by Uwe Johnson
Kreikemeyer and company, that meant German Communists in French exile, imprisoned, Kreikemeyer helped to escape in 1942 by Field, the American Unitarian, then leader of the illegal German Communist Party in Marseilles. Seven years later, Willi Kreikemeyer was installed as the head of the German Reich Railway, Jakob’s topmost boss. In May 1949 he’d gone out on a limb for his party when the West Berlin railwaymen went on strike for payment of their wages in the currency of the city where they worked and bought their bread. On May 5, Willi K. promised them payment in West marks, then retracted his commitment. One dead in clashes with the police, and several wounded, were added to the weight he bore on his shoulders for the party. On May 28 he promised up to 60 percent payment in West marks, and: refraining from any reprisals. In late June, to keep his party from losing face, he broke his word again and fired 380 railway workers without notice or transfer to locations in the East German Republic whose very currency they’d scoffed at. Willi Kreikemeyer, member of a party and adherent of its constitution that claimed to respect professions of religious faith, promised the Jehovah’s Witnesses twelve special trains to take them to a congress in Berlin, that was July 1949, he took their money and then canceled the trains—all for his party. Now that party has been accusing him, since late August, of having passed addresses to the American OSS. Jakob went around dejected in the summer of 1949; a loyal member of the FDJ will of course recite such things on the evenings of his training course; if I’d interrupted, he would have asked me: And what kind of school do you go to, Gesine?
Once the Carola Neher club was done with her, I commissioned from D. E. Willi Kreikemeyer’s life story; all three scholars with all their expertise in registers and sources and cross-references could find no lifespan for him extending past August 1950.
As for the West German chancellor, Bettina Selbich clued us in to the illuminating similarity between his name and that of the President of Columbia University, commander since 1950 of the armed forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Eisenhower, Adenower. Contemporary Studies.
As for the North American president, we were supposed to ridicule Harry S. Truman because he fraudulently used his middle initial to claim American dignity when in fact the S stood for itself, not a whole name; there was also Truman’s former job selling neckties and suchlike menswear, which we were to invoke as proof of his inferiority. Contemporary Studies.
The first time the East German Republic observed Activist Day was October 13, 1950, and Elise Bock was awarded the title “Activist of Merit” and a tidy sum of money. One last greeting from Triple-J, who was now free to return home. The administration of Gneez had been turned over to the Unity Party; his successor was a military commander who moved out of the city into the woods around the Smœkbarg.
On August 15, the government of the East German Republic (a person, too) requested some kind of convoluted operation involving ballots having to do with the People’s Chamber and the state, district, and municipal administration. It counted 99 percent yes votes, and another 0.7 percent on top of that.
The Waldheim trials started in the summer of 1950 and on November 4 it was time to start the executions. Cresspahl wore no crape for the man he might have remembered as his father-in-law. The Cresspahl child still felt sympathy for Albert Papenbrock, because there had been a time when she hadn’t been allowed to take candy from anyone; he sat sadly under the sun umbrellas at the outdoor tables of the Lübeck Court in Jerichow, forced to consume a whole large ice cream by himself. Gesine Cresspahl wasn’t brave enough to show up to Mrs. Selbich’s class with mourning crape on her sleeve; by that point Selbich was quick to apply to Principal Kramritz for demerits. Thomas Mann’s family suppressed his letter to the custodian in the collection of letters published for the time being; in fact he did write the Sachwalter in July.
Some ten trials took place within an hour. No defense attorneys were allowed, no witnesses for the defense allowed to testify. In handcuffs, though almost none were accused of real crimes, the accused—the men and women found guilty before the trial—were brought before the court, which, by the book, pronounced prison terms of fifteen, eighteen, twenty-five years, even for life. [. . .] Mr. President! Perhaps you are unaware of the horror, the revulsion, often fake but often deeply felt, that these trials with their death sentences—and they are all death sentences—have called forth on this side of the globe; how conducive they are to ill will and how destructive of goodwill. An act of mercy, as sweeping and summary as the mass sentencing in Waldheim has all too clearly been, would be such a blessed gesture, serving the cause of reconciliation and hope for détente—an act of peace. / Use your power . . . ! © Katja Mann
But the custodian needed his power to set up judiciary performances of the sort his wise leader and teacher Stalin had showed him in Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia. Why should he restore the honor of a few useful dead when only fifty-one thousand among the living in his country found the courage to mark their ballots with a No—only as many people as lived in Gneez, plus Jerichow.
Klaus Böttcher was sitting in his dad’s kitchen, cooling his feet in soapy water. In comes his wife, Britte, and she says: Hey, there’re three men here, all in black suits, they want something from you. Klaus is out the window, dangles from the sill high above the shop yard, drops down, and takes off, barefoot, over the fence, the moat, the city walls, and keeps going, in the direction of West Berlin. In Krakow am See he has to go to ground at a carpenter colleague’s, his bare feet are bleeding so badly. Britte can read her husband’s mind and gets a call put through to Krakow. – Y’can come back, Klaus, they’re all from the college, they wanted to go in together orderin a boathouse from you, dummy!: said fond Britte. When asked about the consciousness of guilt his behavior suggested, Klaus would always repeat, embarrassed anew each time: Hows the hare supposed to prove hes not a fox?
In December 1950, Jakob’s mother applied for an interzonal travel permit. This was the piece of paper that would officially authorize a trip from Jerichow to Bochum, West Germany. If she’d been correctly informed, there was a remnant of Wilhelm Abs’s family living there. The Abses would write to one another at very most in the event of a death, or a birth, two weeks late; she was old, of course, and wanted to get as close as she could to the news she feared. Jakob made time to go back and forth among the various offices and authorities; Cresspahl’s daughter lacked the kinship necessary to help. So it took until January before Mrs. Abs had collected:
a police registration certificate,
police certification of a clean criminal record,
a handwritten autobiographical statement (fourth draft),
proof of the political or economic reason for the trip (here Cresspahl and Jakob invented an inheritance for her in the Ruhr district, and Dr. Werner Jansen, attorney by trade in Gneez, conjured up on his typewriter when his staff was out of the office a district court’s affidavit of delivery with a West German dateline),
a statement from the Unity Party endorsing the trip (which Mrs. Brüshaver got through via the CDU office for V.o.F. [Victims of Fascism] in Schwerin),
a statement from the Gneez tax office confirming the absence of any outstanding tax liabilities;
and then all she had to do is get everything translated into Russian. Lotte Pagels took twenty-eight marks for that, with all its Krijgerstamian mistakes. Anita, you would’ve done it as a favor, admit it! But since Anita was avoiding eye contact with Student Cresspahl, how could the name Abs mean anything to her? And how useful she could have been as an interpreter with the Sovietnik in Gneez City Hall whose job it was to “advise” the city administration in the sovereign German republic. It probably wasn’t too much to expect for Gesine to make an effort and approach Anita with the request; Gesine was against the trip, Mrs. Abs seemed to be preparing for it very carefully, sometimes people take a trip and don’t come back; she used shyness as another excuse. If the application came back denied it would be her fault.
Aggie, into
December, was busy doing what a govt. exam.’d lic.’d reg.’d nurse considers her job. She hid behind Dr. Schürenberg, district medical examiner; Dr. Schürenberg summoned Cresspahl, examined him plausibly enough, and wrote out a certificate attesting him unfit to work.
In 1950, for the first time since 1937, New Year’s Eve was celebrated in the Cresspahl house. There was no carp, but Jakob brought crayfish. It’s true that crayfish are best in the months without a letter r: in the opinion of Hedwig Dorn, in The Housewife’s Helper, an opinion shared by Frieda Ihlefeld; still, one doesn’t have to take it so literally, if one doesn’t want to, even Ihlefeld seems to regard it as a kind of folklore. For the first time we in Cresspahl’s house were something like a family. Gesine watched from afar as Jakob’s mother scrubbed the live creatures with a birch brush in cold water, then brought them to their death in boiling; while the churchgoers in the family were out at services, Gesine stood by the pot, eyes on the clock and the paper with the recipe, and she ladled off the floating fat, added wood to the fire, let it cool, scooped out the red roe butter; distracted, though, because Jakob at the window spent a half hour showing her how a young man of twenty-two shaves for a nighttime celebration. Maybe the New Year’s carp was missing—the fun was there. Cresspahl wrote the final lines in his last account books. Four people confessed their resolutions for the coming year; four times Jakob poured Richtenberger aquavit into Gesine’s glass.
Jesu, let me gladly end it, / This my freshly entered year. / Thy strong hands’ upholding lend it, / Ward off peril and its fear. / Lastly, in Thy mantle furled, / I shall gladly quit this world.
Oh now dont be leavin us just yet, Fru Abs.
Ive had it. These engines, these wornout tracks, let the devil ride em. Godet Niejår, Gesine!
Happy New Year everyone.
August 1, 1968 Thursday
You’re asking—
For what’s different here in New York in the state of New York. You know that this is one of the places to which West Berlin newspaper publishers send tiny porcelain bells to families one of whose members has been killed trying to kill members of other families on the other side of the world in Vietnam. For one difference.
Well, take yellow. Here yellow is in different places. I mean the whole color family—genuine yellow or as near to yellow as ocher or canaries or anything else in the zone between red and green, not only any of the colors normally seen when the portion of the physical spectrum of wavelengths 571.5 to 578.5 millimicrons specif. 574.5 millimicrons is employed as a stimulus: as Webster says, but, you know, yellow. Here yellow is in different places.
Not only in eggs, Mongols, jaundice, sponges, butterflies, marsh-marigolds.
I’ve never seen as much yellow as here.
Here someone jealous, envious, cowardly, melancholy, treacherous, a deserter, or someone like Brutus (because he was not an honorable man) may be called yellow. Yellow people here are contemptible; the tabloids here are the yellow press, like the yellow Bildzeitung in Germany; there are yellow oaks and yellow perch.
Underbidders are yellow dogs, who sign yellow-dog contracts, which means they agree not to join any union but a yellow one.
Someone yellowing here is throwing his weight around.
The language here believes that certain natives in the southwestern part of the country have yellow bellies, yellow like sulfur.
You see yellow lines on one-way avenues, with yellow writing reserving a car’s width for certain vehicles only.
Two yellow lines divide the two-way avenues.
One yellow line divides the two-lane side streets.
Yellow in broadly applied lines marks off the pedestrian areas in intersections.
Yellow are the casings of the traffic lights unable to speak words, capable only of round disks of color.
On yellow rectangles the authorities warn drivers of curves or children ahead and recommend certain speeds.
Yellow signs surround men at road construction work, and they say: Danger.
The barricades, planks on four angled legs that police place around buildings gutted by fire or use to keep the curious away from festive first-nights or parades, are yellow, sometimes with a touch of orange but the yellow remains unvanquished.
The edges of long-distance railroad platforms are painted yellow.
Yellow has a national quality—think of the only yellow platform edge in all of West Berlin: at the US Army station in Lichterfelde.
The platform edges in the subways are yellow; the railings are painted yellow; the platforms under the passenger’s feet say Stand Clear, in yellow.
In subway stations the first step of a staircase and the step before a landing and the vertical edge of the last step are smeared yellow, sometimes the whole landing too.
The curbs in front of fire hydrants and bus stops are yellow: No Parking. Yellow is the color of the entranceways to garages, yellow the curbstones.
Post office steps are marked with yellow dots.
Gold, admittedly, but still yellow because not quite as red as gold, are the numbers and names and logos painted on the glass doors of buildings and stores and bars.
Official suggestions, too, such as: You are advised against coming any closer, or: Don’t even think about smoking on public transportation, or: Please note that this car’s name is 7493.
In the revolving doors of official buildings you find little arrows on yellow stickers. More and more the old street signs are being replaced with yellow ones.
Gravely the heads of famous ladies look down at you from the upper edge of an edifice that announces in yellow and gold: I am the Metropolitan Museum; I’m free of charge; I am very rarely closed.
Yellow wherever you look.
Yellow are the light fixtures in the windows of Western Union.
Western Union is a telegram service. What President Johnson keeps saying is: Great Society.
Yellow: Johnson commented two years ago about the dress of a wife of a Philippine visitor of state: yellow’s my favorite color too. Actually: she confided later: My favorite color is pink.
Yellow are the raincoats of the workmen crawling under the street and looking for holes in the gas pipes.
The air here is yellow when it’s suffocating.
Yellow circulars are carried around here, I pass you a note on yellow scratch paper, and many ballpoint pens, disguised as pencils, are yellow. Sometimes even orange juice.
Becoming tarnished in accord with nature is surely what the brass on the outside doors of genteel hotels, apartment buildings, banks would prefer to do; their baseboards, doorknobs, peepholes, handles, the surfaces of their noble locks are scrubbed yellow; their hydrants, mostly twinned, are shined yellow. The massive shingles of the exorbitant doctors are polished yellow, to a line of sheer gold, only the rational mind still considers it brass.
And golden triangles on the glass doors of fancy buildings are there to keep you from bumping into them.
Yellow are the envelopes known as manila. Yellow Pages are what they here call what you know as a business telephone directory.
The butter is suspiciously yellow.
Whereas it might get serious here, much like on the other side of the world, the signs indicating shelters against radioactive fallout are yellow. Prophetically placed therein are the three triangles above the little circle in which, in yellow, the number of persons who can here be saved is supposed to be stated but regularly isn’t, as if it were something unknown.
Yellow are the Broadway Maintenance trucks that wash and sweep the streets, that carry away trash and/or cars that need to be towed. Yellow are the cars of many taxi fleets. Yellow are the symbols, products, packaging, and delivery vans of numerous enterprises and institutes.
But why? That they do not know.
Yellow is a color that attracts attention: they say. But why it does so, no one knows.
Maybe because a nephew of the country’s first president owned an ocher factory?
Yellow is yellow: the an
swer runs.
And those who tell you that are authorities. It’s true and I admit it: the authority says: Even if it was my favorite daughter who called me yellow I’d give her a good smack. But I feel that we, and by we I mean our whole nation: We can thank our lucky stars that we can at least kill these peasants in Viet Nam or whatever it’s called there for reasons other than that their skin is yellow. The only people who can understand our reasons are those who belong, and who know: What Yellow Means. End of quote.
You have to admit, finally, that nobody in New York or any other city in this country is killed because of his yellow skin. In the first place, there are darker shades in the mix. Second, this is a free country. You need to see things in a yellower light!
—for it.
August 2, 1968 Friday
The Times would have so loved to report that the Soviet and Czechoslovakian delegations sat down and broke bread together. But she, too, was merely given the communiqué mentioning something about an atmosphere of complete frankness, sincerity, and mutual understanding. They’re planning to meet again tomorrow in Bratislava, but this time with the leaders from Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Will they throw a wrench into whatever the Soviet Union may have signed at the Cierna railroad junction?
And how was the weather in July? The New York Times has worked it out and tells us: Unseasonably hot. We must’ve had a miserable time of things around July 16. A Tuesday. We could’ve done without a half of it. Don’t wish your life away.
Anyone who remembers German class in grade 11-A-II in Gneez in 1950–51 will of necessity cry: Schach! Schach!
The teacher was Mr. Weserich, a student teacher from Thuringia, and the Cresspahl/Pagenkopf collective had already gotten to know him slightly toward the end of the previous summer. They’d seen him on a bench outside the dressing rooms at Gneez Lake—it was early, he thought he was alone, and he was adjusting the screws on an aluminum structure at his left knee, which was where his leg ended. His mouth formed another square; he looked like he was in pain. We were horror-struck.