacation.
The house belongs to Naomi’s father, an accountant who’s worked his whole life to pay for it. His loneliness is there in the living room and on display in the study: yearbooks of the New York Stock Exchange and the Collected Best Plays on Broadway, 1931. In 1931 he got married, in 1942 he went off to fight the Japanese, in 1943 Naomi’s mother moved to an unknown location in New Mexico. Collections: pipes, mussel shells—both abandoned shortly before achieving real stature. Leaves outside dim the rooms.
Today and the next two days: meals together, walks, until the big cleanup on Sunday morning. On the screened porch, a boat’s deck on stilts, it’ll be nice to watch the rain, if it rains. On Saturday night we’ll watch the presidential candidates debate on TV, McCarthy the workhorse against Kennedy the high-strung foal. Or mayb
e we’ll forget to. At night, before we fall asleep, we’ll talk, half honestly. That afternoon two young men turn up, friends of Naomi’s, maybe Mrs. Williams’s. They’re both named Henry. They drink very moderate amounts, talk about job prospects in New York, and direct every fourth sentence to the outsider, Mrs. Cresspahl. Oh yes, this is just the kind of landscape I like. They come back in the evening and pick up Amanda to go to a barbecue in a backyard far away; Mr. Williams’s call from New York misses her by minutes. Who is going to go pick up the phone and lie to him? We all talk differently than we do in the bank, our workday familiarity here broken up into caution, shyness, privacy. Amanda has suddenly turned timid and afraid, hardly speaking up at all, even though she’s usually the chattiest. Naomi and Amanda know something about Mr. Prince that they still need to talk about, but not till they’re alone. It’s as if Amanda is scared of the children, but a house with so many wooden rooms is supposed to be even more full of children. A cleaning lady came by and was sent away, Naomi doesn’t explain. Do you like the rain? My father isn’t exactly strict, but he expects you to behave a certain way. Did you have to raise a father too? I’m afraid I did try to do that too, Naomi. Y’see? The instant before night reaches the ground, the moment before we feel fear, we see the children coming back. They’ve been at the beach until now.
The beach is the shore of a bay curving out into the Sound. Hard sand. Expensive villas on the water in the bluish light. Motorboats anchored past the bathing area, a tiny sail heading northwest. Reeds, marshy meadows. Fifty acres of mixed woodland, narrow access roads. A marina on the other side of the spit of land. Not many boats out on the water. Elaborate, elegant revolving cranes, several floating decks. The water still, almost black. Fingers glow in the darkness. When you surface your face feels pulled, as if it’s slid back into an earlier shape. On the middle jetty a blanket has been laid out under the open sky, there’s a shower next to it—you can live here, by the water. Finally someone came walking up to us, he doesn’t know any neighbors who’d go swimming at this hour. He stops next to the strangers, greets them warmly, starts a conversation about temperature and humidity. And he wishes us a restful night, a relaxing vacation. As if we’d come home.
May 31, 1968 Friday
Vacation in the country. Country rain.
A day trip in West Germany four years ago. We were on our way north from the Hamburg Airport, and in Grömitz there was a bus in our way. Marie was curious about “Holstein Switzerland,” even if it came with explanations from the Holstein Swiss. We were tourists—and we bought two excursion tickets like tourists.
The bus was tightly packed with mostly women and children. We were crammed onto the seat that folds down in front of the rear door. Now that our way out was thwarted, Marie would’ve liked to escape. One lady, quiet, with an elegant hairdo, stepped hard on her foot and it wasn’t enough to just land on the toes either—she put her full weight on Marie’s instep. The Vacation in the country. Country rain. child couldn’t help but look long and hard at her. The lady stood next to us, pulling four rows of passengers in around us, complaining all the while about a child who wasn’t grateful for a stomp on the foot, these foreigners, whatever will a spoiled girl like that do when she gets hip problems. Marie crawled so fast up over her mother’s lap to the window seat that it looked like she was about to jump. But the door couldn’t open, the bus drove off, we were trapped in the hostility steaming over at us from three sides. It’s about respect for your elders! And what was infuriating was that this child showed no fear, merely wanted some distance.
The bus driver spoke through a microphone, selling us the region. His passengers’ commentary about the new single-family houses, the lakeside property for sale, was tinged with good-natured envy: Well now! Isn’t that something? Yes, but what it costs! The driver had dialed back on his dialect to accommodate his paying customers; some grammatical mistakes remained, of course, he’d learned them especially for the job. – This might interest youse. He pointed out an abandoned inn, reported the tragic death of its owner. The men used to really like to go there, there was no phone in the place. Explanations of the local economy: it was agricultural. Cultivation of grain, rapeseed, – you use ’atta make öil. And of course tourism, – it’s you, ladies’n gentlemen, who’re paying the bills now! After sounding the depths of tolerance in such fashion he would look expectantly into his rearview mirror and gather up the approving laughter of his cash cows. Stories about refugees from East Germany, with bedsheets as hoods, coming across the frozen Lübeck Bay into the channel, – break emselves off an ice floe n sail right over. This stuck in the mind and would turn into a dream of drifting corpses whose hands you brush with your hand while you’re swimming, but he’d only been trying to show the blessings of the free market economy in the proper light. White, cheerful light, flowers in the front yards, bricks as if scrubbed clean, thatched roofs neatly mended, all as if the war had passed this place by. Before, in, and past Lensahn, the microphone explained the wealth of the Grand Dukes of Oldenburg, – but in Oldenburch now! estates, forests, whole villages all ’longin’ to him! The passengers’ silence briefly disturbed by respect. Views of the storks’ nests must have been included in the price, the way every last one of them was pointed out. One village had won the contest for the title of Most Beautiful Village, the prize was a bronze chicken, – but the president of our district assembly lives there, he maybe helped out a bit. Obedient laughter at the human weaknesses of high officials, indication of a property far to the north of the road, – y’see that there man-see-on? a film was shot there, Hochzeit auf Immnhof, youse all remember it? Lots of ahhs and yeses, craned necks. We’re supposed to picture a precipice in the Kasseedorf Fir Woods (actually a mixed woodland), hidden by trees: that’s where Carl Maria von Weber got the idea for the Wolf’s Glen! A little later, by the shore of Lake Eutin, – youse remember the four trees? That’s the swimming scenes from Hochzeit auf Immenhof. Eutin, City of Roses, the composer’s birthplace, Voß’s house, no shortage of culture here. And Eutin Castle, that belonged to the Grand Duke of Oldenburg too, – but that’s in Oldenburch! Coffee break between Lake Keller and Lake Uklei, announced as if giving an order, no doubt about his cut from the inn.
Marie, without a glance at the beauties of the landscape that had been paid for in advance, walked over to a jetty and lay down, pulled the sock off her foot, and put her mistreated leg in the water. She didn’t complain, she did what needed doing. She was just seven that August, she’d been in New York only three years, she showed the discipline Castle Hill summer camp had taught her. She was limping visibly when she got back onto the bus. The lady, her hairdo the very picture of otherworldliness and grandmotherly elegance, turned in honest outrage to the mother of this child who had turned out so badly and wished her hip troubles in old age; she was almost weeping with rage. – Vi forstår desværre ikke tysk: Mrs. Cresspahl said.
As he started driving, the bus driver solicited some information. Look left, look right, is the person who was there before the break still there? He was unable to restrain his delight at the fiftieth repetition. The fact that his attention was split between chauffeuring and conférence sometimes sent his sentences into truly rustic pleonasms: Here in Malente there’re some rilly beautiful w-walking paths, and there you can go on some rilly pretty w-walks. He announced the boat ride across five lakes and mentioned the one life preserver ring for a hundred and fifty people, – it’s there for the captn! The owner’d splained it all to him: Captns are in short supply, see?, but you can always get more passengers. The passengers, instead of giving him one to the kisser, smiled thoughtfully.
There were three people who didn’t want to take the boat, and the driver took them to Plön by bus instead, continuing to explain the landscape. – Yeah, that’s where ’ey burn the straw-aw. Not done samuch these days. They go right upta a stack of it n set it on fire. Now something about the name Fegetasche: today it’s the name of a famous restaurant, that’s what it’s still
called today. They rilly do clean out your pockets there, fegen the Tasche, costsa lotta silver for your coffee n coke. Marie looked evenly at her enemy, who even as the steamer was pulling into Plön was searching for her obstinate victim on the lawn—she looked the old bag straight in the eyes as she slipped by, but didn’t finish her scrutiny, and still said nothing. She knew that the only way we’d get back to our rental car quickly was on this bus.
On the ride back through Plön we were shown the castle and the former cadet school: the superfamous boarding school! next year we’ll be getting some relative of an Oriental despot! The passengers were familiar with this particular dictator and nodded understandingly. That’s how it is. After that, we got a stud farm for Trakehners, an old barn whose straw roof reached down to the ground, more storks’ nests, – for the children. This innuendo, too, was met with a pleased noise. Satisfied and exhausted, he slumped down and turned on a cassette of canned music—songs from concerts by Greater German Radio and the Nazi army:
“But That Can’t Rattle a Sailor” (to be sung after losses in the sea war)
“Dark Brown Is the Hazelnut” (light brown the SA)
“And That’s a Sailor’s Love” (. . .)
“In a Little Town in Poland” (lived the girl I longed-to-be holdin’)
And a women-make-the-world-go-round operetta number: “Ganz ohne Weiber geht die Chose nicht”:
– ganz ohne Gummi hält die Hose nicht! the women in the back of the bus sang along—wobbly, menopausal, dressed in discreet bourgeois style. Their choirmaster took them through Neustadt, charmed them with the funds that a bypass road would gobble up, made them meek just thinking of the cost of building a new harbor. He did not tell them anything about the seventy-three hundred prisoners of the Nazis who, in similarly pleasant weather in May 1945, were killed in the sea off this city, not even of the six hundred sailors and guards who died in the line of this kind of duty, so he didn’t need to show them the memorial on the beach near Pelzerhaken either, even though it really is a point of interest, and quite possibly worth the question of how much it cost and who paid for it. The passengers sang along with the tape and were so wiped out with bliss when they got out in Grömitz that they no longer berated the foreign child, Marie, just felt sorry for her as a victim of deeply flawed child-rearing. Marie locked the car door as soon as she got in.