by Uwe Johnson
The guests had understood right away the boundaries of where they were wanted and kept out of the garden, the stables, the kitchen, wherever there was work to do. Trapped in their rooms, they never heard any part of the conversation that the locals had on many evenings. Yes, Ille had visitors, like in Paepcke’s day, whether they wanted a ladle of water to wash the beach sand out of their mouths or wanted to sit down for something serious, a chitchat or maybe a palaver or even a full-on story. Except that there weren’t many men there, and not a few women kept their white head scarves on. No one greeted Gesine as Alexandra Paepcke’s cousin—she gradually came to understand that here she was known and remembered because of her father. At the same time, no one asked her about Cresspahl either. They discussed what was happening around Fischland, so Gesine got to know Fischland as a place where things happened differently from the rest of Mecklenburg. Most of the houses had summer visitors like Ille’s, pursuing endeavors of the mind. The Cultural League for a Democratic Renewal of Germany had more to say here than the number of votes they’d received in the Mecklenburg election would’ve led you to suppose. The government of the Soviet zone had set up a playground here for the intellectuals they considered well-behaved, or usable. Life in Hotel Bogeslav was like in the old days, except that people like Seipmüller the banker didn’t turn up anymore. Actually, well, they did if they were from the British Sector, or even better, England. – Englishmen? Gesine asked by mistake. But she wasn’t rebuked for her forward behavior, why should she be. That’s right, Englishmen. The Kurhaus was called the Bogeslav now. They got special allotments “from the reserves,” whatever and whosever those were. Fischland was doled out to the intellectuals of the Soviet zone like medicine—after two weeks they’d have to clear out for the next ones. There were some who’d been swimming here since June, though. One had gotten a building permit, in Ahrenshoop, thank God. As long as they don’t start putting up their contrived buildings in Althagen. They went for horse-drawn carriage rides through the Darss. That’s right, Gesine, during the harvest. Well, we get ours in whatever happens. Yeah, no one knows what happened to the hunting lodge of Reich Huntsmaster Hermann Göring, they don’t let anyone near that place in Darss. Other than that, hardly a single complaint about the Red Army. Clearly they were trying a different tack with this corner of the world. Sure, they were armed when they went in search of Alfred Partikel when he went missing in Lower Darss Woods. Seriously, they wanted to save him. You know, Gesine, the painter. From Ahrenshoop, not in the Cultural League at least. What Gesine picked up about the business dealings of the locals sounded no less extraterritorial. It was like there was no tax office here, no Economic Commission for the Soviet zone, as if the police had no admittance. On Fischland, the category “self-sufficient” seemed to mean pretty much exactly what the word implied, not someone refused ration cards. Are you kidding, ration cards!? Now and then talk turned to the house with the sundial, so near the Shoreline Cliff. When would that crumble into the sea, do you think. With west-facing windows as tall as doors. Even if they board them up in the winter the wind gets into the room and dances with the sand. Something often said: You should do it, Ille. No harm in it. Just do it already, Ille.
After Gesine had fetched the milk, she was free to go wherever she wanted. Memory remained absent, all that came was the touch of a moment of the past that calls itself memory. What she wanted was entry into the whole of past time—the path through the faltering heart into the light of the sun of back then. One time they’d stood next to each other on the Shoreline Cliff and indisputably seen the outlines of Falster and Møn islands; Alexandra had turned slightly and her upper arm had jerked toward Gesine’s shoulder, without touching it; the feeling of convergence lay in a capsule of her mind, as if buried, and did not come back to life. One time she walked through the lagoon pastures, up to her ankles in squelching water, wanting to secretly get a glimpse of Paepcke’s cottage from the back, without the slightest hope left for anything but that touch of the past. She saw the overgrown hedgerow, the maypole, a corner of the Lagoon Room’s window. The steel door with the chicken wire was secured with a padlock and chain. She heard a woman talking the way you talk to babies old enough to take in words. All of that brought lost time back only as a thought: When we. . . . ; the words in her mind didn’t come to life. Almost every evening, when fetching the milk, she came near the moment when Grete Nagel had offered her and Alexandra a glass of milk, but fresh from the udder, and the cow was turning her eyes to look at them. Now it was a little harder for her to drink milk. She didn’t find anything more than that; and anyway it was probably just because Emma Senkpiel’s milk in Jerichow was adulterated. In the evening, when the Zeesenboots sailed into the Althagen harbor, the cats splashed through the reeds and waited for their hosts, for their share of the day’s catch of fish; cats, in the water! She still didn’t hear Alexandra’s voice. She tried to find expressive descriptions of Alexandra’s voice in that moment; even the idea of it almost escaped her. Outside Farmer Niemann’s three-story house there were three laundry lines and four people painting next to one another depicting the scene. It was like back then. It was solid and impenetrable, covering over the thought of Alexandra; all that remained was the knowledge that Alexandra was hidden under there, somewhere. In the evening the light from Malchen Saatmann’s back room rested in the bushes. She could think: That evening when we still had to fetch bread from Malchen, Alexander was sitting loftily on the sofa, probably tipsy, and he said to his daughter: Well, child?—as if he didn’t recognize her. . . . Gesine could think it. She could imagine it written down. It wasn’t actually there. She was conscious that in this minute of standing still outside Mrs. Saatmann’s friendly scattered homey light the wind stood still too, as if curbing its pace. She wondered if one day she would have forgotten this too, if it would someday be preserved only in words.
At last Ille did it. She asked Gesine for a “frightful” favor; it turned out to be merely accompanying her on an errand Gesine mustn’t ask questions about. She had to keep silent the whole time. Ille’s voice wavered. Gesine would’ve gladly promised her more if it would have made her feel better. The errand was a visit to an old woman in a cottage in Niehagen. Ille put a basket of eggs down in the vestibule, next to an assistant—the fee. Inside, by candlelight and windows draped against the sunlight, she had to put on the table before the conjurer a photograph of the captain and her wedding ring on a silk thread. The old woman avoided any fuss; her manner seemed to have been learned by watching a doctor. Her gaze was that of a businesswoman delivering something a customer has ordered for an agreed-upon price. An open, secretly covert look. She raised her elbows and crossed one hand over the other. The ring swayed on its thread from a previously invisible finger above the captain’s face in the picture. It didn’t sway, it hung perfectly still from the beginning. The ring didn’t move for five full minutes. Where you count to three hundred in your mind. Then Ille started to cry. Back outside, the assistant, apparently the sister or partner in this enterprise, expressed her condolences absolutely as though to a widow—objectively, reasonably, as if such an outcome had been infallibly expected.
– You too? the assistant asked. Gesine had only promised to keep silent. Now that she’d finished accompanying Ille, she was free to run away.
Back home Ille didn’t insist on talking about it. We didn’t take offense at each other. We could talk to each other. Five days later or so I went back to Jerichow with my wages.
Fischland is the most beautiful place in the world. I say this as someone who grew up on a northern coast on the Baltic, somewhere else. If you’ve stood at the topmost point on Fischland, you know the color of the lagoon and the color of the sea, both of them different every day and from each other. The wind leaps up Shoreline Cliff and constantly sweeps across the land. The wind brings the smell of the sea everywhere. There I saw the sun set, many times, and I remember three times, the third one not too well. Now the dirty gold is about to drop into
the Hudson.
That’s when you knew that I’m not coming back, Gesine.
Yes, Alexandra.
That’s when you were done once and for all with wanting to kill yourself.
Yes, Alexandra.
You were still thinking about it.
Yes, Alexandra.
But now you won’t ever do it.
No, Alexandra, I won’t.
I was just hiding, you know.
I know, Alexandra.
In 1947, during the summer, I was on Fischland. Never again.
July 5, 1968 Friday
Yesterday in Bonn, Fritz Gebhardt von Hahn, of the Department of Jewish Affairs under the Nazi foreign ministry, appeared before the court again, accused of complicity in the death of more than thirty thousand Bulgarian and Greek Jews. The defense called a witness who had also formerly been in a leadership role in the Nazi foreign ministry, wiretapping division.
He gave his first names; his last name, Kiesinger, was already known. Profession: Chancellor of West Germany. Such silver-haired gentlemen enjoy the West Germans’ trust. The Social Democrats are in a governing coalition with the likes of him.
When had he joined the Nazi Party? Right away, in 1933. “Not from conviction, but not out of opportunism.” What other possible reasons are there? No one asked him that. He claims to have had nothing to do with the party until 1940, other than paying his membership dues. At that point, he was trustworthy enough to supervise the appraisal and interpretation of foreign radio broadcasts. When the enemy stations mentioned the extermination of the Jews, Mr. Kiesinger simply took a skeptical position and omitted the matter from the daily digest for his superiors, and as a result the Nazis remained in the dark about what they were doing. (This was how Mr. von Hahn could fail to find out what was happening to the Jews he was sending on their way.) Similarly, Mr. Kiesinger’s colleague von Hahn had never heard the term “final solution” until the end of the war. Only late, and gradually, very slowly, did the disappearance of those who wore the yellow star, and stories from soldiers returning from the fronts, make him think “that something or other wasn’t right.” That “something very ugly was happening” with the Jews. Officially he knew nothing. Under oath. Leaves the courtroom without handcuffs.
In Soviet Germany, in Mecklenburg, on February 26, 1948, the Soviet Military Administration ordered the end of denazification on and as of April 10. It was said of the guilty that they were under arrest or that the Western occupying powers were giving them shelter. The Americans were in possession of a particularly capacious aegis: Dr. Kramritz taught the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old children in class 8-A. Former National Socialists were now being expressly invited to join in the “democratic and economic reconstruction,” provided they “atone by honest work.” Not being in jail proved your innocence.
Atonement comes in various forms, of course—how could a child know them all?
The Arado Works in Gneez had now been expropriated in writing. Heinz Röhl had even legally forfeited his Renaissance Cinema, due to miscounted admission tickets when the Soviets released its booty of UFA films for the starving Germans, which was the profit motive, hence aggravating circumstances, not mitigating ones as he was probably used to getting under the republic. And yet there was a business king of Gneez, outside the law just like in the days of Freddy Numero Duo. Emil Knoop, we’d almost forgotten about him! As per the rules he was an ex-Nazi, and he’d come to town with quiet pomp and gentle circumstance and soon exceeded all comparison. I bring you tidings of great joy. He’d had a hard time to begin with, over the reputation from the old days he’d left in his wake. For his father, Johannes (Jonathan) Knoop, had always been considered a prominent businessman and upstanding citizen who could be forgiven such little tics as raising carp and rather gentrified hunting. He’d been doing business as Coal Merchant, Carriage Trade, Import and Export since 1925 (1851). When it came to getting in with the right people in Gneez, his boy Emil had often enough been a problem. Take 1932: it was far from clear to whom a businessman had the moral duty to pledge his allegiance. Johannes was leaning toward the German Nationalist Party. But his boy Emil ran off to Hitler Youth shooting practices with his father’s whole gun cabinet. That was a dicey year. An expensive one, too, for now Johannes had to give money to both sides. And even if Emil’s political savvy could be said to have been proven by 1935, the fact remained that he hadn’t learned much more about his father’s business than how to reach into the cash register; his teachers had apparently had to carry him across the high-school finish line. Then it was labor service that was supposed to reform him; he came back from it once he’d gotten a girl pregnant in Rostock. The things it took to make her see that her life as Mrs. Knoop in Gneez would be nothing but torment! He continued to learn from his father how to cut a fine figure in Gneez, with a sports car and silk scarf; this, along with alimony and other settlement money, was too much for the company so he had to enlist in antitank defense in Magdeburg so early that he became a reserve-officer candidate, then went off to the Polish war as a private first class and came back from the Soviet one as a first lieutenant. Not straight back to Gneez. In June 1945, at the Kiel harbor, the British released him into the civilian population since he could prove to their satisfaction that he’d never had anything to do with the NSDAP other than his party dues having been withheld from his officer’s salary. During his practicum in the black market in Belgium, during his work in all the occupied countries in Europe (except Italy), it had certainly been better for Emil Knoop to be in the party. Whatever it might have been that kept him apart from his loving family for a little while yet, in a Hamburg office that apparently really looked like a counting house of yore, his sojourn there may have helped give his amateur understanding of business a bit of scientific backbone. In early 1947 he took over Gneez. Shows that people were coming from the West after all! He left the coal trade to his father. His qualifications for the transportation business were obvious, seeing as he’d brought with him a more or less brand-new American truck, the kind you could get enough spare parts for in Mecklenburg. He transported almost nothing within Mecklenburg. He spoke little about what he was doing; pretty much all you could get out of him was that he was assisting the SMA with liquidating various businesses. True, one day he’d said a bit loudly in Café Borwin: I’ve got to get everything for the Russians, from tank to horse an saddle, don’ know which way is up anymore! Turns out he did, because one evening when he was arranging a deal in Jerichow’s Lübeck Court Hotel a waiter came running up, pale as a sheet, and whispered: Mr. Knoop! Berlin’s on the line, Karlshorst headquarters! – Right: Emil said, in his self-satisfied way: They cant do a thing without me. Turns out they could, sometimes, and then he’d spend a few days in the basement under the Gneez courthouse. He reformed that place in a matter of days, got hold of the keys of the other cells, had food delivered from town (from Mrs. Panzenhagen—liked her cooking more than his mother’s), and acquired a record player with jazz discs from the thirties, which was apparently a bit of a burden for the guards and they let him go after six weeks (with feverish apologies). Johannes Knoop grew ever paler with fear until he was almost transparent. Gneez got a taste of Emil’s views on filial devotion: by fall 1947 his parents were living in Hamburg, and not in the Pöseldorf neighborhood either, in fact quite far from Inner Alster Lake—out in the country, you might say. They seem to have written him rather few letters. True, Father ran Emil’s old office, it’s just Emil seemed to have forgotten it. To each his own business methods, whether inherited or acquired. Emil’s new office was in Brussels. And why not, didn’t the Soviet zone have a trade agreement with Belgium? Emil’s office in the Soviet Sector of Berlin was called Export and Import, the one in the British zone was a room in a dentist’s office and didn’t seem to need any sign whatsoever. The fact that Emil was often away from Gneez made it that much easier for legends to spring up around him. A foreign truck, with a trailer, loading every last particle of wheat from Papenbrock’s
and the Red Army’s granary and driving off toward Lübeck, the border crossing—that’s not nothing. Soon Emil was respected, almost liked by the proper sort in Gneez. He could be living like Louis the Last in Belgium, could he not?, and yet here he was toiling away for Mecklenburg and the SMA. And did he go around bragging of his business success? No, he kept wearing the same hat every day, bit greasy by now. Did he not show Christian compassion, time after time? A Mrs. Bell was living in Gneez, in a room in her villa in the Berlin Quarter. Lucratively divorced in 1916, a rich woman who took care of problems over the phone. Now that her phone had been taken away, she couldn’t handle the world. Emil went and sat her down at his own private phone. Needed a housekeeper anyway. Do you think Emil was the type to wear gold rings? No, if he had anything to be happy about (“like a kid”) it was more likely that, in addition to his white (“personal”) propusk required for any long-distance transport orders from the Central Transport Authority, including border traffic, he’d been given another one, the red kind, authorizing travel through the whole Soviet zone, including border traffic! It was age-old wisdom, wasn’t it: Just let the army haul a ne’er-do-well over the coals and he’ll know what’s what for the rest of his life. Y’can see it in his short haircut too. Tight, black, neat. And Emil never bought a round for everyone at the bar—only paid for the ones worthy of his love. It was nice to hear him tell stories, not about business but from his life: how he’d shot down two Viscounts near Cuxhaven in September ’39 and made sure the crews were buried with military honors. How at the “Vistula estuary bridgehead” he’d discovered that they’d had a concentration camp by the name of Stutthof there, which was why he’d painted “Stutthof Remains German!” on his truck. You know, personal reminiscences. And now they finally knew what the weather’d been like on May 9, ’45, when he’d skippered the crossing of the Baltic to Kiel: the sea was calm. Why begrudge a lucky stiff?—his interzonal pass was always in order, he could count on being exempted from local motor pools, the rationing board not only recommended him but attested to the legality of his fuel sources. No one envied him his driver, or his 275 pounds. He had such a calming effect. (Nobody wanted a closer look at his black boxy briefcase: too full of dangerous money.) When he did come a cropper—smuggling horses to Lower Saxony; getting beer kegs of “uranium” confiscated at the border—he would laugh himself silly telling stories about it later. A loyal soul, that’s what he was. One time, he came back from the wider world of the steel trade to Gneez, where the potatoes on the state-owned farm weren’t out of the ground yet. He promised fifty marks for every basket upended next to the trucks, and that night the trucks were filled to the brim and he threw a party for the workers too. He could use those potatoes. Took the small stuff too. And oh how he cried when Dr. Schürenberg told him about the diseases the schoolchildren were suffering from. Chinese beggar’s disease, that’s what they had, from eating pigweed? Emil couldn’t bear to hear that, needed a triple brandy, quick now. What? suffering from scabies? under Emil’s very eyes! Dr. Schürenberg didn’t inform him that the word referred to ordinary itches; he painted a picture of the children’s vitamin deficiencies. The children kept getting their ankles all banged up from their wooden sandals’ sharp edges, never healed, led to inflammations of the lymph vessels, horrible pains in the groin. He’d seen Cresspahl’s daughter (– now thassanother good man!: Emil roared, in tears) standing at the train station, legs so stiff she could hardly walk it hurt so much. – Cresspahl? said Triple-J, the town’s military commander, J. J. Jenudkidse. For they were sitting in the Dom Ofitserov, guests of Triple-J. – I swear it!: Emil cried, sobbing. This was shortly before Christmas 1947. – An orange for every child: Dr. Schürenberg said. For he’d been to university and wanted to wipe out on the spot this unheard-of prestige that a common tradesman apparently enjoyed. – And a salted herring for every laborer!: Emil sobbed. Gneez held its breath for the next couple weeks. Emil could always back out by saying, truthfully enough, that he’d been ten linen closets of sheets to the wind at the time. But it happened, punctually too. The salted herring came. The oranges were handed out in schools and children’s homes and hospitals. Triple-J provided the trucks, since this time Emil didn’t happen to have any trucks “liquid” (such short notice!), while Emil saw to it that the things were pilfered in sufficient number from Hamburg harbor. Gneez had long since learned to believe in Emil.