by Uwe Johnson
At the end of the 1947–1948 school year the teachers at the Gneez Bridge School all agreed that they needed to keep an eye on Cresspahl, class 8-A-II. Only Miss Riepschläger, in the excusable carelessness of her youth, excluded herself from the others’ cares. – Gesine has her father back, let her celebrate till she’s blue in the face: Bettina said in her innocence. The older, more experienced pedagogues were perfectly willing to allow this for the first two days, a week at the outside, but it certainly was suspicious, wasn’t it, if this transformation from a gloomy to an open, even confiding personality lasted longer than that. Frau Dr. Beese and Frau Dr. Weidling were constantly skirmishing over the psychological theories they had learned at different institutions at different times. Weidling resorted to dictation, which she gave with grammatical snippets, titbits (back-translation not out of vanity but for educational purposes). She was unaware that her voice, in the heat of the moment of elegant articulation, got rather bulgy, downright owlish in fact, so apart from five students the word usually took various fantastic forms, and those five all happened to be sitting around Cresspahl, although she hadn’t been seen whispering. How could such a timid child suddenly put her graduation to high school at risk! Even worse: during the break Gabriel Manfras and Gesine went up to the board and openly (!) wrote what they’d heard—Gesine “usually,” fine, and Gabriel “jugewelly,” then he crossed her version out. The old Gesine would have pinched her lips, would have turned on her heel, stubborn and subdued. This one came running after Mrs. Weidling, pulling Manfras by the arm (!), and asked in a cheerful, friendly way for the correct spelling. Now wouldja lookit that. Dr. Beese asked if Cresspahl had gotten a demerit in the class book. No, there was no proof she had whispered the answer: Weidling replied, demoralized once more when she remembered how Schoolgirl Cresspahl had walked on with her, alone, and asking like an old friend if the Dr. got these titbits from British Broadcasting? She sometimes gave it a listen too. Was it conceivable—concluding a pact of silence with a child? Severity now as much as ever: Beese said dreamily.
Gesine simply felt like she’d woken up. All the dillydallying before a decision was gone, and whatever she did was right. She saw no reason why she shouldn’t use a wooden briefcase as a satchel one day; she explained the rolling lid, the three compartments to anyone who asked (but not the secret compartment, or its place of manufacture, or its provenance from the personal effects room of a prison)—she was the daughter of a father who could make such a thing with his own hands, wasn’t she? It was only right to share her confidence with Mrs. Weidling, if the teacher was going to reciprocate. (She regretted for rather a long time the sudden disappearance of the titbits from the lesson plan.) Even in Miss Pohl’s class, her stalwart efforts and stubborn diligence had turned into willingness, thinking along as if enjoying it, delight at understanding; she kept her cool when Pohl slipped back into her earlier conception of pedagogical Eros and grumpily reproached her with comments like: Yes, Gesine, about time! or the one about two minutes before closing time; what she got for her pains was more likely to be a twinkle in Gesine’s eye. Gesine not only had a B+ average in math now, almost all her grades qualified her for high school and she’d get permission because she now had a legally authorized head of household who could sign the application. (Jakob had gone to Jansen and started proceedings to be made legal guardian specifically because of Mrs. Abs’s contested signature—now she could throw those papers right into the Gneez moat.) The future had arrived, and she’d been on time to meet it.
She was careful not to overdo it. She was one of the first in her class to show up at the office that Emil Knoop, in his inexhaustible patriotism, had cleared out and made available for the People’s Referendum. When she got there Frau Dr. Beese was on duty, and since it was before the noon train it was just the two of them behind the windows that showed them one piece of Stalin Street after the next through crossed hammers on frosted glass. Gesine suddenly decided she could say something to Beese after all. Because constituting Germany as an “indivisible democratic republic” sounded fine to her, especially if there was going to be a “just peace” too, but she’d learned about elections a bit differently in school—not these ballot lists on open display and quizzing children aged fourteen and up about their preferences. She asked if this was another right way to do it. – I know your identity personally: Beese said grimly. She was missing lunch that day. Gesine mentioned being underage. – You just sign right there: Beese hissed, snide but somehow coaxing too, and the child realized that this might be important for her permission to attend high school. So she scrawled her name under German Unity, appeased her teacher with a curtsey, and skipped happily across the fluted tile floor of the enormous lobby onto Stalin’s blistering hot white street.
Schoolgirl Cresspahl might have gotten her father back; did it entirely escape her what kind of father he now was? He certainly wasn’t in much of a position to work, his earnings wouldn’t even cover the school fees; but she acted as if she’d woken up, downright cheerful. The way things were seemed to be just fine with her.
Believe it or not, Cresspahl had been released with more obligations than just to register his new address. He was supposed to set up a woodworking facility with the machines that had been taken from him and manage it as a trustee. Even the telephone, previously seized as part of his business property, was reinstalled for him by technicians from Gneez in the interest of another business—the people’s economy—and with the old number too: 209. Except the machines he’d driven into the drying shed of the brickyard in April 1945 weren’t there anymore. From the carpenter’s bench and disk sander down to the tiniest saws and clamps, they’d disappeared—and from right next to the Kommandatura, too, under the very noses of the Soviet military police, behind two-inch-thick doors and an untouched padlock. The room had been totally cleaned out. The noble Wendennych Twins stood there, nonplussed, with the itemized lists from the Schwerin SMT in hand, disgraced in front of this dispossessed German while a judgment from their very own army courts absolved him of this crime. Since they didn’t believe in ghosts, for professional reasons, search teams from the Economic Commission started entering numerous workshops north of the Gneez-Bützow line in late May 1948, finding a dovetail jig in a carpenter’s shop in Kröpelin, a crude-oil motor in the maritime boundary slaughterhouse in Wismar (now a people-owned ship-repair yard), and also some purchase agreements whose prehistories had a way of fading into obscurity just before reaching one Major Pontiy, one Lieut. Vassarion—business conducted at night, via handshake, sealed by insufficient written documentation. Cresspahl received furious letters from colleagues who at the time had paid in labor or goods for the equipment the Gneez prosecutor’s office was now having hauled off to Jerichow. He seemed happy about the fact that the machines tracked down by mid-June weren’t enough to reopen a business with, and he put up not the slightest resistance when the post office came to re-remove his telephone after half the brickworks burned down one humid Sunday morning. The honor of the Red Army blazed again in all its old glory; he’d been saved from having to manage anything. The Wendennych brothers had ordered the tardy fire brigade away from the more brightly burning main gate and into Cresspahl’s yard so that it kept his daughter’s house safe but was unable to save the future workshop. The prosecutor’s office found enough molten metal in the rubble to satisfy them and declined to question Cresspahl after he’d had no choice but to refer them to the local commandants as the responsible parties. And what could he have said to their questions anyway? The commandants, nattily dressed and perfumed, came to see him with impeccable apologies and even accepted coffee, standing rigidly upright, after they had called his attention to the smoke in the air. The People’s Daily reported the accident as an attack by unscrupulous elements opposed to world peace in the employ of the American imperialists; in Jerichow word went round about Cresspahl’s experience with fires going back to November 1938; never again did the Twins pay a personal visit to Cresspahl, just as t
hey consistently kept the Germans at a distance from their own residence and persons.
Gesine didn’t mind. For one thing, she’d been in no danger from the fire since she’d been moved for the night from her room to Mrs. Abs’s on the other side of the hall. For another thing, she wasn’t seriously hoping for a return of the old days when Cresspahl would hoist a desk onto his shoulders, an oak top with two built-in stacks of drawers, and march that awkward monster straight through Jerichow to the exact spot in Dr. Kliefoth’s study where what he’d ordered was supposed to be put. This Cresspahl was hardly up to supervising a workshop as a manager. She watched him in the yard earthing up potatoes—the ones that Jerichow’s nimble fire brigade hadn’t run over or trampled; he held the hoe stiffly, moved slowly, head hanging. There had been a time when he could make an interior door with nothing but an ax. He was here now. She didn’t need everything all at once.
They were sitting one morning on the milk stand behind the house. Not only was there no school that day, she could sit next to Cresspahl for as long as she wanted to. Who cares if he didn’t notice that the milk stand’s uprights were rotting and needed shoring up. In the shade, wet with dew, the oldest cat was standing on stiff legs in the overgrown grass in front of them observing a blackbird chick that had fallen out of its nest, not fully fledged. The cat put down two legs in front of the others, not even bothering to sneak up. The screaming mother blackbird was in such a hurry that she dropped like a stone out of the tree, bouncing up already raising her head against the enemy, offering herself as a sacrifice, prepared to commit suicide. The cat gave her a sidelong look, gray and dispassionate, and stepped toward the chick, undeterred by the mother’s shrieking. The cat would take care of the first one and then the second one. Gesine didn’t know for sure if in earlier times she’d also have stood up and taken the dumbfounded cat away from its breakfast; now she came back with the predator under her arm, accepting the fact that the animal thought she’d lost her mind. She sat back down next to Cresspahl, keeping hold of the cat, which gradually realized it was being stroked but clung to its suspicion. What strange new customs were these? Then Gesine saw Cresspahl put down the stone he’d been about to throw at the cat himself.
Of all the arts these are the unprofitable ones, bringing in neither bread nor money. In the last week of June, Cresspahl’s daughter saw how much trouble people could have with the money they’d set aside. Obediently, eagerly, she recited in school for Herr Dr. Kramritz certain things about the West German currency reform that he didn’t believe and that she now felt uncomfortable saying: the surviving leaders of the Fascist war economy, aided and abetted by the leaders of the bourgeois parties and the Social Democrats, were only interested in saving the rotting, crisis-ridden capitalist system—how stark a contrast with the currency reform in the Soviet zone. But she was exempt from the chaos raging among the people of Jerichow and Gneez starting on June 24, as was Cresspahl, and Mrs. Abs, and Jakob too. In their four savings accounts they had a grand total of two hundred and twenty-two marks after the devaluation; only Jakob and his mother had the seventy marks per head that could be exchanged for certificates with glued-on coupons at the post office. But many people owned greater sums, still worth a tenth of face value through June 27 and rather risky above five thousand marks, hinting at arms deals or black market business. Miss Pohl was observed storming up and down Stalin Street in Gneez past emptied shopwindows; by Saturday she had a genuine antique porcelain object from which punch might have been ladled were it intact, and an electric heater beyond repair (trading folks were occasionally moved to offer electrical appliances, given that the power had been cut off). Many felt sorry for Leslie Danzmann, who’d tried to pay back Mrs. Lindsetter, wife of the district court chief justice, the two hundred marks she’d borrowed a week before to buy a pound of butter—the worthy matriarch rejected her offer and refused to come down to even two thousand marks in paper money. Upon her humanity being appealed to, Mrs. Lindsetter avenged herself with the cryptic decision: Yes, well, then there’s no help for it, I’ll just see you in court, darling! Gabriel Manfras got a violin for Christmas from the Sons of Johannes Schmidt Musikhaus—guaranteed and unsellable for decades—though he didn’t know it yet. Mina Köpcke, alarmingly inclined to the inner life and the exercise of religion ever since that nasty fight with her husband over a gasworks manager by the name of Duvenspeck, extended the range of her sentiments to the arts and acquired for a good three thousand marks two genuine painted pictures (oil), one an early-spring birch landscape with an overflowing stream in zigzag diagonals and the other a stag with its head in a position suggesting embarrassment. Pennies, five-pfennig pieces, and groschen were hard to come by, since they retained their face value for the time being; it was seriously said about old Mrs. Papenbrock that she’d rounded her bread prices down. The truth is that she baked less than the minimum daily quota during these days and Miss Senkpiel offered the rounding off—upward. Mrs. Papenbrock overcame her disdain of her son-in-law for once and went to Cresspahl for advice, because the balances in all of her accounts had been canceled the day before the proclamation of Order No. 111 of the SMA of Germany, and the sheepish gentlemen at the government bank hadn’t cared to tell her why. Cresspahl assured her, though he didn’t really believe it himself, that the Soviets confiscated assets only if the defendants were still alive, and spared her his opinion that she shouldn’t even dream of Albert’s release. Not that she failed to conveniently forget her offer to lend him the sum he needed to make up his per capita quota; with a gracefully raised double chin she turned around, almost exactly on the spot, and didn’t shake his hand, content with the disappointment she’d predicted but for which she could never have found the right words. (This was the first time she’d been in the house since 1943.) Sunday had come and gone and money was still pursuing the Jerichowers with its useless offers; they were left to flop like fish on dry land. Everyone in the house felt bad for Jakob’s mother, because the housing that Jakob had refused to consider after the war was now having its equity devalued only fivefold, which meant that the Abses would’ve had to make payments only until 1955, not 1966, for the property Mrs. Abs wanted merely so as not to have to welcome her husband back empty-handed. She knew she couldn’t manage such a property—it was remembering Wilhelm Abs, his uncertain life on or under the earth of a Soviet camp, that she could bear only while sitting alone in her room, praying with unseeing eyes, unhelped by her tears. On Monday Cresspahl received two small packages in the mail containing paper money, payment for bills from 1943 and 1944, but he was not allowed to pay the thirty marks he had been short of his per capita quota after the deadline; Berthold Knever, now back behind the counter at the post office, found that the days passed a little more quickly during the currency reform, occasionally letting him think about something other than his troubles and exert a little authority over Cresspahl with a snippy tone, now no longer a dusky old parrot but one dusted with gray. Then Jakob turned up and gave him trouble aplenty; Jakob didn’t shout at the mayor, he only had to look at him with his brooding, puzzled gaze and he got Cresspahl’s certificates at once, with the coupons, without a receipt. Emil Knoop, unaware of any more pressing troubles, once again made sure he got the cut he felt he was entitled to, despite it taking a few private visits to the Soviet neighborhood in Gneez; his calculations, sweeping all before them, told him that the soldiers and noncoms must have spent almost all of their month’s pay by this point, and the officers and employees of the Military Administration their biweekly salaries likewise, so, charitably, he planned to go in with them on their unrestricted exchange quotas for a mere 5, 4, or 3.5 percent fee. He came to regret his audition with the commandant brothers in Jerichow as a mis-step, for when they threw him out onto the street he could expect only a denunciation, which meant a loss, of time if nothing else. Perspiring, a little on the overweight side by this point, he stood in the sun outside Cresspahl’s house, again forgoing a visit to his “paternal role model.” What did
he have to be worried about? But nowhere and never in Jerichow or Gneez did those Western enemies of peace with their suitcases full of old currency turn up, and it was their evil machinations that supposedly justified the whole ass over teakettle in the first place. Cresspahl’s daughter was spared all this. She didn’t have to participate in the hubbub. They had nothing. They had nothing! In your mind, that can feel like a brisk, cheering wind.
Meanwhile, it wasn’t only Mrs. Weidling and Mrs. Beese who were focused on the Western Sectors of Berlin, to which the SMAG was just then cutting off both rail and water connections—whose population they were no longer prepared to supply with potatoes or milk or electricity or medicine; there was a lot of talk about World War III and a little about the prospect that the Soviets might finally try to set up a trade with at least the British: West Berlin for the parts of Mecklenburg the British had gotten to first. The Cresspahl child was seen going to the Renaissance Cinema during these days, twice, for eight marks fifty each time, but hardly in that subdued and intimidated state so familiar—not to say consoling!—to a teacher’s eye. She didn’t even bite her lip anymore when she had no answer to a pedagogically well-founded question. She was granted promotion to high school, but what deplorable inconstancy of spirit this schoolgirl was remembered as having!