Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – No! I could never do that.

  – Maybe you could, Marie. Some people do when whatever they have is behind them and they’re looking at twenty-five years in the slammer. Never to take a ferry across New York Harbor. Losing your girl. Never once to wake up except from the clang of a blow on an iron bar. To know that your only baggage will be your memories from age nineteen and twenty.

  – If I were Lisette von Probandt and had a memory, I’d hate life.

  – The twenty-five years turned into just five, at which point a West German chancellor visited the Soviet Union. Sieboldt and Gollantz were handed over with the rest of the prisoners of war; they studied law together in Bonn and Heidelberg and were accepted into the Foreign Ministry in 1962. Soon there’ll be an embassy where we can go visit them.

  – So the Soviets educated two civil servants for the West Germans.

  – That’s called cadre development! And Lisette had her seven years of waiting. She married Gollantz, and Sieboldt is their child’s godfather.

  – I could never forgive someone that way.

  – You could, Marie. You will. You’ll learn.

  (Sunday, too, is South Ferry day when Marie says it is.)

  August 5, 1968 Monday

  On ČSSR television, Alexander Dubček announced: The conference in Bratislava had given the country new scope for its liberalization, it “fulfilled our expectations” (not: all of our). He was apparently trying to hide his party’s satisfaction.

  Yesterday in Florida, as was only proper for a Sunday, a man with a girl about two years old hired a Cessna 182, to sightsee over the area: he said. Then he pulled out a revolver; the plane had to fly to Cuba.

  Yesterday a Convair 580 collided with a small private plane over southeastern Wisconsin and proceeded to land with the crushed wreck of the smaller plane, and its three dead bodies, embedded in it.

  We’re flying soon too.

  Student Lockenvitz.

  (Because you want me to, Marie. Only what I know.)

  In the spring of 1950 we invited him to join the work collective of Young Friends Pagenkopf and Cresspahl.

  For selfish reasons. We wanted to learn from this tall, lanky, starved boy how he could think in Latin. – Eundem Germaniae sinum proximi Oceano Cimbri tenent, parva nunc citivas, sed gloria ingens: he said casually when the subject of the Obotrite nobility came up.

  Social background, father’s profession: Farmer. On a 1949 questionnaire: Agronomist. In 1950: Director of Municipal Gardens, Parks, and Cemetery Plantings in (don’t worry, I won’t say the city’s name. Besides, you always pronounced it the Polish way. Anita was the only one who could understand it, if even she did) of one of the larger communities in what is today the People’s Poland. Bourgeois.

  Political background, parents’ party membership before 1945: None. Before 1933: German National People’s Party. Imperialist. His father had kept his distance from the Nazis—Lockenvitz insisted on that. So how did he explain that he spent fifth grade in a NaPolIn? He said his father was given a choice in 1944: being drafted into the army or professing his faith in the Hitler state some other way. Heavy financial burden, the fees for a National-Political Educational Institution. But these places were unlike the Hitler Youth Ordensburgs in their lesser emphasis on physical ability. Take his glasses. The metal frame sent rusty trickles down his nose in hot weather.

  And then why did the Soviets take his father away, if he was in neither the army nor the party? In February 1947 he was “last seen lying dead on his bunk.” (A witness statement; his mother was hoping for a pension. The pension was denied, provisionally in 1947, definitively in 1949, cf. husband’s previous social position. Application for educational stipends for Student Lockenvitz: Approved.) On the questionnaire in Contemporary Studies, Lockenvitz said: My father had an argument with the owner of our house; he was falsely denounced. Once he could trust us, he confided, asking us to tell no one else: That was when the Soviet Kommandatura was in our house.

  Arrival in Gneez: Age eleven. They’d decided to try to defend that city in the East, so his father had sent the family with the relocating German Army in the direction of the western front; the city is now rubble. Mother’s occupation since 1945: Garden worker. Son’s class: Proletarian? No: Wage workers.

  First apartment in Gneez: Across from the cemetery, with Mr. Budniak, the gravedigger, in a single room. Since 1949: Two rooms near the dairy. Starting in March 1951: An apartment converted from barracks in the Barbara Quarter, once the Soviets had left (and demolished a third of the barracks). In the plaster on the top of the barracks’ facade were the outlines of the German eagle and the circle he’d been sitting on, the circle for the swastika.

  An only child. Peasant relatives in father’s birthplace, Dassow am See, where he spent his holidays, paid in kind for his help in the harvest. 1948 to 1949: twenty hours a week working in a bicycle repair shop on Street of German-Soviet Friendship; he needed the money for books. (The city library closed at five thirty, but you can read until midnight.) Starting in 1950: express messenger for the district of Gneez, German Postal Service, which was why Anita had forced him to take that Swedish bicycle; (without him realizing, absentminded as he was, that at the price she gave him it was practically a gift). He was paid twenty cents per tariff kilometer; bonus if it was raining: fifteen cents. Whether or not it had been raining was decided by Berthold Knever. One time a woman in Old Demwies had been waiting so anxiously for her letter with the red sticker and the address crossed out in red—her pass for the West—that she gave him an egg. But he spent a lot of the afternoons in the sorting room just waiting for an express delivery to make; and doing his homework.

  A sensitive child. With a name like that! Nickname (bestowed by Lise Wollenberg): Dietikin. And Lockenvitz, when your hair is actually in Locken—blond unruly waves—with a Vitz or Fitz, a tangled patch, at the back! He lowered his head and pressed his lips together, as if deciding to take action; but cf. here GOETHE:

  For a person’s name is not like a coat, which merely hangs about him and may, perchance, be safely twitched and pulled; it is a perfectly fitting garment, which has grown over and over him like his very skin, and at which one cannot rake and scrape without wounding the man himself. (Dichtung und Wahrheit, Pt. 2, Book Ten)

  Such a child, if he had his way, would have such books in his house ready to consult at all times.

  An afflicted child. During all the many moves, a framed photograph of his father, an enlarged driver’s license picture with the staples clearly visible, was more important to him than all the furniture put together. Mrs. Lockenvitz, however, was just thirty-five when her husband “was seen” for the last time; all she took from him was the mission to get the boy to the gates of a university. (His father had a degree in agronomy.) That was why, after Carnival in 1949, there was a photo in the window of Mallenbrandt Pharmacy with a story to tell about the festivities: a young woman with her breasts squeezed together by her bodice. A child who feels ashamed. A sixteen-year-old beaten by his mother because after a man had spent the night he’d taken his father’s picture off the wall and hidden it; because he made his mother feel ashamed. At one point, when electrical devices were in short supply, Lockenvitz had mounted over his window a bell from a sleigh left behind in the east, with a cord of sack string coated in pitch hanging down, he was so eager for visitors; now he unscrewed the bell, ignored knocks on the door.

  A young man who knows how to enter a room that contains a lady, how to manage his knife and fork now that Mrs. Pagenkopf sometimes brings a third plate in from the kitchen for him. Who insists on the good manners of thanking her for every snack, with a servant’s bow from the neck; who declines to accept another sandwich—just to be polite—he would stay hungry for a long time. Until we could convince him that there were none of the “eavesdroppers who never hear anything good” at our house. It took a long time.

  Because it hurt him to tell a lie. When his school demanded it, so much the worse for th
e school, as far as he was concerned; he did his best to let the teacher in charge know how he felt too. Bettina Selbich watched him nervously as he recited the seven commandments of the Stockholm Appeal:

  I vow to

  stop railroad trains,

  unload no military cargo,

  withhold fuel from such vehicles,

  disarm mercenaries,

  refuse to all my children or spouse to serve with the country’s armed forces,

  withhold food supplies from my government,

  refuse to work at a telephone switchboard or for a transportation system—

  to prevent a new war.

  Bettina felt she should say something about his speech. He’d set all kinds of traps for her before; she tried once again and asked him where he’d gotten that text. Anita said, to no one in particular, in a respectful voice: It was in Pravda, first week of July.

  (We thought she was trying to protect you. Or was it that she used to slip sheets of paper with transcriptions from her Russian reading into your notebook?)

  With us he took a cautious approach. But then Zaychik and Eva came over—memorizing nitrites and nitrates had gotten boring—and shot a questioning glance at Pius’s POB RTT radiogramophone, and when Pius as the host gave his nod, they shut the windows but turned the knob straight to Radio in the American Sector. RIAS broadcast a hit parade on Fridays—Zaychik was delighted to hear Billy Buhlan singing:

  Yoop-de-doo—

  You can’t slam your head through a wall!

  Yoop-de-doo—

  This should have reassured Lockenvitz. For Bettina had informed us in Contemporary Studies that listening to Western stations was forbidden, explaining: Musicians who use their offerings for opportunistic reasons to adorn Mr. Adenower’s road to war will forever be void of the humanism that might let them interpret the immortal symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven!

  Lockenvitz waited until it was just the three of us; remarked: This text from West Berlin does call forth a sociological analysis, does it not? The other side must need to pacify the population, lure them away from making any demands. Lockenvitz was talking to the two of them the same way he’d heard them talk in school. Pius looked at me, brow furrowed; I shrugged as if baffled. We were all acting like diplomats! Pius tried again. So, what kind of music did Lockenvitz like?

  Lockenvitz did rather like “boogie-woogie.”

  This was American jazz from the early years, recently promoted, by government decree, from the music of imperialist-decadent exploiter to progressive insofar as it had developed from the work songs of an age of openly practiced slavery. This boy went in for conversations by the book.

  Then the East German government brought about what it had promised to its youth at the Germany Rally. On June 23, it communicated the following warning to its allied governments: American terror planes had dropped large quantities of potato-bugs over the territory in its control, in an effort to harm Socialist agriculture. In late September, the students of 11-A-II started pacing off the furrows of the potato fields around Gneez, heads bowed, seeking out Doryphora decemlineata. Now If yer wearin butter on yer head you shouldn go out in the sun—they were all embarrassed at a state power expecting them to believe this nonsense about agroterrorism and prove their belief by joyous action in the field. You would need a whole book of its own, Comrade Writer, to describe those afternoons, lasting so infinitely long, the earth turning east toward the sun so infinitely slowly.

  And Lockenvitz showed his true colors to us, at least as the son of an agronomist; thunderstruck by the memory, he cried: Ha! Those crafty imperialists! The potato bug hibernates two handspans deep in the soil and appears as soon as the temperature exceeds fifty degrees. Early May, in other words. Now when is the Germany Rally to take place? End of May. So the bugs arrive on schedule, the females dutifully lay their eggs in batches of twenty to eighty, about eight hundred per bug in total, the larvae hatch after seven days, and they need another fifty days after pupation until they’re ready. In July! Not on June 23. Not by Whitsunday. Boys n girls! If we have potato bugs here in Mecklenburg, they must be descended from the ones that were first sighted in southwest Germany in 1937! They’re thriving here because the land-reform policies cut down all the hedgerows, and in those hedges there were nests, and in those nests there were birds that exterminated this pest! And because pheasant breeding went out with the nobility’s estates!

  – We: he’d said to the two of us. We’d done it.

  Now he’d do it to entertain us, too, for instance when he pontificated to Bettina S., carefully exaggerating, losing himself as if unwittingly in the labyrinths of thoughts: These six-legged emissaries of American invasion. But our land is armed and ready. We have the pheasant, do we not. Small game that lives in bushy terrain, also in cabbage patches. Eats caterpillars and worms and beetles, pests in general! A bird that’s easy to hunt since it’s not a good flier. But what people hunt is the greater foe—the fox. Hence the pheasant’s proliferation. Historical research can trace the economic brutality of the American aggressors back to the Lend-Lease Act of 1941. Under the pretense of aiding the heroically struggling Soviet Union with food and weapons, they smuggled in 117 different kinds of insect species and weed seeds!

  Baffled Bettina was about to go put another A next to his name in the book, but just to be safe she asked a follow-up question. These facts from the war years were entirely new to her, and since she intended to bring them up at an agitprop meeting in the state capital . . . might she ask Student Lockenvitz where he had come upon them?

  – Of course: he said: In the Literaturnaya Gazeta.

  (And wouldn’t you know it, Bettina went and asked the school’s Russian teacher if this was an émigré journal.)

  The student body of the Fritz Reuter High School, four hundred people, found a total of seventeen stray potato bugs; nine of them were ladybugs. Lockenvitz wanted to do what a friend should, and asked us: Did we also know that there was a watch list posted on the distribution shelves of the German Post Office, and that pretty much every day a couple of letters would go spend the night with the Stasi (the State Security Police)?

  Now this Lockenvitz was someone we could ask about his meeting with Hermlin, the poet, on Landsberg Avenue. Lockenvitz had squirmed his way around a lie: On a streetcar for Grünau he’d gone astray and ended up in Schmöckwitz, was invited into a house there for discussions about art in Mecklenburg, about Barlach the sculptor; tea, red wine. Lockenvitz borrowed a pair of shoes from Pius; his own had been waiting to be repaired for four weeks. He told us his thoughts without holding anything back: Our Socialist accomplishments all presuppose someone they’ve been taken from, someone who’s now standing in the corner and sulking. What’s been holding up our American shoe-resoling plants?

  This Lockenvitz of ours was who we picked when 11-A-II suddenly had to delegate someone for an FDJ training course in Dobbertin, near Goldberg. At first, when we saw Manfras vote against absenting himself from home and curriculum, when Lise Wollenberg used her vote to avenge herself for being neglected and punish Lockenvitz in general for having ancestors from somewhere else, we kept our hands down. Then Pius, with the powers vested in him as head of the school-group authority, asked: What did the candidate himself think about taking such a trip. – Any organizational secretary for the ZSGL must constantly strive to extend his or her understanding of theory: he answered, like someone agreeing to sacrifice himself for us. Second round of voting: Unanimous—as was in fashion.

  In November 1950, he left; in January, we had him back. It went badly. Start to finish: a flop, a mis-hit.

  Literally. The start: In November the Ministry of State Security picked up Mrs. Lockenvitz’s brother in the Wismar shipyards; charges of sabotage and espionage. Mrs. Lockenvitz tried to hit her son who was off to practice getting into the mental universe of such a ministry. He grabbed her wrists and said, as if conducting a medical evaluation, that she seemed to be hysterical; distracted by curiosity, she asked him
what the symptoms of this illness were and didn’t like his answers. Now he was off in another town and mustn’t even think of going back to Gneez and the apartment in the Barbara Quarter.

  He never told us exactly how it ended in Dobbertin. It must have been something like an instructor wanting to hear more about the third principle of dialectics—that could easily lead to a bad grade and a “Badge for Superior Knowledge” in bronze instead of gold.

  For his first question to Bettikin had been: If quantity necessarily changes its nature as it increases and is transformed into a qualitative difference, how does that work when you’re comparing Turgenev’s brain to an elephant’s?

  (LOCKENVITZ, from before his course in Dobbertin: Children should be spared this. In 1946, when I went to answer the doorbell in Budniak’s house, there were two people standing there asking about Mrs. Scharrel. Mrs. Scharrel lived on the second floor and was a black-marketeer, professionally. Mrs. Scharrel: Just tell ’em I’m on my way to Wissmar! That was hard for me, but you do what grown-ups tell you, right? The first time, you forget—if you’re lucky. In 1948 the catechist asked us: Who had never told a lie in their life. I raised my hand, because no one else wanted to. And presto! I’d traded up from one lie to two. Now the process is running fine, from a technical point of view. But children should be spared.

  The child Lockenvitz, in 1949, after having worked his way through the Old Testament for a second time, requested an audience with the cathedral preacher of Gneez and gave him a well-organized explanation for why he would henceforth not be coming to the meetings of the congregational youth group. We bring this up to remove any doubt about the fifteen-year-old we’re dealing with here.)

  He was stubborn. Introverted. Teasing Bettinikin had lost its appeal. His grades slipped in Latin. He lost weight—in memory he is sitting lost in obsessive reflections behind his cheap glasses, wearing a blue shirt that hangs on him in folds. Then came January 12, 1951, when an eighteen-year-old high-school student was sentenced to death in Dresden for “Incitement to Boycott” and for the attempted murder (with a pocketknife) of a People’s Policeman; in Gneez, the regular police went into the Renaissance Cinema, not even in disguise, to find out once and for all who was murmuring or laughing whenever the custodian appeared in image and sound, speaking his southern German dialect. Sachwalter Walter considered the sentence appropriate, both before and after it was reduced to fifteen years in prison. This provoked Pagenkopf’s female partner in the work collective to thoughtlessly comment: If it’s really true that this statesman is such a thorn in the Americans’ side, why haven’t they bumped him off yet? It’s been three years!