Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  Gerhard Koch, b. 1924, med. stud., verh. July 13 1950; disappeared.

  On Jul. 15, 1950, the district court in Güstrow in the Hotel Zachow ibidem sentenced nine leading employees of the credit union cooperative to a total of eighty-four years Z. Among them Arthur Hermes, b. 1875. Hans Hoffmann, JD, because he had tried to transfer the assets of the farmers’ self-help association from Mecklenburg to Göttingen. (Two tanker ships, five tank railcars.) “Unfortunately, he succeeded.” Prof. Hans Lehmitz, b. 1903, natural sci., member of the Unity Party: fifteen yrs. Z.

  On Jul. 18, 1950, the district court in Greifswald sentenced additional members of the cooperative to Z.

  Friedrich-Franz Wiese, b. 1929, chemistry student, member of the LPD university committee, verh. Oct. 18 1949; sentenced by SMT Schwerin on Jul. 20 1950 to twenty-five years ZAL, by SMT Berlin-Lichtenberg on Nov. 23 1950 to death.

  Arno Esch, b. 1928, stud. jur., LPD Mecklenburg executive committee member, verh. by Soviet security officers in the night of Oct. 18–19 1949 upon leaving the Rostock branch office. Opponent of the death penalty. “I have more in common with a liberal Chinese than with a German Communist.” “In that case I have established that we do not have the freedom to make decisions here. Please enter that into the record.” Sentenced to death on Jul. 20 1950 by SMT Schwerin per §58 Par. 2 of the RSFR (= Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) penal code: Preparation to Commit Armed Rebellion. Mocked during pretrial custody for his pacifist position. The death penalty was reinstated after his arrest, only when he’d long been in prison. Executed in the Soviet Union on June 24 1951.

  Elsbeth Wraske, b. 1925, English stud., verh. Apr. 11 1950; sentenced by SMT Schwerin on July 28 1950 to twenty yrs. ZAL.

  On Aug. 8 1950, SMT Schwerin sentenced Paul Schwarz and Gerhard Schneider, both members of Jehovah’s Witnesses and therefore both previously in Hitler’s concentration camps; sentenced on Aug. 1950 to 25 yrs. ZAL each for “Anti-Soviet Activities.”

  Siegfried Winter, b. 1927, ed. stud. and most famous handball player in Rostock, verh. Aug. 16 1949; sentenced by SMT Schwerin on Aug. 27 1950 to 25 yrs. ZAL.

  Karl-Heinz Lindenberg, b. 1924, med. stud., verh. Sept. 16 1950; sentenced by Greifswald district court on Oct. 21 1951 to fifteen years ZAL.

  On Sept. 28, 1950, the Schwerin district court sentenced high-school student Enno Henk and seven others, charged with distributing pamphlets, to up to fifteen years Z.

  Alfred Loup, b. 1923, ed. stud., verh. July 3 1950; sentenced by SMT Schwerin on Oct. 31 1950 to 25 yrs. ZAL.

  Gerhard Popp, b. 1924, med. stud and chairman of the U of Rostock CDU chapter, verh. Jul. 12 1950; sentenced by SMT Schwerin on Oct. 31 1950 to 25 yrs. ZAL.

  Roland Bude, b. 1926, Slavic stud., FDJ school group leader, Rostock, verh. Jul. 13 1950; sentenced by SMT Schwerin on Oct. 31 1950 to two successive 25 yrs. ZAL.

  Lothar Prenk, b. 1924, ed. stud., verh. March 24 1950; sentenced by SMT Schwerin on Dec. 9 1950 to 25 yrs. ZAL.

  Hans-Joachim Klett, b. 1923, med. stud., verh. March 23 1950; sentenced by SMT Schwerin on Dec. 12 1950 to 25 yrs. ZAL.

  On Dec. 18, 1950, a Schwerin SMT sentenced fourteen former Volkspolizei officers to death for “anti-Soviet agitation and forming illegal groups.”

  On Apr. 27, 1950, the Schwerin district court sentenced a defendant named Horst Paschen to life in prison for “agitation for boycott in conjunction with the murder of a coast guard.”

  Joachim Liedke, b. 1930, stud. jur., verh. in June 1951; sentenced to five years Z.

  Gerhard Schönbeck, b. 1927, philosophy student, verh. Sept. 6, 1950; sentenced by Güstrow district court on Aug. 22, 1951, to eight years Z.

  Franz Ball, b. 1927, classics student, verh. Jan. 18, 1951; sentenced by Greifswald district court on Aug. 22, 1951 to ten years Z.

  Hartwig Bernitt, b. 1927, biology student, verh. June 29, 1951; sentenced by SMT Schwerin on Dec. 5 1951 to 25 yrs. Z.

  Karl-Alfred Gedowski, ed. stud., b. 1927, verh. June 26, 1951; sentenced by SMT Schwerin on Dec. 6 1951 to death.

  In the same trial:

  Brunhilde Albrecht, b. 1928, ed. stud., verh. June 29, 1951; fifteen years ZAL.

  Otto Mehl, b. 1929, student of agriculture, verh. June 29, 1951; 25 yrs. ZAL.

  Gerald Joram, b. 1930, med. stud., verh. June 29, 1951; 25 yrs. ZAL.

  Alfred Gerlach, b. 1929, med. stud., verh. June 29, 1951; death.

  Above the entrance to the Soviet Military Tribunal (SMT) courtroom in Schwerin were posted the words: JUDGMENT SHALL RETURN UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS. On the dais was a court of three officers. Present in the room, besides the accused: an interpreter, guards, and larger-than-life-sized portraits of Stalin & Mao. Accusations: Contact with Berlin Free University; production and circulation of leaflets; possession and circulation of antidemocratic literature. Verdicts justified under §58 of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic’s penal code, Paragraph 6: Espionage; Paragraph 10: Anti-Soviet Propaganda; Paragraph 11: Formation of Illegal Groups; Paragraph 12: Failure to Report Counterrevolutionary Criminal Activity. Karl-Alfred Gedowski (qv.), in his closing statement: To decide in favor of one ideological worldview, one must also know the other.

  Gerhard Dunker, b. 1929, physics student, verh. Dec. 24, 1951; disappeared . . .

  The author of these thoughtful missives may have been circumspect, mailing the letters with different postmarks from Stralsund, Rostock, Schwerin, Malchin, Neubrandenburg; he gave himself away with his selection. He was apparently indifferent to the fact that Peter Wulff had been accused of having, in the years 1946 to 1948, cheated the state (which didn’t exist before 1949) out of a total of 8,643 marks of income tax, business tax, and sales tax, and whereas he was found in May 1950 to have long refused to pay the 8,500-mark fine as per a settlement arrangement with the Gneez tax office, he was sentenced in July as per §396 of the tax code to a seven-thousand mark fine and three months in jail—Wulff belonged in his annals. Nor did the author seem to care about economic policies, e.g., that farmer Utpathel, in Old Demwies, went to jail for two years over failing to deliver his quotas of meat, milk, wool, and oilseeds; this despite pleading his age of seventy-three years, the poor quality of the seeds supplied by the state, the loss of his entire herd to the Red Army in 1945, and the cattle plague of 1947; the local court in Gneez conceded these “objective difficulties” with the caveat that, as a progressive farmer, he should have mortgaged his business and procured cattle on credit to fulfill his obligations to the state and the people; for Destructive Activity Against Large-Sized Farm (104 acres), confiscation of property; for Economic Criminality per Ec.Pen.Reg. §1 Par. 1 Subpar. 1, two (2) years in prison. Z. Now Georg Utpathel’s farm sat uncultivated, abandoned to cannibalization by the neighbors—apparently a bagatelle for someone more interested in legal proceedings against high-school students, someone who deemed only purely political, ideological penalties worth communicating; that’s how they’ll catch him, and his copyists too: Jakob said, and he took Cresspahl’s daughter’s notes away, supposedly to discuss them with his friend Peter Zahn. Her pages were thus kept safe with an unknown third party in the railroad union headquarters in Gneez, who would send Cresspahl’s daughter her property after Jakob’s death, in an envelope with a Dutch postmark.

  In the meantime, the nameless court reporter (who never used a mailbox in Gneez) kept his involuntary subscribers up to date on the treatment of hotel and tavern owners on the Mecklenburg Baltic coast taking place under the codename Operation Rosa—just for variety. Maybe he was trying to avoid monotony, and that was why he also slipped into the string of personal stories this comment from the Soviet News Agency, TASS, about the death penalty: It bears a profoundly humanistic character, in that . . .Then he returned to his focus on high schoolers, telling us about Burly Sieboldt’s transfer from Neubrandenburg penitentiary to an unknown location, and his preoccupation with university students in Mecklenburg, as if he was planning to apply for admission: in Rostock, the State Secur
ity Service, the Stasi, had pocketed the “People’s House” across from the university, for instance, and built cells in the basement and on two floors, and the interrogators threatened to apply Hitler’s infamous Sippenhaft—punishing the prisoner’s whole family—and indulged in beating suspects when the mood struck. For instance. Or, again, he’d direct his attention to the future that Mecklenburg’s university students faced, explaining to his recipients the origin of the name of “Bützow-Dreibergen” prison—from the three hills (Drei Bergen) on the southwest corner of Bützow Lake, whose shores the facility was meant to be built on; he told us about the first head of the facility after 1945: the journeyman locksmith Harry Frank from Bützow, who passed himself off as a privy councilor until he had to hang himself in a cell in June 1949; told us about the goon squads named after Volkspolizei Lieutenant Oskar Böttcher that rampaged through the overcrowded prison. This information reached us in an objective, dispassionate tone; only once did the compiler give way to anger, ending one report with an appeal: Mecklenburgers! All we’re known for now are the turnips our political prisoners get as feed—“Mecklenburg pineapples.” Is that what we want?

  After the Christmas—the winter—break, the following students were arrested in Gneez and around Jerichow: Gantlik, Dühr, Cresspahl; evading capture: Alfred Uplegger, then in 10-A-II. The men in their leather coats arrived at his farm just when he was busy chopping wood with a long-handled ax. Hows the hare supposed to prove hes not a fox: he deliberated, and hit back. With assault and battery against the state, he had suddenly committed a real crime, he could see that on his own; he took to his heels for West Berlin. One student had been in jail since the start of vacation: Lockenvitz.

  On January 3, 1952, Jakob paid a call to the Volkspolizei district headquarters in Gneez to ask the whereabouts of Cresspahl’s daughter; he could afford to speak calmly since he was noted in their files as a violent man. Since even a man in a blue uniform doesn’t especially like meeting such a character when he’s angry, for instance on a dark night on a lonely path between garden plots, the people at headquarters gave him a reasonable response: they would’ve clued him in a long time ago if they knew anything; you know your Johnny, Jakob! Jakob took a leave from work and settled in for a long wait in the lobby of the villa in the Composer’s Quarter where the local State Security sorted out short-term deliveries in the basements until they were ready to be transferred to Hans-and-Sophie-Scholl Street, Schwerin. Two of our gentlemen promptly opened the door for him, meticulously went over his documents with him—union ID, Free German Youth ID, police ID, Society for German-Soviet Friendship ID, social security ID, German Reich Railway ID—and then he could begin. Rueful and sympathetic of mien, they advised him to go by Volkspolizei district HQ, the agency responsible for Missing Person cases; in this building, the name Cresspahl was unknown even by hearsay. – That’s what we keep telling you, Mr. Abs!

  The door to the waiting room was ajar, and Cresspahl’s daughter could hear Jakob clearly until he left, disgruntled, a citizen who’d come to look into something and found his own personal credentials examined instead. Student Cresspahl was standing on the hardwood floor for her second day, three hours at a time, strictly ordered not to move. The interrogators wished the suspect to keep her gaze fixed straight ahead on a nail driven into the wall four inches above average eye level, on which, in a gilded frame, hung a colorized photograph of Marshal Stalin. Unprompted speaking was frowned upon in this building; speaking when requested to do so by the gentlemen was recommended in the strongest possible terms. The whole time Jakob was standing in the lobby, it was hard for Prisoner Cresspahl to breathe, due to the gloved paw being held over her mouth. When the front door closed behind Jakob with a sighing, satisfied smack, it started again: Raise your head! Arms out! Palms level! Writing exercises were scheduled for the end of each three-hour shift: repeating her life story, followed by discussions of any variations from the version written the day before. Jakob’s appearance had given the interrogation personnel a new weapon. How to respond to the question of whether high-school student Cresspahl was involved in a sexual relationship with this railwayman? This was followed by more stationary gymnastics, a good fit with the suspect’s annoyance at this idiot Gesine Cresspahl, who, on a dim Wednesday morning in January, had boarded the milk train to Gneez and sat down in a compartment by herself, making it possible for her to be loaded with hardly any fuss into the back seat of an EMW at Wehrlich station. And now for a short appraisal

  of the criminal activities

  of the enemies

  of Socialism;

  we’ve even convicted the second-in-command of Czechoslovakia, you know, that Rudolf Slánský; now, if you don’t mind, Young Friend Cresspahl! Raise your head! Arms out!

  She got herself just one slap in the face, toward the end of the ten-day inquiry—she’d fainted. On the night of January 12, when she came back to Cresspahl’s house, she got a hug from Jakob as if he knew what he was doing, as if he’d made a habit of that with her.

  That was a Saturday. The next day, at lunchtime, Anita came from church to see us—another first. We both started talking at the same time: Hey, I’ve got something to tell you! (Just between you and me.)

  Guard duty in the villa that had once been Dr. Grimm’s had been so carefully arranged that neither of them had had any idea that the other was housed on the other side of the wall, being fed bowls of Mecklenburg pineapple, sleeping under filthy blankets and the smell of many different sweats. They agreed about who they were afraid they owed this stay and treatment to—the interrogations had primarily poked around the origins, statements, and proclivities of “our handsome young man,” Lockenvitz. We were offended, our sense of manly toughness disappointed. We appreciated that he might want to buy time on the backs and palms of three unwitting girls; still, disappointing. Until Jakob played Solomon for us and said: Heaven protect him from such complaining women! Did we think we’d ever get a husband at this rate? Just think about what they’d have to do to someone before he’d let a girl get hurt!

  Anita liked it at my father’s house. There was Cresspahl, who squared his shoulders for her when he said hello and looked her in the eyes as he thanked her for coming over. There was an ol woman who said grace before the meal. There was a young man who pulled out a chair for her, served her food, waited on her with talk and stories, and you could get a straight answer out of him too.

  We recognized our third co-conspirator in a gym class where we were combined with 11-A-II. Annette Dühr was walking stiffly—she’d probably had to stand with straightened knees longer. She’d been seen leaving something at Lockenvitz’s apartment door; they hadn’t believed her as much as they did us. The glass face of her watch had been broken. She had blue welts on her back, from the beatings. She was missing a tooth. She avoided our eyes, pleadingly; she didn’t want to be part of a group like this.

  One girl felt left out: Lise had been hidden in Maass the bookbinder’s attic as soon as two 12-A-II students went missing. Mrs. Maass would have taken her out to the Countess Woods in the night, to a waiting car, the moment the Stasi seemed to be coming for her, and driven her to safety in West Berlin; all for the cat, for the birds, for nothing. Like she had nothing to offer, this useless Lise Wollenberg.

  By that time nobody would say a word to or take a slice of bread from Gabriel. His own school class pressuring him, the Dühr family imploring him to get the Central School-Group Authority to intervene to help the missing girl, he had declared: such requests were signs of a regrettable lack of confidence in the Socialist state. – Our security forces know what they’re doing—no more than what’s necessary. You don’t ask questions. You help them!

  Maybe Manfras was insulted by the indifference the girls had shown him since the summer of 1951; we would strike a yearning pose and sing right to his face, until he inevitably blushed, the current hit: Don’t look at me that waaaaay / you know I can never saaaay / (no to you).

  Someone else came from C
ottbus, with medicine: Pius, ordered to Gneez to give a statement. He brought Temples of Golden Joy and a rebuke: we had never actually seen a denunciation against us in Lockenvitz’s hand, or with his signature. The investigators had proceeded on the assumption that the perpetrator must have roped in accomplices. And who would willingly type up what a young man asked them to? Girls, that’s who. – And you of all people, Gesine! He took special care to protect you!

  (I deserved that. After Easter vacation of 1951, henceforth to be referred to as spring vacation, Dieter Lockenvitz left the Pagenkopf & Co. work collective. Just stopped coming, with no explanation. Asked in class whether there’d been a fight, he said he was in love with Gesine Cresspahl, he couldn’t stand the hours spent watching the favors enjoyed by his rival, Pius. Since then Pius and I had tapped our fingers to our foreheads in public, calling him crazy, but we let him have his way. He’d worked it out so that no one could attest to any dealings between Student Cresspahl and him—or a single one of his mistakes—in more than eight months.)

  Lockenvitz’s trial was held on the morning of May 15, 1952, in the district court; though the transcript was to state that it was a public trial, no public was present in the courtroom. Students Gantlik and Cresspahl had made provisions by committing the criminal act of successful bribery of court employee Nomenscio Sednondico; this N. S. alerted class 12-A-II via Elise Bock so punctually that a riotous assembly of young citizens in proud blue shirts had gathered in the courthouse even before the start of the proceedings; shouts were heard: Friendship prevails, friendship prevails! and: We are the defendant’s school class! Among the importunate throng was Colleague B. Selbich, who’d had to leave school with her subjects to smother their open rebellion as much as possible; the fact is, we owed it to her officious cowardice that we were able to see him one last time—former high-school student Lockenvitz.