by Uwe Johnson
Anita crossed the street to the former Wollenberg store; speaking insolent Mecklenburgish, she procured herself a bicycle. She had to walk it on the main street, due to the cobblestones and the scandal it would have been to ride it in her short skirt. Then she rode the twelve miles south in an easy hour, attacked again and again by a plane painted red/white/red, which was supposed to be scattering fertilizer this afternoon. The pilot may have been enjoying Anita’s bobbing skirt.
What Anita felt was lacking, in a northern region like this: a sign with a basket of eggs painted on it, and a hand with a pointing finger: “1000 ft.” People with portable tables on the streets, offering “Eel, fresh from the smoker”; raspberries, strawberries, picked by old women in gardens close by.
In the woods west of Gneez, on the Lübeck–Rostock road (ferry connection to Denmark), she came across the Happy Transit Hotel. Formerly an excursion destination, now a solid two-story building standing there aglow in its white scratch coat of plaster, reflecting in its golden-tinged windows the woods and Anita on her bicycle; in the back, a row of bungalows made of prefab components, every little cabin equipped with a TV antenna.
The man behind the reception desk thought she must have gotten lost; he nodded imperiously over to the placard across from the photographic depiction of the nation’s custodian: Payment accepted here in foreign currency: marks, pounds, dollars, French francs. That was fine with Anita—her question was: Why did the Unity Party insist on parity between the German currencies?
With West German people in transit sitting all around her, Anita ate grilled eel off fine china with silver cutlery, drank a Chablis from a crystal glass. Let the girl who’s learned everything the college of hotel management for the obtaining of foreign currencies had to teach her explain the procedures: Now that you’ve finally finished your meal, it’s time for me to clear away your bread basket! that’s how I learned it! In the middle of northwest Mecklenburg, Anita was waited on for dollars.
There is no Joachim de Catt Street in Gneez.
As for the name “Street of National Unity,” you can still make out traces of Unity. Other than that it’s named for the first President of the German Democratic Republic and it still leads to Schwerin.
Also in Gneez, no lines outside the drinking establishments (in the City of Gneez Hotel, a line outside the former manager’s office, where Western detergent and chocolate and liqueurs are swept off the counter in exchange for Western currency, double-quick). But, Gesine: your Mecklenburg now does its drinking early in the day. The restaurant in the main train station was still closed, the waiting room packed with beer drinkers. Isolated conversations: Ten thousand tiles put on, half of em loose; only a blockhead’d talk about that. – But therere folks who’ll talk bout it.
There they accepted the country’s legal tender from Anita again; piqued. There it had been a long time since any customer had asked for a tea with lemon, though it was on offer, according to the menu. (You could see the calculation. The complaints book was lying out on the counter.) Then the tea came too. Everyone looked at the stranger accusingly. A beer’s what you have at around five o’clock, that’s a given!
The banknotes showed Humboldt on the fives, Goethe on the twenties, Karl Heinrich Marx on the hundreds.
On the rails, in front of the two streaky windows, a heavy diesel train of Soviet make was wearing down the foundation. There was still the word “Deutsche” on the mark coins, but it had already disappeared from the pfennigs.
All of Anita’s attempts to get rid of the bicycle ended in awkward failure. None of the men had so many hundreds of marks on him while out for a beer. They watched with confused forebodings as Anita clambered up with the conveyance into a first-class compartment on the express to Neustrelitz. For fifty-five miles the conductor argued with her over the obvious fact that storing such means of transportation in the luggage net of an express train is not allowed, verbotten! When she transferred to Berlin, she left the bike behind, locked to a public bike rack. In the forests west of Neustrelitz the Red Army is sleeping and drilling like peas in a pod; there, before long, they’ll be drawing lots for the prize of a men’s bike of East German manufacture. In case there are factions in the Soviet Army, and Anita sends them letters with bike lock keys in them.
That was on Ascension Day. The military restricted zone, the gently rolling countryside, it shone in the distance. (—ANITA.)
August 10, 1968 Saturday
Yesterday a derelict known only as Red climbed to the top of the mast of the old lightship at Fulton Street. He wanted to talk to Mayor Lindsay. The New York Times shows us, in three photos, how he fell to his death; she tells us the kind of film she used, the shutter speed. Instructions for us?
A British passenger plane crashed yesterday in Bavaria. Forty-eight people on board, all dead. We’re flying soon too.
In Hitler’s schools we were warned against the stunted shadow of the man in the plutocrat’s hat: “The Enemy Is Listening.” In the New School we learned to warn one another: An FDJ Friend Is Listening.
At first we were suspicious of the loudspeakers in every classroom, since they seemed to simply replace the hand-carried notes that had done fine communicating school announcements until 1950. Maybe the devices contained equipment that transmitted sounds in the other direction. That might work to monitor a teacher; we didn’t think it’d be able to pick out one student’s voice from the thirty in a conversation during break. You’d need a person for that.
In the hour of the study of contemporary events, we’d been taught about the criminality inherent in Hitler’s language, for example in the word Untermensch, “subhuman.” During the break after that class, Zaychik, amused at the memory, carelessly remarked: If Ive ever in my life seen a one a those it was Fiete Hildebrandt. He meant former farm night watchman—“after-hours agricultural surveillance monitor”—Friedrich Hildebrandt, appointed by Adolf Hitler as gauleiter and Reich governor over the good state of Mecklenburg; Pius approvingly mentioned that Hildebrandt had been shot in 1945, in an open field near Wismar; Cresspahl denied it: he’d been sentenced to death in 1947 by an American military court and executed in 1948 in Landsberg am Lech, Bavaria. She’d heard that from her father, who kept an ear out for the postwar life paths of peacocks of that sort. As recently as five years ago, the mere name Hildebrandt had been a daily threat to him—Wallschläger, that shining beacon of the church, had included this special commissioner for the defense of the Reich in his prayers in church in 1945. At the June 1950 teacher’s conference, it came up that 10-A-II showed a regrettable interest in information that the state media rightly withheld from the East German people as being unhealthy; showed, in fact, a treasonous concern for the fate of criminals. We looked around at our classmates; who among them was listening in on us and passing our casual chitchat along to the authorities?
Which of them had brought himself to deliver Teacher Habelschwerdt to the knife (disciplinary transfer), by furtively quoting her stupid comment about community spirit? True, something called “community spirit” had been one stated pedagogical goal in Hitler’s schools, but anyone who’d spent years needing to recite this surely might misspeak the words once. Was Mrs. Habelschwerdt now squandering her gifts for the natural sciences as an arithmetic teacher at Niklot Elementary School because of one of us, someone we went swimming with, maybe even shook hands with sometimes?
Gabriel Manfras was the last person we thought of. First of all, how could we believe that the First Chairman of the FDJ school group would waste time and effort filing reports? Then, we felt protective toward him, which made it hard to see him properly. Gabriel Manfras was afflicted with a mother who used to thunder at him, even five years after the war: Our Führer will return and he will judge you! Gabriel Manfras was haunted with the memory of the crowd lining the road among whom he, too, quivering with enthusiasm, had waved and shouted “Heil!” when Hitler’s man in Mecklenburg had staged a rally including a drive through Gneez. Of course he’d want to
get distance from that; and so we accepted the repellent seriousness with which he now professed another brand of Socialism. We smiled only a little when he told us about his triumphs as a “People’s Correspondent,” when an article in The Schwerin People’s Daily was signed “gms”—a report on a skating or skiing competition, say, where the US team had won, a fact that “gms” neglected to mention though he did say that the Soviet Union had finished in an honorable second place.
Student Cresspahl could still recall the elementary-school days in Jerichow when she’d wanted this quiet, darkly brooding boy with the razorsharp center-part to finally notice her. Once, as a joke, for her own amusement, she told a story about Soviet Darwinism without paying attention to whether Gabriel Manfras was in hearing range: Michurin, the Soviet man of science, is giving a lecture about insects. He shows his listeners a flea standing on his right hand, orders the flea to jump to his left, and the flea does it, repeatedly. Then the professor pulls the flea’s legs off and orders it over and over to jump; the insect refuses to comply. Here, the professor announced, we have scientific proof that amputating a flea’s legs causes deafness . . . Gesine Cresspahl laughed—delighted by the twisted logic, enjoying having others laugh with her. She should have paid closer attention to the labored, contemptuous smile that Manfras was forcing onto his face.
Student Lockenvitz was no doubt making a subtle grammatical point and nothing more when he applied his linguistic stethoscope to the chest of the word Volkspolizei, trying to diagnose a possessive or accusative genitive. The German People’s Police—who was the possessor, who the direct object? Policing by the people or of the people? It was pure semantics for him when he translated res publica as “affair of the people” and detected the tautology in the term “People’s Republic.” Even the question of why this label was granted to China and Poland but not, for the time being, to a “People’s Republic of Germany”—even that would be used against him, later. Thanks to Manfras.
A book was going around school on hidden paths: I Chose Freedom, the work of a defector from the Soviet Purchasing Commission in Washington, DC. It told of compulsory spying on colleagues, institutional falsifications in industrial manufacturing, brutality during state police interrogations, concentration camps and forced-labor colonies in the Soviet Union. This Victor Kravchenko had had to sue a French Communist newspaper for slander, after it had called him a lying agitator in the pay of the Americans; a Paris court found that his evidence was true and convincing. When Burly Sieboldt loaned the book in confidence to Cresspahl’s daughter, he simply trusted she’d know who she could pass it along to; Lockenvitz found it badly written, or at least badly translated into German, at which point Pius decided not to read it, he just wanted it summarized. Up came Gabriel Manfras with a trusting look, and he nudged the conversation to the topic of the enemy’s arguments, that it was necessary to know them before, and were they not to be found in a book by the name of? Gesine denied any knowledge of such a book—among other reasons, because it might do painful damage to Gabriel’s idea of the Soviet Union, where the heart of man beats so free in shirokaya natura. She thought the book’s contents could bring about a fight with Gabriel, in which his feelings would be hurt; she wanted to spare the boy.
On the market square of Gneez, the new one, a loudspeaker on a pillar droned on and on all the livelong day, from morning, when the sleepy workers emerged from their trains, till night, when they’d earned their rest. The plaintive cry rang out: We don’t want to die for the dollar! – That’s fine: Pius said, brooding: but why is all the business at the Leipzig Fair conducted on a dollar basis? Manfras rushed that question to Instructor Selbich. But Pius was almost a soldier, rallying to the defense of the republic, he was not an easy target. So she pretended that “someone” in 11-A-II had asked her that question, and expounded to the class the temporarily unavoidable exigencies of the world market—not having an easy time of it, and pressed by Student Lockenvitz’s invocations of Socialist autarky. As far as the Pagenkopf & Co. collective was concerned, he’d been caught red-handed—the spy, the informer, Manfras unmasked as someone ready to do whatever dirty work the Unity Party wanted. From now on we could protect ourselves, but how could we warn the others? Writing something in block letters on the board would have gotten us a house visit from men in uniform or, worse, not in uniform. We made do with surreptitious nudges in the ribs or casually clearing our throat when someone among us started candidly holding forth about a foreign general and marshal with troops stationed in Mecklenburg. A covert nod in Manfras’s direction as he sat there, head lowered, pretending to do his math—we avoided even that.
Hünemörder came back to Jerichow and Gneez from the Lüneburg Region in the West, true to his vow never to return until Friedrich Jansen and Friedrich Hildebrandt and all their trash had been smoked out of Mecklenburg. He’d brought with him a few pounds of nails and tacks, thinking to open a hardware store in Gneez; with his solid business sense he had it all figured out, he just needed a saleslady. He couldn’t believe it when he heard that Leslie Danzmann was available. Danzmann, the fine lady? That’s right. After losing her job at the housing office she’d done so again at the people-owned business FishCan; repeatedly accused of embezzlement and unlawful appropriation of eels etc. and prevented from giving evidence in her own defense, she had finally, in her pride, given notice. She’d applied to the Schwerin CDU, helped once again by her past reputation; was allowed to help out reporting on legal matters in The New Union; was saved for a while from the fright it gave her to be offered under-the-table merchandise as a preferred customer—from the butcher, at the dairy—goods that hardly came up in the sales patter but made themselves known in the final total price. Her column, “Courtroom Glimpses,” made her name known for a while in almost all the cities and towns of Mecklenburg, but then what was written in the files about her past life caught up with her again. Leslie Danzmann was available, any hourly wage would be fine. Grateful, she dispatched with friendly homespun phrases the lines of buyers pushing up against Hünemörder’s mostly empty shop window. After two hours of commercial activity the People’s Police was informed, showed up in pairs, and led Leslie off, her wrist cuffed to Hünemörder’s. No one knew what Hünemörder got for his attempt to sabotage the people’s economy via individual distribution of quota-regulated commercial goods, because that was handed down in the capital; Emil Knoop, through whom this supply line should probably have run, had just set sail for Belgium (by this point Knoop had barges crossing the border for him). Leslie Danzmann was held in the basement under the Gneez district court for a few days, not knowing what she was charged with, kept busy cleaning the cells and passageways. She says she was released the moment she’d finished straightening up the detention areas. This was the latest piece of social instruction Danzmann had received, but what improvement in her social consciousness would it bring her?: the Cresspahl girl asked, in a circle of friends, noticing too late Manfras’s encouraging face as he walked up to them.
Bettinikin was furious. The brooch on her blue shirt quivered. (– Where the brooch sits is out in front: this saying, too, had been brought to her notice.) But she had to let it go with a vague threat against those whose sympathy for persons of the Reactionary Middle Class . . . Student Cresspahl gave a deliberate smile. She, like Bettina, knew about a certain photograph showing the teacher wistfully confronting the middle class.
The potato-bug uprising brought matters to a head. Class 12-A-II had been ordered out to the fields for the purpose of learning to distinguish between Coccinellidae or Rodolia cardinalis and Leptinotarsa decemlineata. Three students were missing. Whether they’d planned it or were just being absentminded, Students Gantlik and Cresspahl decided they’d rather take a stroll around the Smœkbarg, maybe because they could be sure that the rest of the class was out of town. Zaychik said he’d had to load coal into his auntie’s cellar. All three were summoned in writing to justify their actions before the teacher’s conference. There, Instructor
Selbich confronted Student Haase with the fact that, after storing the briquettes—an act defensible in the interests of the people’s economy—he had found the leisure to patronize the Renaissance Cinema. Instead of leaping onto his bicycle and hurrying to join the potato-bug inspectors! While we waited in the classroom for our consilium abeundi, Zaychik told us who’d screwed him over: outside the movie house he’d run into Manfras, excused for political service. (A photograph exists of this bench of public penance: Zaychik stands with his coat collar looped around the hook of the map stand, neck skewed sideways, arms slack, as if being painfully hanged.) A contrite and repentant Anita was saved by her contract with the Soviets. A contrite and repentant Cresspahl had a guardian angel circling overhead who had taken a picture of Bettina in West Berlin. Zaychik was credited with the fact that at least the work of filmic art he’d chosen to view was The Council of the Gods (East Germany, 1950, not shown in West Germany), thus informing himself about the imperialist conspiracy linking IG Farben, Adolf Hitler, and Standard Oil, so he got off with a severely worded reprimand, thanking the faculty for their lenience.
Anita took it upon herself to notify the party in question. Student Gantlik did not ordinarily go up to Student Manfras’s desk during a break as if she had something important to tell him; the class fell silent and everyone saw the furious twitching of the two reddish spikes of hair at her neck, heard her voice ringing with passionate intensity: Anyone who takes the things we tell each other in private, family matters, personal business, and hauls it to the principal’s office, brings it up before the Party, is . . . he’s. . .
What was the worst condemnation Anita could come up with? He was . . . a bad person.