Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  On maps, Old Gneez resembles the attempts of early mathematicians to carve a piece of wood into a many-sided polygon approximating a circle. This crude disk, divided by thin veins, was split down the middle by Stalin Street, an artery for shopping, strolling, and through traffic big enough for two horse-drawn carriages to pass each other without moving aside. Almost everything east of this thoroughfare, down to the rose garden, was considered “the old good part of town,” the collective address of people who could document ancestors there since Napoleonic times, or, when in doubt, refugees. To the west, the side streets might start off by putting isolated stuccoed buildings on display, but they betrayed their true nature with the crumbling half-timber at the sides and stood convicted by the cottages, small farms, and tradesmen’s yards sloping away behind them. These were houses built not just for single families but for those who wanted a rental income too. Anyone walking through the Danish Quarter could tell by the doors. Factory-made, barely any woodwork or mottoes on the beams. Just workers. Happy with anywhere they could lay their heads. That’s how it is, west side, can’t be helped, right? Anyway, there were such crooked walls there that you hardly noticed the odd door handle. That’s how several of those houses had avoided the looting. Gotten off easier in terms of being assigned refugees too. But even the Soviets hadn’t been able to eradicate the border to the respectable part of town: Stalin Street.

  Stalin Street, previously named from its orientation toward Schwerin, crept south toward the market square for a quarter mile and then vanished into the cobblestones, starting up again on the opposite corner but less grandly, and now as Schwerin Street once more. There was Bulls’ Corner, Bleachers’ Road, Coopers’ Lane. There the child sometimes visited a building with a grand entrance and a cramped upper story of living quarters and servants’ rooms. There she sometimes watched Böttcher at work. She liked that. It was across the street from the Chapel of the Holy Blood. Schwerin Street had once been a way to walk to school.

  But the market square was unforgettable for a child from Jerichow. Its square footage might be comparable to the market square back home, but in Jerichow everything had been left at that; the square here was clearly the model for Gneez’s modern ceremonial plaza by the station. Here the buildings often showed four rows of windows, one atop the other, each of its own dimension, in individually upward-scalloping facades, behind whose pinnacles was no mere empty air but an indisputable window to an attic room, which existed there too. They kept such a proud distance from one another; they left alleyways, Tüschen, between them, not from necessity but from self-respect. They had to have those. The roofs had their backs turned from the market square; like hair partings above faces, they were all supposed to be unique. There were pulleys built into the gables, on which every single gap had been upgraded to a half wheel with spokes; there were coats of arms painted there, from interlaced initials to a burning circling sun. (The south side of one building turned the long end of its roof to face the market with a mansard in masonry not to be found on any postcards from before 1932.) Here you had the Court and Council Apothecary. There you had buildings that spoke of history, and not only in their weather-beaten bricks: In this hall the citizens paid their contribution to Old Freddy’s seven-year war (1756–63). In memory of the time of the French: arson and pillage under General von Vegesack. Friedrich IV, King of Denmark, spent the night here, December 19–20, 1712. The post office, formerly the palace of the counts of Harkensee, was on the market square, its Doric columns courteously retracted. On the west side a spacious building has raised its brows so high that the roof needs to keep to the horizontal for a while before bending downward in back. Its facade has double doors proportioned according to the golden ratio, with staircases to the second floor closing in on both sides. And yet it stands in a row with the other buildings, not insisting on a greater separation. This was the former City Hall. The double staircase had been meant to show respect for authority, for the man elected first among equals. The cellar below was to keep its view of the market square. But for twentieth-century views it was too modest. With all their grand ideas they still hadn’t managed to wean themselves from linden trees, full and round of crown, all around the market square near the surrounding buildings; they had just kept on growing. The candelabras wouldn’t grow. Station Square might suffice as a parlor for the modern era, but the market square was Gneez’s good room, now as ever.

  The city didn’t end there—south of the market square was almost a third of it, known as the Ducal Quarter, designed by court architects somewhat more generously between the forceps formed by tree-lined avenues along the old fortress walls: police prison, district council office, district court, county court, palace theater, cathedral yard, high school converted into Soviet army hospital, and the esplanade, about a hundred yards long, between the city swimming pool and the Little Berlin housing development on Gneez Lake. At the corner of the cathedral yard there was Alma Witte’s hotel, where the child from Jerichow sometimes spent the night.

  The city of Gneez. First mentioned in the Ratzeburg tithe register in 1235. Approx. 25,500 inhabitants in 1944, just under 38,000 in 1946. District capital. Industries: Panzenhagen Sawmill, Möller & Co. Canning Plant (a branch of Arado). Apart from that, trades; no mercantile business to speak of except for one company. Surroundings: forest to all sides except the south; a ridge of hills to the east, 320 ft. high, forested under the gracious supervision of Duchess Anna Sophie of Mecklenburg. The last witch burning took place there in 1676, hence its second name, Smœkbarg (Smoke Hill). Along with Gneez Lake: Warnow Lake, Rexin. Train connections to Bad Kleinen, Herrnburg, Jerichow.

  Ever since the Cresspahl child had been transferred to the Bridge School, she could have turned right straight from Station Square, walked down Warehouse Street, and crossed the bridge to the Bridge School in the suburb known as the Lübeck Quarter. If instead she wanted to learn more about the city of Gneez than she was assigned, perhaps that was due to the time she had to kill until the next train departed?

  She had long since stopped being a stranger, someone who noticed the buildings first and the people second. She was still a commuter student, but she’d moved to Gneez with many of her things.

  She would enter the houses. With the people there she’d talk business, and she had much more time to do so than Jakob. She asked Böttcher the price of a butter churn, compared his answer to what Arri Kern was hoping to spend, and Böttcher got the difference.

  In “the new good part of town,” the suburb around the station, she had a Russian officer’s wife to visit. This was the supervisor of the district council office. Her German landlords tried to hound at least this one newcomer out of her house with grossly inadequate services—they gave Krosinskaya no bed linen, started rumors in the neighborhood that her kind could hardly be used to any. Krosinskaya didn’t have a husband in the barracks on Barbara Street; hers was buried near Stettin. This meant she had to buy sheets and blankets. She bought liquor. Once, she took all her clothes off except her silk slip right in front of the Jerichow child, pushed up an invisible weight with both hands, and asked: wasn’t she still beautiful? The child guessed her age to be about forty and gave her the adjective she wanted; she wasn’t lying either. It’s just that everything about Krosinskaya, from legs to breasts, was a little too large, too heavy. Krosinskaya always paid the exact amount. She laughed at her German hosts. They wouldn’t give her any furniture, so what? So she lived in bed, spread out sheets of the army newspaper on the bare mattress and laid out her dinner every day on the Krasnaya Armiya: sausage and bread and onions, separately. She ate them with a knife. In other ways she was quite finicky.

  Another Soviet family, employed at the station, were bringing up their little boy to hate Germans. He would kick over Granny Rehse’s mop bucket and treat her like the lowest scullery maid every way he could. Granny Rehse would have enjoyed being affectionate with the seven-year-old; as it was, she didn’t understand him. This was the Shachtev family, who d
idn’t buy liquor, they bought LP records. It was supposed to be Beethoven’s music and cheaper than you could get it at Krijgerstam’s Razno-Export. They brought out some liquor after all, under protest; berated the German child as a Fascist brat; weren’t above threatening her with denunciation once—all with the pointedly good manners that made any real familiarity impossible. Mrs. Shachtev had been a doctor before the war. Her darling child, Kolya, had had his own nanny back home.

  The Jerichow child learned from Alma Witte, or from Wilhelm Böttcher, those little scraps of local history that newcomers so like to use to imagine they understand a strange place:

  The cathedral burned down in the hot June of 1659. Every other building remained intact undamaged, so it was presumed to be a case of arson. (According to the calculations of the New York municipal weather bureau, June this year was unusually wet and cool.) The Church has been waiting for the city to donate money for a new spire since 1660. The city had to accept the Protestant faith at gunpoint; the cathedral received nothing but a new transept until 1880, with the city giving nothing for the tower. The city could wait. As long as the Church was annoyed, the citizens could accept that ships no longer used the blunt emergency roof of Gneez as a seamark but instead used St. Peter’s Church, Jerichow.

  The Lübeck Quarter’s official name was Bridge Quarter, even though it was on the Lübeck side. Well, we can keep the big neighbor to the west, even its name, out of our city at least once, can’t we! For another thing, there had been a bridge there, over the channel with which Johann Albrecht I of Mecklenburg, long before Wallenstein, had intended to link the Wismar Bay to the Elde and thence Asia Minor. Wallenstein had lent his name to the scheme; what remained was a putrid ditch between Arado Works I and Arado Works II.

  Gneez Lake had once been named after a large farmer’s village to the south, which was wiped out during the Thirty Years’ War and then later in the seventeenth century came under the plow and turned into moors. Woternitz Lake was the old name. The higher Gneez rose in the world, the more urgently it wanted a city lake of its own—Gneez printed it on tourist brochures, screwed hands with a pointing finger onto the enamel signs already in the train station. True, the Reich’s land surveying office hadn’t budged. Gesine learned to listen to such stories without bringing up Jerichow’s Town Street. The right thing to do when Gneez’s “Town Lake” came up was to purse one’s lips a little and give Willi Böttcher a sidelong glance. Then she almost seemed to belong.

  She had to take care of things in Gneez. On September 1, 1946, when she started at the Bridge School, the signature Abs on the old report card had caught the eye of the homeroom teacher, Dr. Kramritz. He’d asked just out of curiosity, but her panic made her realize the truth: Mrs. Abs was not her stepmother, not her aunt, not anyone entitled to sign report cards. The Cresspahl child had no legal guardian at all.

  In late October she heard about Control Council Directive 63. There were now to be “interzonal passports” for trips to the western zones. The border was open again. Whatever it was keeping Jakob at the Jerichow gasworks and Cresspahl’s house was a mystery to her. He might go west any day now. Dream up a funeral to go to there, or a deal in nails, and the People’s Police would give you the piece of paper you needed. Mrs. Abs wouldn’t stay without him. But Cresspahl’s child had to wait.

  In Gneez you could see it. Brigitte Wegerecht had stopped coming to school from one day to the next, without an excuse for Dr. Kramritz or her friend. Then she sent word from Uelzen (British zone).

  Rooms in Gneez would suddenly turn up empty overnight, or whole apartments. Leslie Danzmann scattered a glorious treasure of residential assignments over the refugees’ heads. There were again families living all by themselves, behind their own door. When Dr. Grimm was due to take over the district council office as senior administrator, Krosinskaya energetically made certain suggestions and his family took a trip to Hamburg for a christening—no great surprise for so Protestant a family. He spent a long evening over wine in the Dom Ofitserov discussing the work Gerd Schumann had left behind after his departure; by the next morning he had swum across the lake near Ratzeburg. He knew what he was doing. Brigitte’s mother, née von Oertzen, may have been complying with her husband’s last wishes, or her brother’s advice. Could Cresspahl’s child have blamed Jakob’s mother for doing likewise?

  Jakob still went to visit Johnny Schlegel’s often enough. He was in love with a girl there. Anne-Dörte was prettier, and smarter, than any younger girl could hope to be; she might be a countess and all that; but Gesine Cresspahl knew—she was thirteen, wasn’t she?—that loves like theirs last a lifetime. There was no doubt about it. If Anne-Dörte was summoned to Schleswig-Holstein, Jakob would follow her there too. Then Cresspahl’s child would be without the care to which she had a customary right and which the Abs family had temporarily given her.

  Children who are alone in the world are sent to a children’s home. There was no such place in Jerichow. The one that took in all the children from the area was in Gneez.

  June 28, 1968 Friday

  Yesterday, června 27th, in Literární Listy, the weekly journal of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, published in Prague, authorized by the Ministry of Culture, price one crown twenty, was a letter to all the citizens of the country,

  dělníkům,

  zemědělcům,

  úředníkům,

  vědcům,

  umělcům,

  a všem,

  signed by almost seventy workers, farmers, engineers, doctors, scientists, philosophers, athletes, and artists,

  Dva tisíce slov, The Two Thousand Words:

  “The first threat to our nation was from war. Then came other evil days and events that endangered the nation’s moral integrity and character. Most of the nation welcomed the Socialist program with high hopes. But it fell into the hands of the wrong people. It would not have mattered so much that they lacked adequate experience in affairs of state, factual knowledge, or philosophical education, if only they had had enough common sense and decency to listen to the opinion of others and eventually agree to be gradually replaced by more capable people.

  The Communist Party, after enjoying great popular confidence immediately after the war, bartered this confidence away for office piece by piece until it had all the offices and nothing else. We feel we must say this. It is known to both Communists and the others who are equally disappointed with the way things turned out. The leaders’ mistaken policies transformed a political party and an alliance based on a great idea into an organization for exerting power, one that proved highly attractive to power-hungry individuals, to unscrupulous cowards, to people who had something to hide. Such people influenced the self-image and behavior of the party, whose internal arrangements made it absolutely impossible for people to attain leadership positions and adapt the party to modern conditions without performing scandalous acts. Many Communists tried to fight this decline, but they managed to prevent almost nothing of what was to come.

  Conditions inside the Communist Party both epitomized and caused the corresponding conditions in the state. The party’s association with the state deprived it of the asset of separation from executive power. No one was allowed to criticize political and economic decisions. Parliament forgot how to advise, the government forgot how to govern, and the leaders forgot how to lead. Elections lost their significance, and the law hardly mattered. We could no longer trust our representatives on any committee or, if we could, there was no point in asking them for anything because they were powerless. Worse still, we could scarcely trust one another anymore. Personal and collective honor collapsed. Honesty was a useless virtue, assessment by merit unheard of. Most people accordingly lost interest in public affairs, worrying only about themselves and about money, despite the fact that it was impossible to rely even on the value of money under this system. Personal relations were ruined; there was no more joy in work; in short, the nation entered a period that endangered its moral integrity and char
acter.

  We all bear responsibility for the present state of affairs. But the Communists among us bear more than others, and those who served or benefited from unchecked power bear the greatest responsibility of all. This power was that of an intractable group, spreading out from Prague into every district and community through the party apparatus, which alone decided who could or could not do what. The apparatus decided about the cooperative farms for the cooperative farmers, decided about the factories for the workers, and decided about the National Committees for the public. No organization, not even a Communist one, was truly under its members’ control. The chief sin and betrayal of these rulers was casting their own whims as ‘the will of the working class.’ If we accepted this premise, we would have to blame the workers today for the decline of our economy, for crimes committed against the innocent, and for the censorship that hinders us from describing these things! The workers would also be to blame for the misconceived investments, the trade deficits, the housing shortage. Obviously no reasonable person can hold the working class responsible for these things. We all know, and especially every worker knows, that the working class had no say in deciding anything. Working-class functionaries were given their voting instructions by somebody else. Many workers imagined that they were in power, but it was a specially trained clique of party functionaries and state officials who actually ruled in their name. In effect these people had stepped into the shoes of the deposed ruling class and themselves became the new power.