Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – Was there someone writing down everything Brüshaver said again?

  – Not in church. Yes in Papenbrock’s parlor.

  – Then all they could do was talk.

  – And they’d been given the room to talk in which the Communist Party hadn’t been able to fill. That group, which met at Prasemann’s Rifle Club, really did see it as a game of hide-and-seek with the Soviets. It was not only Duvenspeck (German Liberal Democratic Party) who let himself be heard expressing the opinion that in Liberalism the freedom of each individual was compatible with the freedom of every other individual, hence had to be restricted by it. After the Sunday in October when the CP collected a group of people to burn down the estate manors “which were a disgrace to the landscape,” even though in truth that surely applied more to the farmworkers’ cottages, the local historian, Stoffregen, just released from his labors dismantling the railways, gave a subtle lecture on the influence of Italian and English architectural styles on secular buildings in Mecklenburg, “which we were permitted to see for the last time this past Sunday.” In the minutes there was only something about the urgency of the potato harvest.

  – And then Stoffregen was arrested. Oh, Gesine . . .

  – No. But that’s how Stoffregen got himself known. People like Duvenspeck on the other hand, and Bergie Quade, even though they claimed that as housewife or civil servant they’d been purely apolitical, were needed for positions in the Anti-Fascist Women’s Committee, or as municipal advisers, and maybe they felt more important when they could apply for a permit not merely as a private individual but by starting their letter: As a member and representative of the Christian Democratic Union . . .

  – What exactly could they apply for?

  – Whatever they wanted. They could petition for the removal of Friedrich Schenk as mayor, for the construction of a power line to Jerichow. . .

  – But what did they get? What were the limits?

  – I can tell you one of them. They had banded together as private groups—they were appointed, not elected to public office—but they had one mandate, assigned to them by everybody, and there was no getting out of it. They needed more living space. An urgent mandate, you might say. Imperative. There you are, Mina Köpcke, you’ve been running around after your workmen six days a week and Sunday morning is wasted on bills and taxes and now you’re sitting on the sofa in the evening, Duvenspeck’s there too, in his shirtsleeves, you wouldn’t mind taking your blouse off too, at least undoing a few buttons, Duvenspeck’s a little tipsy, now that doesnt hurt, jus’ top off my glass there, fill it up, fill it, Eduard, cheers Edi . . . and here comes the refugees’ oldest child walking into the room, right on schedule, wants to warm up the pillows for her brothers and sisters by the fire, a ten-year-old girl like that sees more than you think, the kids’ll lose all respect for you just because they can’t find anywhere to live, the Liberal Democratic Party hereby proposes to improve the lot of the resettlers and requests that the Soviet Kommandatura approves an allocation of living quarters from the occupation power’s holdings at Jerichow-North airfield.

  – So that was the limit.

  – Right. They thought they’d pull a fast one Pontiy’s successor—surely he could see the houses for the former civilian employees standing empty on the airfield, all those broken windows. They promised to have living quarters restored by the honest tradesmen of Jerichow. They provided proof that an airport like that is too big for just one company of guards. If not a single plane is flown in or out, then the strategic value must be—let’s just say it, zilch. Now don’t you agree, Mr. Commandant sir?

  – Now who was this commandant?

  – I didn’t know him, I never once saw him. Around Jerichow he was known as “Placeholder,” because he left after only three weeks. But I know what he answered, and I can imagine his despair at these screwy Germans, exasperation buzzing around in his brain like a swarm of bees—no clue about territorial tactics, right on the border with the British, they say this crowd almost beat us? It was a short answer, given with his very last scrap of patience, and I can hear his tone of voice too, imploring, beseeching, rising to outright fury on the last syllable. Guess.

  – “The commandant regrets to inform you—”

  – No.

  – “The Red Army refuses to allow any interference in matters which—”

  – Nope.

  – “Get out!”

  – No.

  – “There’s no such airport”?

  – There! is! no! such! airport!

  June 18, 1968 Tuesday

  Brezhnev had tears in his eyes. In a two-hour meeting with the Czechoslovak parliamentary delegation on Friday, things weren’t going as Professor Konstantinov wanted and as the Soviet news agency knew to be true. Admittedly, a representative of the People’s Party said so, which is a party with a Roman Catholic orientation, but it is part of the Czechoslovak National Front, allied with the Communists; admittedly, he said it to that tiresome Lidova Demokracie, but anybody in Prague could buy a copy. Brezhnev denies that his country intends to intervene in Czechoslovakia’s democracy. Many things that the now uncontrolled Czechoslovak press is spreading among its citizens are making him sad and hurting the Soviet Union’s feelings, but there is no thought of intervention. Leonid Ilyich was prepared to justify himself before any international tribunal! He also concedes that errors have been made, though he doesn’t say what they might have be. The general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Ilyich, cried.

  – They were always going to be bringing you Socialism, Gesine. They never denied that, right from the start.

  – It was going to be Socialism. But not off-the-shelf Socialism. The Germans were going to make their own.

  – What does “German” mean, Gesine?

  – The German version of Socialism had to be something special. Sweepingly specific. In February 1946 the Communist Anton Ackermann wrote to the Germans: In particular cases the

  pronounced characteristics

  of the historical development

  of our people,

  our political and national idiosyncrasies,

  the special features

  of our economy

  and culture

  will find full expression.

  – What did he mean by these German idiosyncrasies? The robes the judges wear? How many doors the buses have? The color of their military uniforms? Blue for the navy?

  – The German military was outlawed. Weapons, buildings, literature. Everything.

  – Was it that you were supposed to do it in the German language, not in Russian?

  – Yes. But imagine how people like Stoffregen the local historian started drawing up a list of German things! What was German about the state, about the people . . .

  – Gesine, when’re you going to show me just one person who liked it. Who was sitting in the driver’s seat. Who did it because he wanted to. Who was enjoying himself. Someone like that. He knew what was going on and he liked it. You must know one!

  – I do know one. Imagine that you’re twenty-three years old . . .

  – Sounds great, Gesine. Sounds great.

  – . . . in the summer of 1946, you’re the district councilman for Gneez, you’ve gone over to the Communists not for a bit of bread but across the eastern front, you’ve founded practically every third local branch in the area around Gneez, you’re allowed to carry a gun, you talk to the Russians in their own language with a Moscow accent, you’ve got a room in the City of Hamburg Hotel, now with breakfast, but in winter Alma Witte has to heat it for you . . .

  – His name’s Gerd Schumann.

  – That’s what you’re called these days, you’ve been given that name and by now you’re even used to it, it’s missing only a few deep crannies you can crawl all the way into, where you feel it to be really yours, where it couldn’t be anyone else’s. You shouldn’t change it again, you should keep it for now, you’ve gone around t
o too many villages with it, people wouldn’t know you; but who has the forms you need for another name, and the authority to stamp them and sign them? You do. You don’t exercise this power too, there are enough other kinds that you wield.

  – He’s got everything he wants.

  – You were one of the very first, the Soviets brought you into Initiative Group North, you were not with Comrade Sobottka in Stettin on May 6, you were still studying administration in Stargard, but you were there in Waren on the Müritz when the Sobottka Unit voted itself head of the party for Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, you’re not on the wrong horse, you’ve proven your worth. No one’s given you anything for free, you worked for it. And it’s thanks to you that nobody’s homeless in Mecklenburg now even though the population’s doubled, 52 percent are resettlers from the East but they all have roofs over their heads, you’ve put them to work, they can feed the occupying power, feed the friends, they have food to eat themselves, and you receive bread for your labors too. Where 2,500 estate owners used to exploit the soil now you’ve helped settle nearly 65,000 new farmers, it was your party that repaired 26 large bridges rather than leaving them in ruins, the waterways are open again, except for the Bolter sluice, your accomplishments include 539 drivable trucks, 243 tractors, 437 automobiles, 281 motorcycles, laid rail, 11 omnibus lines running on schedule . . .your party got them all moving. You did that. That’s what you have to worry about.

  – And he can’t have had any other worries, Gesine.

  – Oh yes you can. You can have trouble with the party. The Red Army deploys you to Mecklenburg and a little knowledge of the local dialect would’ve come in handy. No idea what the people might be saying to one another, maybe right to your face. In a rural area you would’ve liked to know the acreage needed to feed a family, how much milk a cow actually gives, that people here still measure the land in rods. The same kind of thing had happened with the other comrades in Initiative Group North—they came from Silesia, Bavaria, the Ruhr, they were miners and clockmakers, some of them knew nothing but the inside of the party. One had waited it out in Sweden. Sweden! The party helped you, it sent you up and down the coast from one village to the next and soon the people were no longer laughing at you, you even proved to them that five hectares was enough to feed a family, not the fifteen actually set by the party back in 1932; hopefully the other comrades did as well as you did. You know the reasons: The German émigrés in the Soviet Union could only produce cadres of activists, and not even enough of those, certainly not agricultural or technical experts; take what you can get. Those the Nazis didn’t kill off in their prisons and camps are broken, sick, exhausted people; have to make do with them too. You have to talk them out of the nonsense they’ve dreamed up away from the party. They come to you with their thuggish Socialism—total expropriation, large-scale agricultural production—you can’t be a spoilsport, you have to let them find out for themselves that we can’t entrust the administration of Socialist farms to the same estate managers who served the agrarian capitalists. One of them, who’d been in a camp since 1939, objects to you that after the brown straitjacket he has no desire to put on a red one—you explain the exceptional path of the German nation to that one. They demand from the party the immediate and complete seizure of power by the working class and you gently point out to him that Socialism can only be forged with the human material at hand, with farmers, the lower and middle classes, and of course with the working class in the lead; that’s precisely why the Red Army has removed the large estate owners, the military leaders, the major banks, the leading industries. Sent them away. Others can’t get it through their heads why Mecklenburg would demolish its proletarian centers in Rostock and Wismar; it falls to you and none but you to itemize that the workers at Heinkel and at Arado built warplanes, at Neptun they built warships and rocket parts, at Dornier seaplanes, and you pose the question of restitution in moral terms first, only then political ones. When they ask you to intervene in Soviet arrests, you just silently shake your head and suggest that when it comes to security the Russian friends trust none but themselves, and rightly so. Yet another person understands about the demolitions but not about the Razno-Export or Techno-Export stores where the Soviets are buying up gold, precious stones, porcelain, paintings, every last valuable possession down to the wedding rings, in exchange for cigarettes at precisely the black market rates; you ask that one: Who owns such things? He wouldn’t happen to have any of that himself now would he? When they ask you about the years between 1935 and 1938 in the Soviet Union, or émigrés there who never came back, you’re too young for a moment and then you ask about the harvest. You have your own burden to bear. You have no choice, you have to tolerate a Social Democratic mayor in Gneez who, you personally know for a fact, from a prisoner’s statement, encouraged comrades to defect during the Nazi years, that is to say volunteer for the German Army; he survived with his tobacco store and now they call him senator. And if that’s not enough you have to let the bourgeoisie into the administration for the time being, as long as they weren’t actual members of the Nazi Party, or if they’d been locked up for refusing to give a Hitler salute once; actually what matters more, more often than not, is that they know something about business. The head of the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern State Bank is one Dr. Wiebering, bourgeois anti-Fascist, all right, Forgbert’s a Communist and he’s vice president and supposedly he’ll pick up the banking business but will he? As for you, you’re a bit up in the air—every file comes across your desk, you sign the permit, a duplicate of every order is filed, but now this deputy of yours, Dr. Dr. Heinrich Grimm, what did he do after the Nazis kicked him out of office as a district councilman? He says he behaved properly. What does that mean? Who is this Elise Bock: almost all your files pass through her hands and typewriter but who is she going around with, why doesn’t she want to join the party? Of course you’d trust her any day over all these people who come running with their applications for party membership, talking about their good will, offering up the exceptional German path to Socialism as their justification, they don’t have the faintest glimmer of an idea about the party, you need to find an empty building somewhere or other in this district of Gneez where you can teach them, sound them out, prepare them for the party, since you’re not allowed to refuse them membership. This language! Kåååmen sei, so kåååmen sei nich; kåååmen sei nich, so kåååmen sei; if they come then they dont come and if they dont come they do come so its better when they dont come so they do come than when they do come so they dont come . . . Once you’ve slowly finally learned to understand the words then what are they talking about? At least if it were a riddle, but no: it’s a problem predicting the future, and what’s the answer? Duven un Arwten. You had to get that translated for you. Tauben und Erbsen. Pigeons and peas. Hopes for the harvest. All right. Not that you’re homesick for Mannheim, the Allies have blown it to bits anyway, but down there in Baden the people wouldn’t look at you so funny just because of how you talk. There’s plenty for the Communist Party to do in the Neckar region too. Now your proper place is wherever the party sends you. But you could think of another place.

  – Don’t make me a whiner, Gesine!

  – You’re twenty-three! You want everything to be perfect. The party must be pure. And all you’ve got is pure chaos. Hodgepodge. Odds and ends and none of it fits together.

  – That I can understand. It’s like in that Soviet film we just saw. Where the Red Army man loses his party book. To him that was worse than . . . than if you woke up tomorrow morning in a hotel room in Outer Mongolia and had lost your passport. I get him, I think. And if he can’t handle Mecklenburgish right off then let him keep talking Russian. With his friends.

  – That’s what they were called. You were allowed to call them that.

  – Dancing at the Dom Ofitserov! Not everyone gets to do that.

  – As if you have time for that! You get to the office, for once you’re going to clear your desk of the ten-day pile of leftover paperwork,
and Triple-J phones you up. Mr. Schumann: he says. They’d almost gotten to first-name-basis brotherhood the night before last, hadn’t they? Well, maybe he forgot. What else does he have to say? Wants to know whether you’ve been to the station. Have you been to the station, Mr. Schumann? That’s it. End of conversation. You have someone drive you to the station, gun in your coat pocket, must be some kind of dustup going on there, what else could it be. What it is is a freight train full of resettlers, transfers, from Pommern, from Poland, and they’re sick, and have lice, and now once again the city is faced with typhus. These few hundred people could infect forty thousand. Now you’ve got to waste three days—burying the dead, setting up a hospital in the Barracks of the Solidarity of Peoples, ordering the doctors onto night duty—while your Social Democratic mayor spends a few extra days on his official trip to Schwerin. Does Triple-J ever once show up, take a look around, intimidate the stretcher bearers a little? On the contrary, the station and the streets around it are declared off-limits to the Red Army. And what does Jenudkidse say on the fourth day? – Good boy: he says. You don’t lose faith in him, you don’t imagine yourself as his equal, but he could be nicer when he tells you certain things, not quite so patronizing. You get it, this unification with the Social Democratic morons can’t be avoided. Tactical reasons are reasons. The whole People’s Front thing has to happen. You give Triple-J reports on the problems with the bourgeois parties; you make it funny, with amusing details, you don’t complain. You get the new farmers to trust their property, you remind them of the Count von Gröbern who told the Prussian parliament that he needed three oxen in his fields, two to pull the plow and one to drive it—finally the people believe that you’re trying to bring them justice. In Wehrlich they invited you to the celebration after the drawing of lots. You danced. A woman put her arms around you, not out of gratitude, just because she felt so happy. You turned red, and the men helped you out of your embarrassment by slapping you on the shoulder, and for one afternoon you weren’t an outsider. Then the SMA sends you men from its own Centralized Agricultural Planning Office—well-dressed well-fed gentlemen, one with a pince-nez—and at a public, authorized meeting they prove that Mecklenburg’s climate and soil quality make it the best region in the country for the cultivation and propagation of seed potatoes, enough to feed half of Germany, it won’t take more than, say, 1,500,000 acres of estate land staying in large, undivided plots. And there goes three weeks of agitprop. The people don’t believe you anymore. They start asking each other if they’re really working the land for themselves. This is the hot water the Red Army has gotten you into with its People’s Front, 1936 model. All of a sudden you realize that they were just letting the bourgeoisie talk their talk, the land has been divided up and distributed and it’ll stay that way. You apply yourself with a little patience and suss out the ultraclever variation being played out before your eyes and you forgive Triple-J for everything, almost everything.