Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – And denounced him.

  – You don’t trust me. You think I’m twisting the story around against her. Just to make her out to be bad.

  – You hate her.

  – There was nothing about her for a thirteen-year-old to hate, Marie. I avoided her because Cresspahl more or less told me to, and now Jakob wanted it too. Did I know why? Can you hate on command?

  – That wasn’t my trap, you know, Gesine.

  – She would never have denounced him, it would have gotten around to the neighbors that she was being more accommodating to the Soviets than she needed to be. And besides, she still shared something else with the other Jerichow homeowners: they wanted their little entries in the nobility’s good books. The situation might change again, after all.

  – Back to what it had been? They’d lost!

  – The Soviets were incomprehensible conquerors—they didn’t introduce their own economic system in Mecklenburg. Not the big nationalized communal farms, their famous kolkhozes. They faithfully kept the agreement with their Allies, the Potsdam one, and took the land away from everyone who owned more than a hundred hectares, and of course from any Nazi leader. They did so earlier than promised, but did they do it in a Communist way? Socialist production is large scale, you’ll learn that one of these days, but the Soviets handed out their stock of land in small parcels, many of them just five hectares, to farmworkers, small farmers, resettlers from the eastern territories, even old farmers got something, and the municipality of Jerichow, can you imagine? got fields to cultivate that had once been the nobility’s, and a piece of the Countess Woods to boot. To approve so much property, in such quantities, both the concept and the reality, and provide the Mecklenburg world with it—that didn’t look like they were planning to stay.

  – They must have done it with gritted teeth at least. Just to honor their treaty?

  – You don’t believe they’d do such a thing, Marie.

  – Aha. So that was your trap. Right, Gesine?

  – That was not even the spring in the door of the trap. But they’d signed an agreement saying that the German people were not to be enslaved, and they stuck to it. They kept their version of Communism for themselves. Sometimes they acted in such a way that even the most ethical bourgeoisie couldn’t help but approve. They communicated with the Germans through a newspaper of their own, and they could have called it The Soviet Military Administration News, The Anti-Fascist Observer, The Free Red Front, but they called it The Daily Review—Tägliche Rundschau, “The Frontline Newspaper for the German Population,” and dropped the “Frontline” as early as June 1945. And that wasn’t any random title, it had once been the name of a Christian paper with fiercely nationalistic leanings. The Soviets took that, too, from the booty they’d pocketed from the Nazis, all strictly legally. The middle-class concept of property counted for something with the Soviets.

  – Maybe they needed your bourgeoisie for a while, for economic reasons. But they didn’t let them into the government. That would have been like promising to cut off their own arm.

  – Well, don’t ask Sister Magdalena about the Potsdam Agreement.

  – You’re kidding me.

  – The Soviets couldn’t make their position with regard to their share of the conquered people any clearer than they did with their leader’s prophecy, painted on bedsheets and hung on town halls or painted in red Gothic on the front walls of school auditoriums:

  Hitlers

  Come and Go

  But

  The German People, the German State,

  Remains

  all center-aligned the way type designers and calligraphers like. When you have that before your eyes for hours on end you can’t stop trying to translate it into Latin, with et, or even more elegantly, atque, it looked so classical. Wise as the Leader of Peoples working nights in the Kremlin, a perfect example of his style and yet the voice was off a little, it wasn’t one of his feats of dialectics, just the ebb and flow of history: Hitler a recurring type notwithstanding the growing power of the international working class, eternity promised to a state identified only as German but that meant it included a strand of Mecklenburg too. It was nothing less than a lesson in irony, perfect for bourgeois minds.

  – They didn’t believe it, Gesine.

  – If the Soviets were using perfectly good sheets for it? Cotton they otherwise could have slept on? Your middle class bowed their head and accepted it, they liked showing off how clever they were. How sly, how shrewd. As promised, the Soviets didn’t just hand over the administration of their conquest to Germans, to opponents of Hitler’s; as expected, they sent in relatives, German Communist Party émigrés trained in Soviet schools for this German state; predictably, they sent in people with them representing the class which, according to Soviet science, was the sole source of productivity and historical strength, and which, moreover, was overdue for an equalization of both income and power; to no one’s surprise, the Communist Party arrived. Now it was their turn.

  – Arm in arm with the bourgeois parties. Before K. A. Pontiy’s very eyes.

  – This commandant left them behind in Jerichow as a memento. After Cresspahl’s arrest—

  – “Stop.”

  – In fall 1945, Pontiy was no longer the Oriental potentate. His orders grew more detailed by the day, treating the former British Mecklenburg in accord with the same plans that applied to the rest of it. Sighing, he gave up his statistics. He would have liked to just issue orders. He ordered Mrs. Bergie Quade and Köpcke’s wife to come to the villa for coffee, on the last Sunday in November, the Sunday for the Dead, and amazingly enough he served coffee. They could sit down, too, if only in the brown leather armchairs facing the corner of the commander’s desk, but they tried to make up for this by sitting bolt upright, knees decorously together, expecting a discussion of their idiosyncratic bookkeeping. Instead it was suggested to them that they

  found

  a regional branch

  of a Party

  of German

  Liberalism

  (or: Liberality) and

  Democracy

  while Bergie couldn’t stop dreaming of filing a complaint over the removal of the old mayor; Mina was encased in an almost new dress, let out at the back with two gussets, acquired to be worn for the widowed Mr. Duvenspeck, she had just started feeling like a woman again; now they missed their cues, it didn’t matter what else they said: we’re simple womanfolk, you know, I’m just taking my husband’s place, you know, I mean in the business, that’s all, a political party’s for special interests, youve still got our men locked up, you know, and what will the neighbors say! Commandant!

  – Liberalism. Isn’t that something to do with the gold standard?

  – Not in that context. There it was the idea of stimulating the economy with the economic self-interest of the individual, unrestricted competition, a free market that the state protected but did not interfere with, international free trade, manage best by managing least, laissez-faire laissez-aller . . .

  – Must’ve been a translator’s mistake.

  – Well, they were certainly willing. It was a gift, they weren’t going to ask why they deserved it. Whatever they thought of this party’s name, it did have a ring of the old days, of prewar times, pre-Nazi. They were clever about it, asking for time to think it over, pleading shyness, what with the public speaking. Bergie couldn’t get it out of her head that Pontiy’s adjunct Wassergahn could be her son, she’d have no trouble pulling the wool over his eyes. Mrs. Köpcke licked her lips, she’d been chosen because she was a woman, and if the Soviets were offering tea and cakes for honest doings and dealings then she could cut herself as big a slice as any man. Each of them hoped to palm off the top spot onto the other, but that didn’t yet get in the way of their friendship and trust. There was only one snag to be taken care of, and that was the neighbors’ ignorant chatter about sucking up to the Soviets: they’d learned a thing or two from the reputation they themselves had crea
ted for Cresspahl. And here they both bethought themselves of K. A. Pontiy’s shortest, curtest answer, which had sort of agreed to offset their political activities with the expedited return of their husbands from Soviet prison camps—wasn’t that an honorable reason? It took some time to get it known among the good citizens of Jerichow. Duvenspeck, though in charge of the gasworks, was the most amenable to accepting it. Then, out of left field, Böhnhase emerged as the founder of the local LDPD (German Liberal Democratic Party)—Böhnhase the tobacconist, former DNVP (German National People’s Party), sentenced to seven years in prison for the crime of bartering tobacco for bacon in 1942 and yet not recognized as a VoF (Victim of Fascism) but nonetheless ready and willing to serve as a pillar of anti-Fascist Liberalism, office hours whenever his shop was open, tobacco rationing no argument against the party, abolishing tobacco rationing an argument in its favor. Mrs. Köpcke had to admit, along with Bergie, that they’d underestimated the male appetite, and anyway Böhnhase had been too far away from the trough for too long. They both joined his party, now no longer the main offenders, just fellow travelers. They brought in others too: Plückhahn the pharmacist, Ahlreep the jeweler, Hattje from the general store, tinker tailor soldier sailor rich man poor man beggar man thief—the whole native population faced with a minimal state. A “night-watchman state,” they called it. Translation from the German.

  – Did Louise have to join a party too?

  – She wanted to, Marie. It was voluntary. Allowed. Desirable. Louise, standing in for her husband, joined the Conservative party, which called itself a Union, and wanted to be Democratic like the liberals, but unlike them Christian. Christian Democratic Union, CDU. And that’s how K. A. Pontiy achieved his public

  expression

  of my respect

  for the cause

  of the equal rights

  of women

  because even though Pastor Brüshaver didn’t generally preach atonement for German war crimes, even in what he called “the social sphere,” he did think party politics was irreconcilable with spiritual office, it was enough simply to call for an “honest self-reappraisal,” and Pontiy was happy to have a woman in charge—

  – Louise Papenbrock.

  – Käthe Klupsch.

  – She was the laughingstock of the whole town!

  – Käthe Klupsch was incapable of laughing at herself, though. What she was best at was the forgiving tone in which she spoke of people who went over to the Communist Party or Farmers’ Mutual Aid just to get a second residence permit or a claim to a plow or maybe a head of cattle from the stock of the land reform agency. Swenson, Otto Maass, Kägebein, whenever one of them asked another how things were going the other would say: Scared as shit, same as ever! It sounded much better in public when Käthe Klupsch announced: We have joined forces not for our personal advantage but for the cause.

  – Well, whatever your trap was, Gesine, it blasted mine to pieces.

  – Mine was just to show you that you’re wrong sometimes with all your talk of merciless oppression by the Soviets.

  – I was trying to prove I can learn a lesson. I can think the Russians are right, sometimes, at least when they punish a crowd like that. But now the old crowd’s back on top.

  – What do you call a double trap like that, Marie.

  – You know perfectly well.

  – Your English is better than mine.

  – A double cross. Probably a Vorspiegelung vermittels Tatsachen in German, or something.

  There once was a time when we believed Herbert H. Hayes—that time when he looked up the weather over Easter 1938 for us. Let’s hope the New York Weather Bureau never employs him anywhere but in the archives. They’d have to worry about him in the forecasting department. Today was neither sunny nor dry. It might have deserved “mild,” if only for the persistent rain that wouldn’t stop for hours.

  June 14, 1968 Friday

  The Czechoslovak government delegation is back from Moscow. Bringing gifts. The Soviet Union will increase its annual natural gas shipments to Czechoslovakia to three billion cubic meters (100 billion cubic feet). The Košice steelworks will receive two million tons of iron-ore pellets a year, though not until 1972. Do we think he’s gotten the fear of God put into him, our confident Vice President de Rosny? No, the Soviets refused to provide a hard-currency loan, modest though the requested sum was, $350 million, a mere seven-eighths of their debts on the Western market. All the more quickly and happily will de Rosny provide more. We’re not going to get out of our trip to Prague. Marie knows, too. She doesn’t want to talk about it.

  The Times, prim and proper Auntie Times, makes a decorous curtsy. She apologizes. She’s made a mistake. In that Soviet poem on the death of the New York senator, it wasn’t supposed to say that Abraham Lincoln basks in his marble chair. It should have said that the marble Lincoln “rasps.” Marie could use this for her Kennedy folder. But she doesn’t want to hear that name for a while.

  – So, what are you not going to tell me about today?

  Sometime before Christmas 1945, Erwin Plath came trotting through northwest Mecklenburg again—his home territory, and assigned to him by the Socialist Party in Hanover. You make an effort for a guest, and Plath got his meeting in Jerichow, twenty minutes standing in the brickworks drying shed, perfectly in view of the Soviet Kommandatura, so it wasn’t only from the cold that he was shivering. It was a bitter enough pill to swallow that he had to admit a mistake before informing his audience of the new party line; they heckled him mercilessly, not even respecting his status as a messenger. Fourteen men and two women had come; he knew two as former card-carrying members, was willing to believe it about two more, for eight of them he could imagine neither a past nor a future in the Social Democrats, and in one case he thought he must be dreaming, hadn’t he been kicked out of the party in 1938, following the full illegal procedure? What’s more they refused to give their names, so we’ll have to content ourselves with their initials, although we can assume that W. was Wulff, and B. was Bienmüller. P. was Plath and wrote out his name, Plath, and had come from headquarters—important delegate Erwin Plath. The others soon cured him of that. – In all my life: P. was still saying nineteen years later: I’ve never been through a party meeting like that!

  W. This meeting is now opened. Be it resolved: This is not a meeting. About the agenda, let it be unanimously agreed: There is no agenda. That takes care of the role of secretary. I ask that the election of the secretary be approved. Now get lost, you.

  P. The party regrets the erroneous directive of August of this year.

  S. Do we have a chairman? We don’t have a chairman. Permission to speak can only be given by the chairman.

  H. You’ve gotten us into a fine mess, comrade. If the Soviets know any of our names now, it’s your fault.

  P. Who’s been found out?

  L. None of your fucking business.

  P. The party concedes that the attempt to acquire secret spheres of influence within the Communist Party has not succeeded. There are comrades who applied for admission into the Communist Party who have been asked to found their own local branch of the Social Democratic Party. It was wrong, I’m not ashamed to admit it, I’ll say it again.

  K. Let’s hear you say it again, mister. Like in school!

  P. There’s no “mister.” And who are you, anyway?

  L. None of your fucking business.

  P. We must apply all our strength to create a strong party organization as a counterweight.

  W. We’re not in Krakow here. The Communist comrades in Krakow am See sent all their papers to the State Criminal Investigations Office in March ’33. The Soviets probably found them there.

  P. That’s beside the point.

  L. None of your fucking business.

  S. They don’t know a thing about us. We didn’t send any parcels to the Nazis and none to the Soviets either.

  H. But there’s one man they know. And that’s your stupidity, dumbass.

&n
bsp; It’s your fault.

  P. Is it you, comrade?

  H. Me you can call “mister.”

  P. Needless to say, the party will do everything in its power to cover for that comrade.

  K. Permit me to inquire: Do you have anything to cover him with?

  S. Because he can run away on his own. He doesn’t need any chick-enshit from the party for that. So that’s one less of us.

  P. How many of you are then, anyway?

  L. I move that this is none of his fucking business.

  W. Since we have no meeting, no official agenda, and no procedure, there is no way to propose a motion. The motion is passed.

  P. The most important consideration, in case of unification with the Communist Party, is to create a strong counterweight within the Unity Party. If it comes to that.

  S. Feel free to come back when the party in the British zone unites with the CP.