by Uwe Johnson
But it was he who opened by apologizing. – Well that’s that: he calmly said once he’d pushed himself up into a standing position. – For Führer and Reich; I believed it too: he added, leaving the rest to us, trusting fully to our diplomatic skills. As a result he already had a reputation when demoted Principal Selbich introduced him to us, in her sour way. – We will be reading Schach von Wuthenow by Theodor Fontane: he said, announcing his intentions as clear as daylight. How we would have quaked in our shoes if we’d understood what he meant.
We had German four days a week. Weserich told us about the century of Fontane’s life, starting on May 5, 1789, with Count Mirabeau, deputy of the Third Estate; he was perfectly open in laying out his traps but we failed to see them. He told us about Fontane’s childhood years, his time in England and France; read to us from letters to his family, car tel est notre plaisir, as the king and Fontane’s father used to say. Neat, clear High German, drawn from his mind while his gaze was elsewhere. On September 11 he had the effrontery to ask us our first impressions after reading the work by Th. Fontane mentioned at the start of the semester. Out of the blue, one week to the next, with shining eyes full of anticipation!
Anita raised her hand—she was willing to sacrifice herself. He ignored her hand but smiled at her, and her alone. The rest of us, numbering about thirty, were permitted to remonstrate that there was only one single copy of this work in the Culture League library; that only novels like Effi Briest were on our shelves at home; we tried to talk him out of his plan. The upshot was that he complimented us, praised our resourcefulness, and promised to repeat his question on September 18. – We’ll be seeing one another quite a lot this year: he promised.
To keep him favorably disposed to us, we each contributed a thirtieth of what Elise Bock charged to type out a hundred and thirty printed pages; Pius procured the mimeograph stencils on a visit to the FDJ district office. (– Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn: he admitted, but only in his collective work group.) Before the pages could be run off, though, Anita had to swing from City Hall a certification of harmlessness and authorization to reproduce a text. On the 18th, there we were with our bundles of rough spotty paper, and Zaychik the rabbit was already looking forward to what he was about to say.
– Issan old story: Zaychik said: You bed ’em, you wed ’em!
The visitor thanked him for this instruction in Mecklenburg folk wisdom. And he was right—what had spoken from Zaychik’s mouth was the spirit of the Gneez townsman-farmers (and the banished nobility); he didn’t even realize the speculation he was inviting about his parents’ marriage, or about his own dealings with Eva Matschinsky. She shrank in her seat, blushing.
Dagobert Haase stood there, naive and slightly chubby in body, grumbling and defiant in manner like someone who follows instructions but doesn’t have to. And he said: It’s about a hunnerd an fifty years ago. A cavalry captain has a girlfriend that maybe he wants to marry. Suddenly he falls for her daughter, twenty years younger, but because people’re crackin jokes about the pockmarks in her face he wants to duck the consequences. The king orders him to marry, and he does, but he shoots himself after lunch. He leaves his name and the child to her.
Zaychik obligingly turned half around to let us see in his face what he thought: Ain’t that always the way?
Mr. Weserich thanked him for the plot summary. Might Haase be prepared to answer an additional question?
Zaychik let his head fall forward—the silent sufferer. Upon request, he named the main character (same as the title), the daughter (someone named Victoire), the mother’s maiden name . . . (not sure about that).
The address of the von Carayon family? this German teacher asked the room, past Zaychik, explicitly to spare him, and when Student Cresspahl could only give Berlin, we were permitted to return to the opening of the story and begin again:
“In Frau von Carayon’s salon on Behrenstrasse in Berlin, a few friends had gathered on the customary evening . . .”
We were then informed that people of rank at that time . . . but it wouldn’t be worth the trouble, presumably, to ask what the year might be?
– 1806: Anita suggested, and then had to say why. – Because the characters are talking about the Battle of the Three Emperors at Austerlitz as something that just happened, and that was in December 1805, on the 2nd.
. . . at that time chose their addresses with great care. Where they lived expressed their self-regard and was held up to others. Therefore—alas!—he had no choice but to inform us that Behrenstrasse runs parallel to and one block south of Unter den Linden; the von Carayons were blessed with a house on the corner of Charlotten Street, a short walk from the Opera, the Lustgarten, the Palace. Behr Street is named after the heraldic bear of Berlin—this opinion is widespread, but the truth is that the street honors the engineer Johann Heinrich Behr, to whom Berlin owes French Street and, as of 1701, Jerusalem Street and Leipzig Street as well. Well known to every tried and true Berliner and now to every member of class 11-A-II, from personal experience, at least since September 11, if from a different source. Moreover, were we to consider that the author of this tale surely eschewed any mere coincidence, why would he mention an architect from the turn of the seventeenth to eighteenth century in the very first line? Perhaps to infuse the past era of the story with a hint of an even older past? Make sense? And are any of us now inclined to turn to the subtitle? “A Story from the Time of the Gensdarmes Regiment”? In response to the resulting determined, stony silence, a young student-teacher spent the rest of the class expatiating on the origins of the name of this regiment of cuirassiers, bearing swords instead of lances in the cavalry of Charles IV of France. A nod to the author’s French background, perhaps? Gens d’armes, au Moyen Age, soldats, cavaliers du roi? Since our session, full of fascinating moments for which he was in our debt, was now drawing to a close, he ventured to request that by Wednesday we at least try to read the first two pages.
Class 11-A-II needed almost three weeks for the first six pages of the novella, and no matter how much you stared at Mr. Weserich for wasting all this time he refused to lose any sleep over it. We started to look forward to his outbursts of cheerful despair, when the perfectly clear words “in England and the union states” actually failed to call forth in our minds a picture of the United States of America, or to ensure that we learned more about the origins of the von Bülow gentleman, Adam Heinrich Dietrich v. B., than that he’d been arrested for his writing. Could it truly be the case that there was only one single encyclopedia in the whole city of Gneez, loaned out to someone else for the next several years?
No one could accuse Weserich of pettiness. We were inclined to work with him; we were equipped to handle the Latin quotations, thanks to Kliefoth, and now and then even translated one ourselves (hic haeret). After a while Weserich realized that, though a knowledge of Latin might be helpful in the learning of French, it could by no means replace instruction in the latter. This surprised him; he didn’t want to admit it; was this reason to challenge the intellectual fathers of the Educational Reform Law who had replaced French with Russian? Thenceforth he had us present to him utterances in Fontane’s second language for translation into German—always at least three at a time, please, on that he must insist. – How the time is running away from us! he’d cry, and this was late October, and we were on chapter two. So we looked things up in the dictionary, things such as embonpoint, nonchalance, the realm in which a gourmet excelled and the one in which a gourmand; we asked old people if they’d ever seen that kind of sinumbra lamp (an oil lamp on a pedestal, casting very little shadow). When Mathias Weserich was happy with our knowledge, to the point of putting on a show of surprise and disbelief, it was meant to be fun for us and so we did him that favor.
Two weeks of class on the riddle: Why did Fontane give titles to his chapters here, unlike in Under the Pear Tree only three years earlier, or Count Petöfy one year after Schach? What is a title. It is placed at the top (bu
t why are paintings signed at the bottom or the side?); it indicates what is to follow. It’s a courtesy to the reader, who at the end of a chapter is invited to take a breath and then know in advance where the voyage is going—to Sala Tarone, to Tempelhof, or Wuthenow. Yes, and is it supposed to whet our appetite? Such writers do exist, but we are dealing with Fontane here. A title is a milestone along the path: Wanderer, after twelve miles you will be in Jerichow. A sign at the edge of town—when a stranger reads “Gneez” it doesn’t tell him very much at first, but once he’s entered that city he knows where he is. A title as a warning. As an ornament, accompanying the old-time fashions of Berlin in 1806. Perhaps. The question remains: What is a title?
We had something of a mishap regarding the Sala Tarone Italian Wine and Fine Food Store on Charlottenstrasse. The gentlemen have to squeeze their way through rows of barrels and the cellarman enjoins caution: – There are all kinds of tacks and nails here: he says. Pinnen und Nägel. There was a boy in our class named Nagel. We could have acted like adults; the next day, his name was Pinne Nagel, Tacknail. He took it well. Underneath, he was glad that he now had something of his own, a nickname. From then on he’d say, about tricky math problems or cramped quarters: There are all kinds of tacks and nails here. He survived eleventh grade, Pinne Nagel. Today he’s a jaw surgeon in Flensburg.
But what precisely is a Pinne, our Mr. Weserich begged someone to inform him. He understood the difference between a Pinne and a Nagel only after we’d connected the dots of the Little Erna story for him, with piety and tact: Lil’ Erna’s Grandpa’s lyin’ in his coffin and her mom wants to make him look just like he used to when he was alive but she can’t get the beret to stay on his bald head, she fumbles and fumbles and then finally Mr. Piety-and-Tact comes by and she tells him the problem and he says Give me a minute I’ll take care of it and when she comes back it’s right there on Grandpa’s head just perfect and she says How’d you do that? and he says Carpet tacks! It was the same with the Plattdeutsch during Schach’s visit home: Weserich truly acted like it was all Greek to him. We translated why the old goat was always butting Momma Kreepsch where she hurt—in writing, since he asked us to. One time he came to us with reproaches: We’d kept a word from him. Right at the beginning, as early as the fourth chapter. We were crushed and promised to make it up to him. It was about Aunt Marguerite, “who spoke with a pruned mouth the Berlin dialect of her day, which almost exclusively used the dative case”—this without quotation marks around the offending term. We’d acted like everyone knew what this meant! That was the word, then, and he asked us to show him what it meant, and he stood in front of one schoolgirl after another (we’d convinced him that only girls pruned) and watched her protruding mobile lips, then thanked her. We responded in kind, gathering up our skirts at our side, which were below the knee in those days. We curtsied.
We were already in Wuthenow, page 122 of our transcript, chapter 14; we’d had enough of Schach (the person, after he’d spoiled the boat ride on the lake for us with his lachrymose shirking, not the book), when Weserich invited us to expound (with no notes!) on how we’d made this Schach’s acquaintance. A forty-five-minute debriefing, right to the bell. It turned out that the weeks and weeks frittered away at the start of the year had paid off: we found the last line of the first paragraph where he is mentioned as absent, and nameless. The gentlemen there—von Bülow, his publisher Sander, von Alvensleben—are conversing with their hostesses, the Carayon ladies. Von Bülow is looking to start an argument. He quotes his man Mirabeau’s comment about Frederick the Great’s celebrated state as a fruit that’s already rotten before it’s ripe. In the sermon, he gives himself airs, as if by chance, with the maxim: nomen et omen. Not the est we learned in school, but et—name and destiny, bringing them into closer and more pregnant proximity and significance. After von Bülow’s emphatic pronouncement that “Europe could have stood a bit more of the harem and seraglio business without any serious harm,” whose name is announced midsentence? Cavalry Captain von Schach, the Shah between two women; his adversary is there already and will have the last word to the end. Fontane and the science of names. Fontane and the art of introducing a character.
A list of characters: Josephine, Victoire, Schach, Aunt Marguerite, the king, his much-bemoaned queen, Prince Louis, General Köckritz, the Tempelhof innkeeper . . .
A list of places, settings: The Carayons’ salon, the tavern with the tacks and nails, the carriage ride, the (invented) church in Tempelhof, the villa on the Spree at Moabit across from the western lisière of the Tiergarten (our consultation of reference works should by now have led us to a place where we might find the reason for this word choice), the parade in Tempelhof, the bedside scene, Wuthenow am See, Paretz Palace and its park, death on Wilhelmstrasse. Make sense? A vote, in writing, anonymous, of favorite locations. The lake came in first—we were again mostly from Mecklenburg by this point; the students from the Memel (the Neman) or Silesia had to accept it. Pius showed me that he’d voted for Paretz. Student Cresspahl’s favorite image was of the swans that came swimming up from Charlottenburg Park in a long line.
Another ugly incident: Schach is going on and on about the prince, his gracious lord, whom he loves de tout mon cœur: he tells Victoire. But, he says, with all his adventures in love and war the prince is “a light that burns with a robber.” Again we’d tried to slip a word past our German teacher! He was left standing there completely unaware of what a “robber” on a light might be in this Northern Germany of ours! We agree that we have earned our punishment and request an ample measure of it, as schoolchildren used to be made to say. A robber is a light with a wick that gives off a very sooty smoke—that “steals” the candle wax away. When candles were still made of wax . . .
Anita saved herself the trouble of the curtsy we’d all adopted as a way to tease Mathias Weserich. She had the chance; she outsmarted herself. It was common practice in our class to turn to the back left corner of the room whenever it was Dieter Lockenvitz’s turn to speak; Anita, too, liked watching him talk. If the talk was rebellious, her eyebrows rose in concern. There were certain details of a story from the time of the Gensdarmes Regiment that displeased Student Lockenvitz. In the fourth chapter and the Tempelhof churchyard, hazel and dog rose bushes grew so lushly that they formed a thick hedge, “notwithstanding the leaves weren’t out yet.” A student would get a red mark for that “notwithstanding.” In the chapter called “Le choix du Schach,” it said, “After arrangements like these one parted”—was this a misprint? or something wrong with the grammar? What annoyed (i.e., ärger’ed, and by now we could think aigrir’ed too) this student most was Fontane’s habit of giving words of direct discourse in both the subjunctive and quotation marks; Weserich interjected questions to keep the boy’s spirits up, although he regularly conceded the points anyway. But students were now officially required to form collective work pairs, one stronger student and one weaker, and Anita, who could have put herself in a position to observe this Lockenvitz for hours, and from close up, too, instead chose a girl, Peter (Monika), who was weak in chemistry and math.
When Weserich interrupted his aimless drifting among us to stop and stand by Lise Wollenberg’s desk, we would see the phrase come to life: she was “hanging on his lips.” She was, and she wouldn’t have taken it particularly amiss if he’d solemnly ushered her out of the classroom and offered her his hand and his heart. But Weserich must have had some experience with girls like this who throw back their head when they laugh, whinnying like a colt; it was only in the seventh month of our collaboration on a man from the Regiment Gensdarmes that he gave her a speech, for her alone.
– My dear Miss Wollenberg! he said.
– You are looking at my mouth, as though something were missing there. You mention the color of my teeth at a volume that cannot but reach me. I now have the honor of confiding to you that no hair grows around my mouth because the skin there is transplanted. My teeth have an unnatural appearance because they were mad
e in a factory. Do you have any other questions? Would you care to tell me where, in this story about a cavalry captain, von Schach—you remember him—where you suppose the person telling it is?
– Nooo: Lise said, straining for insolence. We felt sorry for her, the big blond child caught in the act of trying to be frivolous with a grown-up (“and with true horror maketh sport”). But we didn’t hold Weserich’s counterattack against him, after all the embarrassment Lise had caused his colleague H.-G. Knick.
Something different for a change. Who is the narrator? How does he conduct himself in performing this activity? Was he present at all the events that have taken place? Would those involved have wanted that, or allowed it? When are they outside the range of his observations? when they’re writing letters. Once the letters are written, the narrator tells us what they say. What does he refrain from telling us? Why do we learn of the stolen hour of love only from the use, twice, of the informal second-person pronoun du? Good taste, or tact, or a well-developed ability to cope with life? Lockenvitz, let me give you a striking term for your collection, one which will bear you aloft on its wings to your final exams and beyond: the authorial narrative situation.
He knew where the ice was thin, our Mr. Weserich, and kept off it. Von Bülow, staff captain but also political essayist, admits, in the quoted subjunctive that so vexed Student Lockenvitz, to an abhorrence of pubs in which he felt “police spies and waiters were strangling him.” There were pubs like that in Gneez; birthday parties had long since ceased to be thrown outside the house. Here Mathias Weserich could play innocent—he was from Thuringia. In his first appearance with Schach, von Bülow mentions the indissoluble marriage between church and state; Weserich could casually remind us to always stay in the temporal frame of the story. When Victoire writes her friend Lisette a letter that mentions “your new Masurian homeland,” he knew that he had before him a child who had lost his own home in that part of the world; the discussion turned on the claims Victoire felt entitled to make from life, as revealed by this letter; how could the teacher suspect that Anita, too, felt herself to be a person “restricted to no more than her lawful share of happiness.” He probably didn’t even notice the silence that greeted his mention of a “Möllendorf” infantry regiment.