Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  If Anita were the missionary type, she would have managed to convince him to work harder in Russian. She accepted his merely satisfactory grades in this language, if with a sigh. The hiking trips to Poland, he’d thought of those without her too. She may have been waiting for him to say he wanted to go to “where you got married” again; she didn’t let herself try to talk him into it.

  So how would Alex ever get the crazy idea into his head that Anita could take him by the hand and out of the country to wherever he wanted to go? He’s a do-it-yourselfer, and he lets himself get caught in the Stettin harbor in the proven act of trying to leave a Socialist fatherland behind at his own discretion. Alex is sentenced to three years in a prison in Saxony. He’s allowed to write to Gneez from there. Anita is left empty-handed.

  And what does Anita write to tell us, as though she had no troubles of her own? She invites Marie to live in West Berlin for as long as I’m working in Czechoslovakia; she promises to keep a perfectly regular household—with no trips. Anita with no trips. She asks Marie to visit, so she can work on her own English.

  As if she, too, has agreed to present me with the ČSSR as a country you don’t take a child to. You send the child to a godmother.

  July 25, 1968 Thursday

  To dissuade Soviet troops from any thought of crossing the Czechoslovakian border to defend it, Prague television is showing the vigilant tanks, dogs, and barbed wire fences that they have there already. The West German government has decided to move the maneuvers they’d planned for Grafenwöhr and Hohenfels, near this border, to the area near Münsingen and to a mountain ridge known as the Heuberg, in the state of Baden-Württemberg, some 100 to 150 miles away. So that the Red Army can withdraw, to its homeland, eastward, with one less thing to worry about.

  Dr. Julius Kliefoth was removed from his office as principal of Fritz Reuter High School before the end of the 1949–50 school year. His students had to get through the change without an official justification; were they supposed to think Kliefoth had shown “conduct unbecoming a teacher”?

  Stubborn, that’s what Kliefoth was. In 1947, summoned before the school board to accept a food parcel he’d been allotted so that at least the head of a civil service office would be properly provisioned amid the ravenous children, he refused any special treatment; apparently he was sufficiently taken aback to utter the word “corruption.” A year later, in March 1949, the German Ministry of People’s Education officially approached him and ordered, at the behest of the Soviet Military Administration, an increase in his salary and purchase coupons above and beyond his ration card, as well as preferential credit in case he wanted to build a house of his own. This was meant to keep people like him from going forth and building a log cabin in the Western occupation zones. Kliefoth would have loved a two-week visit to England. When reminded of his rank in the school administration, and how inappropriate it was to be subletting an apartment on Field Road in Jerichow, he declined to move into an apartment of his own on Cathedral Square in Gneez; he took the milk train to work, often didn’t return home until evening, on the bare wood of the unheated compartments, and considered himself lucky when he’d managed to buy kerosene for his lamp. Now the Mecklenburg Ministry of People’s Education lacked a lever with which they could remind him of favors received. Kliefoth was a tough ol Murrjahn but in the end ’e had ta give in.

  The Mecklenburg Interior Ministry was disappointed with Kliefoth as well. He was ordered to report to Gneez City Hall on May 15 and 16, 1949, where they were holding the vote on the Third German People’s Congress. It was a historic session in its exemplary eschewal of the word “election” or “choice,” Wahl, boiling things down to a single alternative. The question was simply whether the eligible voter were for peace or against peace—whichever one you want, really. A Yes would install in power a Unity list of candidates from the existing parties, en masse, so that anyone’s displeasure at, say, the Communists, over, say, their strangulation of West Berlin would also lessen the mandate of the Free German Youth; or a preference for the party of the Soviet Union, perhaps because it had let food and work materials back into that city for the past three days, would equally unintentionally advance the cause of the Cultural League (for the R. of a D. G.). Kliefoth was a civil servant; he failed, in his innocence, to realize that the authorities wanted to take advantage of the civil trust he enjoyed—things were surely aboveboard if our Julius was supervising them. Educated man and all, had ta respect him. Now he obeyed in all rigor, feeling bound by a formal, official assignment. On the first day, his polling place was run like a classroom. He looked at the voters like examination candidates, welcomed the uncomfortable ones with encouraging murmurs, obligingly spoke Platt. In this location Gneez voters, either presenting a valid ID or known to him personally, would step up to the urn on their own, the police having no other right than to escort non-local individuals out onto the street. Kliefoth leaned his head back to look at each person stepping up to his table, instead of merely raising his eyes—an effort growing slower and slower toward evening. If he looked stern it was because he hadn’t been able to smoke—the dignity of the proceedings forbade it. He was the very picture of a civil servant carrying out an assignment the government had given him.

  On the morning of the 16th, instructions arrived from Schwerin—a “Blitz Telegram: Rush To Desk,” signed Warnke, Interior Minister. According to these instructions, Kliefoth was to declare ballots found unmarked in the urn as valid; the large preprinted YES was sufficient. If there was writing on a ballot, it would count as one of the desired votes, except where the text showed signs of a “democracy-hostile” disposition, whatever that was. By dint of these numerical chicaneries, Peace plus the Unity list found as much assent in Mecklenburg as 68.4 out of a hundred—888,395 people—but 410,838 people had managed their ballots in such a way that their NO was immune to metamorphosis. The presiding officer’s signature was missing from the Gneez Electoral Commission report; Kliefoth had given himself a leave, for “philological reasons.” For the historical files he had to revise this to a “sudden onset of medical weakness”; how could a belligerent and party-loyal minister like W. be expected to approve of a civil servant who took almost a whole Monday off on his own insubordinate say-so?

  Fired because of his past: was Lise Wollenberg’s opinion, stated with her well-known propensity to gloat. But when the Soviets, in their Decree No. 35, declared that “denazification” was complete in the Soviet Occupation Zone as of April 10, 1948, Kliefoth had not had to interpret his life story before the special court even once (unlike Heinz Wollenberg); Kliefoth had slipped away from Berlin’s Hitler party as early as 1932, to the rural pastures of Jerichow, and since the start of the war he’d kept tucked away from it in the army. Of course the Red Army wanted in writing what had been ordered in the Demyansk Pocket under Hitler’s supreme command and his, Kliefoth’s, responsibility as captain on the staff of the Second Army Corps, everything up to and including his final rank of lieutenant colonel, but the Soviet Military Administration must have deemed it satisfactory. For in 1945 they left him free with an honorable discharge, and in May 1948 they recommended him to their German Administration of the Interior as an instructor of tactics in the training academies of the newly formed German People’s Police, the Volkspolizei, offering Kliefoth the temptation of two salaries, civil and military, and a doubled pension; he excused himself with a medical certificate that he was missing eight teeth, and everyone knew a soldier needed a full set of thirty-two to bring to the army’s table. They’d offered him back pay from the army, too, retroactive to May 1945. Of course you’d be a bit mad at anyone refusing such munificence.

  It was also said that he’d allowed his grip on the reins to get loose—we know who took the reins out of his hands. For that fall of 1949 was a season of meetings in the Fritz Reuter High School. Emerging from the Third People’s Congress (which Kliefoth had indeed rubbed the wrong way) had come a German People’s Council, and thence a People’s Cham
ber, which on October 7 declared the territory of the Soviet Occupied Zone to be a German Democratic Republic and the inhabitants therein to be members of said state, with a constitution, a government, and for the time being the traditional eagle on black/red/gold stripes, all to be celebrated with solemn yet festive rites in the assembly hall, which lasted either two class periods or an entire morning. For each of these, Kliefoth asked one of “the younger gentlemen” to do him the favor of presenting to the assembled youth how these events between Mecklenburg and Saxony looked in the context of other circumstances in the world, how they advanced or hindered them, with particular attention to China; Kliefoth seemed to be asleep behind the red-draped table on the podium, his narrow skull with its tuft of white hair tilted forward, hand on chin; in fact he was calculating how much of the prescribed curriculum was being lost in the time these performances took up, and watching the afternoon, too, disappear in teacher conferences on curricular renovations, meetings he had to vouch for in person to the Mecklenburg Board of People’s Education. When he eventually stood up to bring the ceremony to a close, his shoulders were bent, he seemed bowed down with the cares of his office, and the claws of the Picasso dove of peace painted behind him seemed to have him by the neck—he who had once been able to speak in a tone of confident authority, looking forward to his return to work. – In this spirit . . . : Kliefoth loyally said; true, he did sound exhausted.

  Kliefoth had come a cropper over the new national anthem: proclaimed individuals such as Mrs. Lindsetter, solely to pride themselves on their musical understanding. For this additional requisite of a state—a song—had been integrated into the lesson plans of the Fritz Reuter High School for November. In 2/4 time, in a simple three-verse symmetry, it accompanied the rhymed resolve of a plural subject, a We, to rise once more from the ruins and turn to face the future, along with that of a singular subject, “you,” to serve a “united German fatherland,” “so that” (last couplet) the sun might shine across this land, “beautiful as ne’er before.” Each grade rehearsed this pretentious good-natured piece under Joachim Buck (Julie Westphal was elsewhere, in Güstrow, studying for her job as a New Teacher). “Handsome Joachim,” shining of tonsure, swirling of hair therearound, lips playing incantatorily, was adept in the preparation of state occasions, having been thanked for adorning official proclamations both in the Weimar Republic and under Reich Governor Hildebrandt (see Mecklenburg Monthly Bulletin, 1926–1938); he gave his respective all to the present authorities as well, hurled invisible weights in the palm of his hand from way down low up to the coffered ceiling of the school auditorium, conjured his singing underage throng with an elderly rowing motion of the arms that sometimes made him look like he was pushing a medicine ball, and nodded punctually from the neck when the last note had rung out—this was how he rehearsed the lower grades. He thought he owed the twelfth graders, facing their Abitur, a more substantial scientific underpinning, a “musical history of ideas” as it were, so he opened his instruction in the new state melody with a practice waltz from The Theoretical-Practical Piano Tutor: A Systematic Course by the musical pedagogue Karl Zuschneid (1854–1926), a 3/4 number that sounded like a model for the admittedly less jumpy anthem. Joachim turned his amply shining eyes upon his students, so that they might notice the blindly gliding fingers at the end of his long arm. With a variation of Zuschneid’s rhythm he slipped into an impudent tune that, like the preceding, seemed related, by descent and by family resemblance, to the subject of the lesson, and proceeded to inform the class that this was a song from a 1936 film, Water for Canitoga, sung by Hans Albers and René Deltgen to a tune by Peter Kreuder (1905):

  Good-bye, Johnny, (Newly risen)

  Good-bye, Johnny, (from the ru-ins)

  we were really great together. (to the future turned we stand.)

  But, ala-as, (Let us serve your)

  But, ala-as, (good weal truly,)

  now those days are gone forever (Germany our fatherland etc.); naive handsome Joachim, simply retaining and recognizing a melodic line he may have picked up during his studies, or at the Renaissance Cinema in Gneez thirteen years ago. Still, the criminal police, D Squad (successor to K-5), accused him as early as February of having imputed a borrowing, a plagiarism, a theft to the composers of the latest version of the anthem; still, his pretrial custody turned up correspondence neither with Peter Kreuder (Argentina) nor with Hanns Eisler (Berlin/GDR). Since handsome Joachim was willing to concede a passive knowledge of the constitution, from his reading of reports, he talked his way into Article 6, “Incitement to Boycott” and Related Offenses, and as a result Buck saw the light of day again in 1952, in Lüneberg, in the West, somewhat disappointed by the state of musical scholarship there, which dismissed the origins of the East German anthem as a bagatelle rather than anything newsworthy, still, surrounded once more by a community of followers thanks to his secular performances of “Oh Eternity, You Word of Thunder” or “The Heavens Declare”; a loss for Gneez, to hear Mrs. Lindsetter tell it. And Kliefoth? Principal Kliefoth received an official reprimand. Almost entirely lacking in musical culture himself, during the official faculty meeting he had simply smirked at the curious fact which the newly founded State Security Service, the Stasi, had unmasked as an attack against the establishment of democracy. – What nonsense: Kliefoth replied in his measured way, when the district school board accused him of not having denounced handsome Joachim on the spot, as he should have. The two gentlemen had been in former times, 1944, confederates—they had shared an academic semester; at that point the oaken chair was heavily shifted and out was cried: Principiis obsta! (Ovid). Kliefoth preferred Juvenal and cried out: Maxima debetur puero reverentia!, by which he meant not just twelfth grade but all the students he was responsible for. His adversary was dismissed even sooner than Kliefoth was, but not before ensuring a comment in Kliefoth’s file.

  The end of the professional line for Kliefoth came: it was furthermore said: with the academic subject of Iosif V. Stalin (b. 1879); others were sure: it was Christmas 1949.

  1949 minus 1879 equals the biblical, magical age of seventy for the distant Generalissimo, and just as the people of the new nation, the East German republic, sent “the Soviet Union’s Genius Helmsman,” “the best friend to the German People” close to thirty freight cars of presents, along the rail lines that still remained (adding shamefaced apologies for the delay in supplying a planetarium for Stalin’s own city), so too did the students of the Fritz Reuter High School, Gneez (Meckl.), make their offerings under the Loerbrocks portrait of the honoree (members of the festival committee: Sieboldt and Gollantz; responsible for the contribution of class 10-A-II: Lockenvitz). Julie Westphal—eye sockets clenched in rigid zeal, brow curtained with bangs of stone, bosom quivering in her jacket of mannish cut, this Olsch on the wrong side of fifty—had had her conducting skills freshened up in Güstrow by that point; under her baton, a female choir of ninth and tenth graders performed the birthday boy’s favorite song, which, with its desperate longing for the grave of a lost love, Suliko, intoned by sixteen-year-old girls’ voices, was apt to cast a pall over the proceedings; following Julie’s choreography, the eleventh-grade students, dressed in regulation blue shirts and blouses, stepped solemnly forward and back, raising and swinging their flags; in Julie’s mandated tempo and meter, the graduating seniors called in chorus what the younger audience responded to in chorus as a vow to the Architect of Socialism, the Lenin of Our Time, the Teacher of Vigilance in Confronting the Agents of the Enemies of the People, and whatever other personal descriptions Burly Sieboldt had gleaned from the daily press of Stalin’s party in Germany. Cathedral Cantor J. Buck—handsome Joachim—on guest piano supplied the P. Tchaikovskian stylings, stiffly, vivifyingly armed with neither premonition nor warning. Final number: the new anthem. Principal Kliefoth was present as master of ceremonies, grayish green bowtie in his worn collar as usual, wearing the baggier of his everyday knickerbocker suits, his thin lips performing a dry chewing motion
and the discomfort of a man abstaining from smoking out of respect for the occasion. Mission accomplished.

  That was December 21. For the 24th, Kliefoth had authorized 10-A-II to give another festive performance. That was thanks to Anita. This foreign child, from “East Prussia,” hadn’t been satisfied with the information we’d given her about the man for whom the school was named—what she’d been told about his writings had been couched in the phrases and circumlocutions Mecklenburg children used to brush one another off. As a result of her shy inquiries, we rehearsed the description of the Christmas celebration in Chapter Seven of Fritz Reuter’s Plattdeutsch monument Ut mine Stromtid (Seed-Time and Harvest, 3 vols., 1864) and performed it for our parents as a narrative with staged episodes. For what parents we had. Normally Anita would’ve had to pay for her suggestion by appearing on stage in person, but we were sufficiently embarrassed to cast Student Cresspahl, alas, in the role of Fru Pastor Behrendsen. In the words of the poet: Everything about her was round,—arms and hands and fingers, head and cheeks and lips; Cresspahl wound blankets around her hips and stooped and pretended to be forty and did her hair up in a bun—Anita was upset. Anita had invited the Brüshavers and thought Aggie would take offense at this embodiment of a pastor’s wife scurrying like quicksilver round the Christmas tree and perpetually asserting that surely she’s closest to hand. But Aggie laughed along with the rest of the audience, and clapped—a good woman, she was. Burly Sieboldt took a turn as Pastor Behrens, and Lise was Lowise, and Rika with er loud voice was played by Schäning Drittfeld who fainted on us right after the last Julklapp Christmas gift. There was no shortage of village youths—Fru Pastor had real pfeffernuesse and apples to hand out. We’d cut the part of melancholy Franz in favor of Jürn the coachman: Pius was Jürn, and the commentator, and had the last word with his drive through the village, the songs coming from the poor little laborers’ shacks, and up in the heavens God had lit up his great Christmas tree with a thousand shining lamps, and the world lay stretched out beneath like a Christmas table, which winter had spread with a cloth of whitest snow, that spring, summer, and autumn might cover it with Christmas gifts.