by Uwe Johnson
We know this: Give up our leading role and it’s all over for Socialist society. For this reason alone we must understand each other on the question of what is required to lead. We depend on the voluntary support of the people. We are not implementing our leading role by ruling from above, but by acting rightly, progressively, socialistically.
Any indication of returning to the old methods of compelling obedience would evoke against us the resistance of the majority of party members, workers, cooperative farmers, and intelligentsia. That is just how we would imperil our political leading role, would threaten the Socialist advantages of the people, how our common front against imperialism would waver. That cannot be our hope.
We have our tactical plan. We’ve told you what it is.
First. We are going to give the specific people responsible for bringing the party into this unfortunate situation a good talking to. If that’s justifiable.
Second. At the fourteenth extraordinary congress of the party we’ll take a look at what we’ve done since January. We will lay down the party line, adopt an attitude to the federation of the Czechs and the Slovaks, approve the new party statute, and elect a new Central Committee with the full authority and confidence of the party and all of society.
Third. Then we’ll tackle our internal political questions: the improvement of the socialist National Front, self-government, the actualization of the federal constitutional arrangement, the new elections, and the preparation of a new constitution.
Just now it’s darn tough. We’re winning, if also suffering drawbacks. But we have the situation in hand. The delegates elected to the congress are a guarantee that the future fate of the party will not be decided by extremist or unreasonable people.
We have clearly rejected the “2,000 Words.” They were never dangerous words, but since you got so mad at them we want to tell you loudly and openly, so that all Czechs and Slovaks can hear us and understand: This must not be repeated, for that could anger our Soviet friends, from whom we require not ill will but patience. Nothing of this kind will happen again.
But believe us, it’s been easier to do our job since we abolished censorship and restored freedom of expression and of the press. People are no longer whispering behind our backs but expressing themselves openly. For the first time, we know what they think of us.
If we now discuss a certain painful matter with you, but in everyone’s hearing, and despite the fact that you have records of it in the files of your secret police already, this is actually an act of politeness and to be taken as information ex officio. The law about the rehabilitation of innocent people who in earlier years were persecuted illegally with the help of the law has been a success. Since it was passed, people are hardly ever even looking in this direction.
In September, immediately after the party congress, we will confirm the permanent existence of the parties of the National Front and pass a law clarifying the legal regulations for the formation and activities of various voluntary organizations, associations, clubs, and all that kind of thing. The enemies of Socialism will show themselves, and we will have the opportunity to effectively face them down.
Dear friends, are you trying to make us look bad in front of our own people? We can hardly return to the days when we could convince them that you weren’t butting in when you were butting in. Help us save face. We cannot decide on our own policy anywhere but at our own congress.
So what are we asking you for, then? For time. For two months.
We are ready to talk with you. It was probably just a misunderstanding about the date of that meeting—it happens. But leave us in peace, just for a bit, it’s touch and go here. Of course we’ve always been ready to talk. We will kiss your hand, we will embrace you cheek to cheek, if you’ll leave us to act for just a little while yet, dear friends, just two months.
In the name of our common fight against imperialism, for peace, the security of nations, democracy, and Socialism.
Why don’t you all say anything! You’re still treating me like a child whose fun you don’t want to spoil!
Maybe it will be fun for that child.
Yeah, maybe!
Gesine, you’re forgetting: we have no power over the future.
But you always gave me advice when you were alive, for the future!
Then we could get you back, if we had to.
The fun is over.
Gesine, you don’t want us to treat you like a child.
Today it all did come down—it’s been four hours and still we’re telling one another where we were when it caught us. D. E. claims he was standing on his mother’s lawn after lunch, hose in hand, nose raised aquiver, and he put his equipment away because cool dry air from New York was moving past him overhead; he’s more than a little proud of his nose, and we will remember him looking self-satisfied like this, exuberantly waving his wine glass around. Employee Cresspahl watched the beginning, neglecting her official duties: the light between the glass skin of the blocky office buildings had darkened and then turned exaggeratedly clear. All the edges sharpened to clarity. Then, at a quarter past four, came the first thunderclap. Marie is convinced she saw the very same bolt of lightning, in the wide cutting of Ninety-Sixth Street sloping down to end in the dark window of the river. She was outside the Good Eats when the first fat drops burst at her feet, and Charlie waved her in—a regular customer—but there was a man pressed against the Broadway side of the front window, lacking the change for a cup of coffee, who surrendered, shoulders slumped, to the rivulets flooding the sidewalk. Just then the rain was pouring torrentially down at the bank’s palace, too, and from the thirteenth floor you could hear the cars tires whooshing on the wet asphalt. Just then D. E. had stopped at a streetlight in New Jersey, next to a pedestrian marching along as if in a parade, with a piece of cardboard over his half-bald head and letting the rain blacken his suit all it wanted. Just then Marie saw a Negro dancing across Broadway, a large cardboard box on his shoulders that he heaved up higher again every five steps, never bumping into anyone. Then the fire engine began to wail on Third Avenue. Racing mountain streams were pouring down D. E.’s windshield, but if he’s said he’ll be somewhere at six then there he will be, at 1800 hours, and we’re grateful. On Lexington Avenue, in contrast, the commuters seemed to think it was more important to keep walking than to keep dry; clearly rain engenders less solidarity than snowstorms or heat waves—here in this country of ours. It was now twenty minutes since it had started coming down, and a men’s clothing shop had its window sign ready: Umbrellas, On Sale. But Mrs. Cresspahl marched grandly on, under the roof of a folded New York Times. The beggar stationed on this side of Grand Central Station, who when on duty shocks people with his bared double leg prostheses, had taken a break and was now leaning against a wall inside the Graybar Building, his pant legs rolled down. When Marie stepped outside she learned a new kind of breathing, which D. E. can now explain to her as due to the plunge of at least ten points in the air humidity. In the subway it was still muggy, only half of the fans were running, the people stood grumpily pressed up against one another even though they had, after all, survived another week in New York. At quarter to seven the rain was so weak that it could only trickle, but still it had swept clear the clump of fog from New Jersey so we could again make out the opposite shore in its semidarkness. Then the thunder trampled back and forth over the Hudson, unable to let the river’s water be. Now it’s quiet, the asphalt mirror of Riverside Drive shows us the treetops in their close friendship with the sky. A squealing birdcall comes over from the park, like that of an injured young animal. A seagull? Yes, Marie saw it over the tops of our trees—a seagull sawing into the wind, the wind bearing down on our building.
July 20, 1968 Saturday, South Ferry day
At the table lavishly set for breakfast (American version, for D. E.), opposite the festively sunlit park, The New York Times came between us—we almost slipped into a fight. Twenty American-made machine guns have been dug up under a bridge betwee
n Cheb and Karlovy Vary. In five kit bags (or knapsacks) bearing the date 1968. Plus thirty pistols, with the appropriate ammunition. Near the West German border. And Pravda, Moscow, was able to publish the news yesterday morning, before the Czechoslovakian interior ministry could even announce the discovery. To a Professor Erichson, this means it’s possible that such caches have been placed across the country, waiting to be found and to thus give the Soviet Union justification for any military invasion: Sudeten German uprisings. According to this expert, airborne troops are most likely. But there’s a woman sitting at the table who’s planning a trip to that part of the world in a month—she’d prefer to be presented with a slightly brighter picture. Then came Marie’s glance, up from below, amazed at this new fashion of someone in our family criticizing a person for expressing their thoughts; both of them stared at me like I was simply overworked, I needed a break. They can have their outing, but during it they will have to listen to the Pagenkopf story: as a warning, as a promise, however they want to take it.
“Can Love Really Be a Sin?” This song, too—famously sung in a low, smoky voice by a Nazi actress and now put back to work, this time by Sovexport, to distract the Germans from their hunger—who do you think got this song sung at them in Gneez’s Fritz Reuter High School starting in January 1949? It was sung and drummed and whistled at Cresspahl’s daughter and Pius Pagenkopf. We were the Couple.
Lise Wollenberg believed it too. She’d taken as deskmate the niece of Mrs. Lindsetter, wife of the district court chief justice—a delicate blond who, despite her soft flesh, was nicknamed Peter because she’d always worn her hair cut short, since the early days of the Soviet occupation. It looked striking next to Lise’s long curls. Wollenberg said about me: yes, well, with a father like that Cresspahl was well advised to suck up to the new regime.
But Mrs. Pagenkopf was not a fine lady with elegant clothes and hairdo and political slogans on her lips; to me she looked bent, stout, and worn-down, dressed as frugally as Jakob’s mother. Her shoulders were hunched as though she had a lot of fear left over from the twelve swastika years and new worries too given her husband’s “lifestyle” in Schwerin—which was, of course, how the good people of Gneez couldn’t help but understand Mr. Pagenkopf’s political activities. She was far too shy to let herself be drawn onto the stage at the Renaissance Cinema for the political address after a screening, much less when it was later moved up ahead of the films after people had started heading for the side doors en masse as soon as they saw the words “The End.” She did read the front page of the Schwerin People’s Daily and would have been perfectly able to spell out for her comrades what had happened to the SED since the first party conference in January 1949. (She actually helped us with our So-Sci essays.) The neighbors interpreted her taciturn manner as revenge for the times when the Pagenkopfs were people it was better not to talk to. She talked about me as “your Gesin,” in a voice of fond reproach; she rarely talked to me. But since it was me her boy Robert had chosen, she soon found a rhyme: Röbbertin his Gesin. Anyway, if she had talked to me I’d have had to shout back. Since her near-deafness had remained incurable, she turned her right ear, not her eyes, to everyone but Pius—who knows if she ever once looked me in the face. It was as if Pius’s mother lived in the kitchen; she was visible most of all in the ceaselessly washed windows, the polished floors, the scrupulously assembled sausage sandwiches that Pius carried in from the kitchen with the tea. Yes, there was tea. And butter on the bread, for the Pagenkopfs had three ration cards and would never be short of the fifty-five marks for a pound of margarine from the TO store. The sandwiches were generous. After 1949 I was never hungry in the East again. To that extent, Lise was right—I was enjoying one of the pleasures connected to the ruling class.
I thought I should keep this Pius away from Jakob (I was after all being unfaithful to Jakob, whether or not he’d been with other girls). Several weeks went by and then I saw Pius talking to him: the tall, elegant boy in a polite pose in front of the stocky guy in his greasy railroad worker’s outfit. Jakob’s protecting hand was over me every step of the way.
Pius and I were a couple because we’d walk together from our shared desk onto the Street of German-Soviet Friendship to Pagenkopf’s place, where we’d do our homework in the “salon.” (The maid that Helene Pagenkopf had once been had filled the living room to bursting with flower stands, étagères, spindly little tables, and club chairs, leaving barely enough room to walk around a piano, the contribution from Pagenkopf Sr.) Since we left the house together too, we were a couple.
The teachers soon got used to it. When the beanpole gym teacher couldn’t find me, he asked Student Pagenkopf to tell me the practice time. Naturally he’d be accompanying Student Cresspahl to the pool, with her swim things in the basket of his bike. He, like she, joined the SC Trout swimming club because his father had asked him to add more “societal activities” to his schedule. Since each member of a couple has to look out for the other, Pius discovered that children who excelled in a sport were rewarded by a transfer to a special school, where they received more training in their specialty than in practical subjects, and thus after their tournament victories would have to scramble professionally while never catching up to their peers. Cresspahl the front-crawl ace soon saw her times slump to almost normal. There was little that anyone could prove against her, since the other teachers reported steady performance from this student, and the gym beanpole banged his stopwatch as he accused Cresspahl of paying too much attention to Pagenkopf. Still, he did say I could stop coming to his practices, since he didn’t like interfering with couples. He must have liked us, as a couple.
KLIEFOTH: What is all this fuss supposed to mean, Mrs. Habelschwerdt! It is precisely at their desk that the two of them are safe with respect to your . . .valuable concerns!
The world thinks it’s cute when the two members of a couple are similar in certain ways, and I became a bit more like Pius by joining the FDJ, just like him. For his father had now seen fit to request a bit more societal activity from “my son’s girlfriend” too. He required more than a bit, it turned out—my booklet sporting the yellow-on-blue rising sun soon proved insufficient and I had to get myself the tall narrow one with the black-andred-and-gold flag waving in front of the Soviet flag, both diagonal flagpoles stuck into a circle. This latter booklet was for the Society for German-Soviet Friendship, and after Cresspahl read the Stalin telegram (“Hitlers come and go . . .”) printed after my name he promptly raised my allowance by fifty pfennigs, “for the next ones.” Small wonder that Pius was elected president of our FDJ class chapter at the start of tenth grade, and I his deputy; we held these offices to the end and they were noted in our transcripts.
We biked as a couple to the unofficial bathing spot on the south side of Gneez Lake and swam without the others across to the boathouses Willi Böttcher was in the process of building for the Progressive Intelligentsia; we came swimming back to the rest of the class together, and clearly we’d been talking to each other the whole time. When I happened to be there without him they sometimes still sang that question about whether love might be a sin, but Pius had cured me of my old bashfulness and they learned to ask about him through me. We were, after all, the ones who dried off with the same towel—the couple.
When two people have been a couple for a while, they go to the movies depending on the state of their wallets and the attractions of the film; when two people are far from being a couple, one of them has to pay for the other’s ticket and spend ninety minutes laboriously exploring whether they might become one. If only one member of the couple is there, people keep a seat free for the other: next to Pius, “Keep that free for Gesine”; to you as you come in, “Here’s your man!” In the FDJ meeting, on the field trip to the theater in Schwerin, on the potato fields during harvest service. When one of the couple is on card-checking duty, Gesine will take Pius’s plate with her and bring him his school lunch. A couple has more time than other people; they can save the stroll
s, at least two afternoon hours, up Stalin Street and back down it, keeping a trembling lookout for the object of their longing: those in a couple already have it.
I should also tell you: Pius was no more Catholic than she was Protestant.
In spring 1950 we signed up together for maintenance duty with the German Railway, because this time old Pagenkopf had requested a more visible societal activity. For three weeks the couple poked around in the scruffy track beds of Gneez station, with shovel and pickax; in the photo you can see “my son’s girlfriend” shoveling while Pius, amiably leaning on a handle, looks into Jakob’s camera, a knit cap on the back of his head. The reward (the material incentive) was a free train ticket to any destination, but we were unable to take a trip together because Cresspahl needed my pass for a trip to “Berlin” (never referred to as “East”). So Pius went by himself to Dresden, detouring via Wittenberg on the way there for the sake of his father’s reputation, returning via West Berlin for my sake, because when one person in a couple goes on a trip he brings back a souvenir for the other. Gesine Cresspahl, 10-A-II, now owns a ballpoint pen.
The last game was pretty pathetic but here we have Fritz Reuter High School versus Grevesmühlen, with Pius as center forward again. And look, two minutes before the starting whistle here comes Gesine. Over there, in that empty part of the bleachers, the one with the braids, straightening her long skirt around her legs. The one sitting up straight, so Pius can see her. Why should they wave to each other! he’s already seen her. Look, she doesn’t clap for him either. Well he already knows. They’re a couple after all.
Yes, but can love be a sin?
In the winter the power cutoffs would interrupt us diagramming benzene rings or laying out the societal motivations of Lady Macbeth, and there would often be another hour before the evening train to Jerichow. Then it might happen that Pius would sit down at the piano and play me what he’d learned in eight years (he had diligently practiced Schumann’s “Träumerei,” and once, on a dusty, languorous summer afternoon, I heard him playing it from the street—he kept his dreams of Lise to himself). Other times it would be perfectly silent behind our dark windows. Early on, Zaychik and his girl Eva Matschinsky burst in on us with the excuse that they’d wanted to bring us candles. They saw Pius go back to the piano and Cresspahl calmly go on smoking—they must have thought we were uncommonly slick, and moreover they’d now lost their pretext for visiting. Pius had told me about his elder sister’s death from typhus, I him about Alexandra Paepcke. We could certainly say: We knew things about each other.