by Uwe Johnson
That Dr. Kliefoth thanked the participants and wished them and the audience a merry “Christmas holiday” was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Because he could have stopped us. He’d had on his desk for at least a week the directive permitting winter school celebrations only for the Generalissimo, or else for the Soli-boy, whoever that was. Kliefoth was likewise informed that the official designation of this break in the school’s operations was henceforth “the winter holidays”; and that is what it has been called in Gneez and Mecklenburg to this day.
It meant “the Solidarity Child,” Fru Cresspahl.
With a nightshirt, a lit tallow candle in hand, like the Darmol ad?
Or the Coal Thief caricature. But I must say, that part about the camel’s back is an Anglicism, Fru Cresspahl.
All right: Which drop made the barrel run over? How did we lose you?
They could take their pick of reasons. Safety violation: no firefighter on the stage.
There was a bucket of water and a bucket of sand, Mr. Kliefoth—we’d thought of that.
But was there anyone wearing a helmet, axe in hand?
There was no medical team either.
Right! And whatever was wrong with Christiane Drittfeld? I remember her as a buxom lass, rosy-cheeked even. No, stout.
She was about to go away with her parents over New Year’s, to the West. The need to keep silent, the secret goodbyes, were probably too much for her.
Moreover, you had the wrong author.
Fritz Reuter had given his name to the school! I say this in a dignified tone.
The wrong text.
Written in 1862, in Neubrandenburg, Nigen Bramborg!
In which books are also distributed to children, at the end.
“Writing books and slates and primers and . . .”
“And catechisms,” Fru Cresspahl! Utilization of a democratic-pedagogical venue for Christian purposes, that’s what that was called. Propaganda, it was!
“Quosque tandem!”
“Videant consules” is what I said.
But you weren’t fired until the following April.
That was when the fat really hit the fire. There was sposed to be an essay writtn everywhere cross Mecklenburg, “What My Teacher Has Told Me About Stalin,” and none came in from my school.
A kind of pedagogical public referendum.
Not in my school.
Plus it would’ve been better if you’d gotten a few less letters from your friends at English universities.
Or joined the National Democratic Party, where they’d gathered all the known Nazis in one place, and the riffraff from the army. That would’ve helped for a while.
So who’s right, Lindsetter? Or bringing in Stalin? Or Christmas?
You figger it out. They could use my age too.
Dr. Kliefoth was a full year away from retirement age in 1950.
But you know who was called a Murrjahn, and was one too.
The last time Gesine Cresspahl saw her principal in the school was when he substituted for one of his “younger gentlemen” and taught a class in the map room. He had trouble handling the long poles wound with big heavy sheets. A thin line of spittle was on his lips after a Latin class with the seniors. He recognized her right away when it was her turn and she asked for the physical geography of South China, but he looked at her as if her eager greeting came as a surprise. Alert, cheerful eyes in steep-sloped sockets, tucked into thick wrinkles—an owlish look. And because Kliefoth disappeared in the middle of the school year, without an assembly to thank him and say goodbye, it was too late for a torchlight procession in his honor the first time he resigned, and later such a gesture was seen to be “inopportune,” a translation for a simpler word. Because it would have meant a twelve-mile trip for his students, from Gneez to Jerichow, where Kliefoth was spending his premature retirement alone with Mr. Juvenal, Mr. Cicero, Mr. Seneca. And the stories going round about his ample pension also soothed a sixteen-year-old conscience. But Student Cresspahl was now on her guard in Jerichow, her own town! She avoided the path to the garden plots where Kliefoth was cultivating thirty rods of land with potatoes and tomatoes and onions and carrots the way he’d learned to as a child in Malchow am See. As if she wasn’t so sure he would fill her hands with berries.
Friday July 26, 1968
When a Czech general suggests rotating the command of Warsaw Pact troops so that it’s assigned to a state other than the Soviet one for a change, Moscow snorts and accuses him of having divulged military secrets. In Prague the ruling presidium of the CP of the ČSSR gets cold feet, removes Lieut. Gen. Václav Prchlík from his high party post, and sends him back to the army. The Soviet air defense command announced “exercises,” operation “Sky Shield,” extending into regions near the border with Czechoslovakia, and now the Polish Communists, too, venture to criticize their Czech brothers for lacking the will to fight against the “forces of reaction” threatening them. The Associated Press adds a photo—a camouflaged Soviet truck on East German soil, a hundred yards from the border at Cínovec; a half-recognizable wheel looks about as tall as the two Red Army soldiers next to it.
A prosecutor in Frankfurt am Main has sought a life sentence for Fritz von Hahn, for the 11,343 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Greek territories that he sent to Treblinka, for the 20,000 Jews from Salonika that he sent to the gas in Auschwitz. He’ll get his sentence next month, maybe.
Employee Cresspahl plans to write a letter today. At five to nine she steps in front of Mrs. Lazar’s fortresslike desk and tries to give her a smile; she may be here straight through to evening with this work she’s assigned herself. She does it with the door open, without first taking out the colored ribbon and typing on white paper with a carbon underneath. She does it with company equipment, on company time—that’s how reckless she is now. Because anyone who comes in, Henri Gelliston or another of the vice president’s young men, will see a page of writing in a foreign language, not addressed to an allied firm, suggesting private business.
Salutation.
Missing. Could endanger the recipient. Because of the name, or the code name. He has renounced the usual adjective himself, although we’d much rather have begun with Dear. . . Unfortunately it would be something of a lie.
(Dear) (J. B.—cut); we can’t do that. The salutation in German would say that we like and respect you, and also expect the same in return. And who is it who’s prevented us from saying that? You have, by lying to us. The salutation sticks in our throat. The tongue in the throat, you remember. We speak to you with dissembled voice—no, not even to you, just in your direction. We give no address, neither Rövertannen in Güstrow, nor Christinenfeld in Klütz, nor Markkleeberg Ost in Leipzig (alter all the names!). We don’t want to make it any easier for them to look up your notorious registration card with the People’s Police by giving a building number on any Street of Peace/of German-Soviet Friendship or even a Stalin one now renamed half after a mysterious Dr. Frankfurter and half after Marxandengels. Anonymouses of the world, unite!
We’re saying du to you, the informal pronoun, to make it clear how we used to address each other; we’re talking to you as if to an unknown cat, with shimmering fur or unkempt, it makes no difference, and needing our care or our contempt for letting herself go like that.
We’re talking to you as a “we,” to give you the excuse of the unfathomability of a group, and conversely so that you can presume for the time being, and write in your report, that one is speaking for others with whom he/she has taken your side, to ensure that you are trusted and the very mention of your name respected. Take your pick and you’ll figure it out—also what you’ve destroyed.
In deference to your anxieties, you will find this in your mailbox but not brought and previously inspected/photocopied/registered/indexed by the German Post Office of your country, since we intend to pay only for conveyance and delivery, by no means for technology or personnel costs in Location 12. That is why you might receive this between bedsheets that
a people-owned business, Lilywhite, or a Workers’ Cooperative Union, Progress Laundry, returns to you. Or when opening a book you’ve requested to borrow. Or unexpectedly crinkling in your jacket pocket. Some way that it’ll end up right in your hand, and yours alone.
So that it’ll be well and truly concealed whether and that you have ever been an in-law/friend/sublettor with or of anyone named Gesine Cresspahl (cut this), a person still thinking of you from beyond your borders. So that you could be a nominal aunt of ours. A seminar leader, female; a teammate, male, whom we always had to greet with a balled fist or the cry of “Friendship!” Anyone from among that innumerable company of members of the Socialist community of humankind—we’re quoting here. A man in a gray flannel suit (cut).
You should always be in a position to state for the record that this must have been addressed to someone else, you’ve never in your life been the author’s Roman or countryman. Whether you’re male or female, bearded or uncurtained—we say nothing. Nor about the business/laboratory/institute in the German Democratic Republic in which you so laudably ply your trade/science/ability/habits, albeit without glorious honor and recognition from your national government, but still so that certain of your patrons/sponsors/coworkers/pen pals deem it appropriate and worthwhile to honor the round number or some other number of your birthday with a collective reminiscence/tribute/festschrift.
It’s no secret how these German-style festschrifts go: the jubilarian is supposedly never and reliably always asked whom he’d like to see included and who would be embarrassing, who an unattainable honor, who a scandal; in your case: whether you could make your peace with a publisher and place of publication abroad, where those honoring you can do so without harmful or awkward consequences for your honorable person. Far be it from us to reveal whether the editors here have found a publisher in Finland or France, Sweden or Switzerland; all we have to say about the place of publication is that it should be in a country on a large body of water between two oceans. Or three. Nicer typesetting, presumably. But printed in a British colony? Gibraltar? Hong Kong? Our lips are sealed. And let it be a private joke, among the like-minded, for your sake.
So we were deaf in one ear, while happily hearing perfectly well in the other, when the editors approached someone to open the string of pearls of expert dedications and obeisances with a biographical squib, which many years of contact and inclinations thereto made that someone capable of; and also at whose request: yours. For your comfort and safety I double-checked, twice, in writing: yes, you asked them to ask me. It was clear in any case—who else could have given them my address, my apartment, down to the phone number, if not you. I (= we) had to take it as an assignment from you. Confirmed and attested in black on white. Here we had a place to begin, it seems.
We are, as you well know, subjected to five eight-hour days a week of work; I can tell you in confidence that it’s more than that. Still, there’s always the weekends. It’s true, we could have foisted the job off onto a Comrade Writer we have handy, in fact totally in our hands; but since you suggested me, it had to stay with me, between us. My English, as you might well imagine—the stipulated language—unspools passably enough in professional matters, when it comes to assets and liabilities and credit lines resulting therefrom, but never in my life have I attempted belletristic prose with it. And that’s what’s needed to put down on paper a person’s life, what can be known and presumed, what’s been seen and heard. Don’t you think? For other people to read as well, and recognize you there, for their amusement and instruction? I admit it, humiliating though it is: I needed two dictionaries on my desk. As though my English would disappear on the spot if I tried to use it to say how someone was (might have been) in school, how he looks biting into a Thuringian bratwurst (a cold boiled egg), how he gets through a storm at sea (a summons from the secret police / the East German Stasi), whether he can sleep easy or should take to his heels immediately. I started by moving around you like a tailor (male or female), trying to find out what’s under the fabric and how my own might sit on your shoulders and limbs. I also tried to look at you like a young girl/boy with a crush on the special way you purse your lips, move the muscles around your eyes, place your legs. How you clear your throat, how you . . . I thought, as you know, about your parents. There was one thing about which I kept absolute and perfect silence. I praised what I liked, wove what bothered me into a stitchery of teasing. My thoughts hurt the whole time, I was working so hard; by the end I could sometimes feel your presence, as if you were now there. Fourteen and a half pages, two thousand characters each, and off to the main post office at eleven at night to send it off to the editor with the next airmail.
Then silence, and the date of the occasion came and went. Finally the explanation that you’d had my document smuggled over the border to you, in pants pockets, matchboxes, what do I know, so that you could read what I in particular had to say about you. What’n honor (but: “festschrift” and “jubilarian,” qqv.). After another while, the information that you’d recognized yourself, actually both of us, in the piece and, while admitting to a certain diffidence, were happy to accept the portrait as on the whole accurate, knowing what I’d left out of it out of friendship.
Well all right then. ’Slong as you’re happy. No problem. I waited for requests for changes. Again like a tailor.
But none came. Instead, the message that there’s no possible way to publish our piece, because it’s known that we’re so-and-so.
You could’ve known that when you asked us, doncha think?
Obviously we’ll withdraw the piece. True, we do have a contract (payment: zero); but we won’t insist on it. Why should we stand in your way if you’ve got a hankering to become a factory manager/a Meritorious Doctor of the Republic/a coach of the national team/no-previous-criminal-record? with regard to your art/technique/physical ability to travel to the NonSocialistEconomicSphere, the West? On the contrary, we would like to see your knowledge or skills presented in Helsinki and Leningrad, Pasadena and Mexico City, by none other than yourself.
Without our needing to be there in person, of course.
You have stipulated a festschrift in the field of endocrinology/forestry/ molecular biology/mathematics/art history/heating engineering—purged of the piece of life that you had in common with us.
Which makes us think that here, like there, you are transferring the needs of your government into your own person—exigencies of a kind that you simply impute to the GDR in an interpretation that is all too obsequious and far-fetched.
For if we do run into today’s emissaries and guardians of your national government, they’ll likely hold it against us that we left without asking the law, whose answer to such questions we knew in advance to be No and which punished even the asking with prison. And yet the machine guns remain unraised before us; the GDR says Good day and Have a nice trip; it provides room and board if we’re willing to pay in our NonSocialist money, while keeping the non-NonSocialist money that should be ours locked up safe in its very own State Bank. Auf Wiedersehen, it says that too.
Possibly it’s keeping in mind the useful services we might be able to render it after our farewell, namely mentioning it as a foreign (ausländisch, outlandish) state, as it is required to be for reasons of recognition (details under a three-letter abbreviation; direct mail to the editors). That would be one of our deeds worthy of gratitude.
You took up our time. Which is fine—I’ve liked a lot of people in my life. But you misused it, since you knew it would be in vain and for nothing; you wasted our time.
We understand the limitations you’re operating under; but we’re sure that you’ve brought a good part of them on yourself. Still, since you say so, all right: you can get only from us, via a private mailing address, a thousand little things of everyday life that your national custodian and his successors keep from you, from academic books to toilet paper. You’re perfectly happy walking around in your country wearing a jacket made from fabric you’ve had us sen
d you, a transistor radio at your ear that we sent you on your request. But it’s impossible for you to admit to any contact with us professionally, publicly, or in official correspondence—even the proximity of our name would harm your career/cadre dossier/biography/reputation. We understand that. We in no way intend to keep you from perceiving your human rights.
Last night it was relayed to us, as indisputable sight and sound: you are walking around in your country with our memories of you, the eulogy you’ve swindled out of us so that you could hear it while you were still alive, the things we’ve preserved about you and considered valuable. We hear: you’re reading it to friends, always in an intimate circle, as a plea for pity for your bad situation, in which you’re unable, for reasons of state, to have such nice things about you printed.
Since last night we’ve been walking bent double, inwardly, we’re so embarrassed. So ashamed.
We’d like to take back what we wrote for you, trusting you.
Elli Wagenführ. (Change the name. But how could Somebody Orother replace Elli Wagenführ?)
We told you about her, and that was not right. How she used to slip out of Peter Wulff’s kitchen, plates in both hands, – Coming through!: she’d cry: Hot and greasy!, and the market-day clientele would declare that something hot would suit them nicely, even in the middle of the summer, and make remarks about her fat. Undid her apron strings. Looked forward to getting a slap. I’m sorry. I take it back. (Change the name. Pub in Jena.)