by Uwe Johnson
The Stasi had visibly done to him what his newssheets accused them of. They could have hidden some of it behind a pair of glasses replacing the ones they’d broken, if they hadn’t been so cheap. As it was, he was brought in with his face bare, seemingly blind, stumbling; he slumped in the dock, hanging onto the chair as if even this was beyond his strength. He held his head in a listening pose; he avoided looking at us. Since his upper front teeth were elsewhere, he had trouble articulating certain syllables.
Witness statement from MANFRAS: The defendant’s work in the ZGSL was, in practical terms, sabotage.
(Whatever work there was to do in the Free German Youth organization, Lockenvitz had done it; Gabriel’s role was to give the annual addresses, his overview appraisals of the state of the world. Now he accused himself of lacking the vigilance that Great Comrade Stalin always . . .)
Witness statement from WESTPHAL: Dieter Lockenvitz assisted in the Culture League’s library starting in 1948, organizing, cataloging, and placing orders for the collection; he is familiar with the premises. How could I suspect him of leaving a window open so he could climb in at night and use the typewriter?
Witness statement from LOCKENVITZ (MRS.): My son is a secretive child. He can’t have gotten that from me or his father.
Witness statement from SELBICH: Missing. (Afternoon walks in the Rose Garden, Gneez.)
The prosecutor, during his training for the People’s Court, must have skipped his German classes. Wild grammatical flailing. Somersaulting voice while mispronouncing the foreign words.
The defendant’s attempt to obtain a diploma underhandedly. (His Abitur would have been the kind you see once a decade [except for chemistry]. He was meant for an era when people were rewarded according to their abilities.)
The defendant’s monstrous ambition (am-BITZ-ee-own) to make public the judgments of the court kept under seal by the criminal chambers of the sovereign republic in the interests of the state! Collection of Subversive Information.
Terrorism. (Since he’d also sent his correspondence to the district court judges in New Mecklenburg, to affect and intimidate them if possible.)
Motion to have the defendant’s mother in the courtroom arrested, for suspected complicity. (Gerda Lockenvitz, b. 1909, garden worker; sentenced to 2 yrs. Z. for Neglect of Child-Rearing Obligations and Active Collaboration.)
The implement used in committing the crime—one (1) bicycle, Swedish (foreign!) manufacture—is hereby confiscated for the use of the state.
(No comment whatsoever was made about how a child not even originally from the country could have gained access to secret files and records of closed trials. The detailed information in the reports about June 18 and July 20, 1950, and December 6, 1951, were just asking for a cross-examination. Yet the court acted as if no one not sitting on the bench knew a thing about the details of Lockenvitz’s one-sided correspondence; perhaps this meant that he was still trying to protect his sources.)
Question: Do you admit that you are an enemy of the first workers’ and peasants’ state to exist on German soil?
Answer: I admit to an unambiguous German and Anglo-Saxon genitive. I admit to proclaiming the law in the public square in Germany.
Fifteen years in prison. And since the Soviets had decided not to take an interest in this lone-wolf criminal, he was spared a trip on the Blue Express to Moscow—a coupled-on prison car disguised as a vehicle of the German mail service. He also forfeited the privilege of learning to mine coal in Vorkuta or cut trees in Taischet. He also missed the Soviet amnesty of 1954, which annulled the verdicts of military tribunals. Since he’d been convicted by a German court, he served two-thirds of his sentence.
In September, the interrupted correspondence resumed:
Gerhard Dunker, b. 1929, physics student, verh. Dec. 24, 1951; sentenced by Güstrow district court on June 17 1952 to eight years Z . . .
In the beginning, 12-A-II knew where Lockenvitz had been taken: to Bützow. Two students in that class were allowed to choose a job for him, since he’d also told them which companies placed orders for convict labor:
People-Owned Business Rostock Shipping Combine,
P.O.B. Güstrow Garment Works,
P.O.B. Cadastral Unit, Schwerin,
P.O.B. (Combine) WiBa Wittenberg Basketwork Manufacture,
P.O.B. High-Voltage Installations, Rostock,
Wiehr & Schacht, Bützow;
they had some idea of his daily menu and were able to calculate from his reports an hourly wage of ninety-four cents, which left him at the end of the month, after the deductions for tax and social security and imprisonment costs, with fifteen marks, just enough for two pounds of butter and four jars of jam; they knew the maximum allowable contents of the packages they were sometimes permitted to send him as a reward for good conduct:
500 grams of fat,
250 g cheese,
250 g bacon,
500 g sausage,
500 g sugar,
and, up to the maximum total package weight of 3 kg: fruit,
onions, and store-bought cookies in their original packaging; Anita could bring herself to send such a package only once, and it was returned; the sender was required to be living in Lockenvitz’s jurisdiction and be related to him.
Thanks to his spywork, we were able to picture him with a one-inch crew cut, in hand-me-down Volkspolizei overalls, saluting the constable by doffing his cap and averting his gaze to six feet in front of and three feet behind this dignitary as he strode past, assuming a military posture, marching in formation, sleeping (never alone) next to a shit bucket. We left him alone.
Were we expecting his final statement to include an apology for our ten-day detention and questioning, or what? If Pius was to be believed, Lockenvitz probably thought no one had been arrested but him. Jakob said: Thass somethin you gotta learn: bein stuck in the slammer.
Starting in the summer of 1952, after those responsible for administering East German justice had disciplined Lockenvitz, they began to have their doubts about whether the secret arrest and incommunicado imprisonment of fellow citizens were sufficiently daunting to those remaining on the outside thus far. Maybe it was this high-school student’s publicity campaign that helped inspire the criminal courts to start publishing their verdicts in the provincial newspapers. Let people read the deterrents in black and white.
Or was it simply disturbing to watch an eighteen-year-old boy sacrifice his future—from which he had every right to expect admission to university and, with luck, a profession of his choice—for the truth, whatever kind of truth, a proven fact or not? Remembering Lockenvitz sets our thoughts aflutter slightly. Birds starting up in the dark.
We got word from Gneez that his mother had returned there as soon as she’d served her two years. She tried to wait in Gneez for her son; however, the cathedral preacher whom Anita had gone all the way to Jerichow to avoid took the trouble to thunder down from the pulpit against her, using words that the Bible offers for the casting out of the undeserving. They say she’s waiting in Bavaria somewhere.
Starting in 1962 we could have made inquiries about Lockenvitz. But his schoolmate Cresspahl decided she’d rather wait and see whether Anita would take back or tone down her threat from 1952: If I ever run into him in the subway and he offers me a seat, I’ll stay standing!
The fact is, we sold Lockenvitz down the river. To give Anita the last word: We are guilty before him.
August 13, 1968 Tuesday
The New York Times on her front page shows us how an East German delegation in Karlovy Vary is greeted by a Czechoslovakian one: without Russian-style embraces and kisses. The onlookers cheered for Alexander Dubček; they bestowed a silence on Comrade Ulbricht, and later the two crews ate at separate tables. In her three-column history of the East German custodian’s life, the World’s Chronicler mentions a 1957 exchange of words between “Walter Ernst Karl” Ulbricht and one Comrade Gerhard Ziller. The former’s subordinate: While we were in concentration camps, you were making s
peeches in Russia; you have always been safe. The latter’s superior: I will never forget what you’ve said here; we’ll discuss the matter later. Subordinate: (goes home and shoots himself). We wrote a tall question mark in the margin next to this story, since we want to ask someone for information to assuage our doubts—until memory, once again present, reports for duty at the place where said person now finds himself.
(Yesterday’s telegram from Helsinki: UNABLE TO WRITE – ERITZION.)
Employee Cresspahl has now promised her daughter that she can do whatever she wants through next Tuesday; Marie has hesitantly renounced the military swimming drills in her summer camp. Yesterday they went to Chicago; because the flight takes more than an hour. (Because unfamiliar men keep calling the Cresspahl telephone in New York acting familiar, with urgent questions to ask about a certain Missing Person; also because one has neglected to report that person’s possible demise.) Marie liked that the passengers on this airborne commuter line simply take a number and pay the stewardess on board, who is equipped with a money pouch at her belly like a train conductor. In Chicago we took the rattling trains on the Loop downtown. We looked for the hotel where we stayed in 1962, like a princess and infanta; torn down. In Marina City’s round towers on the Chicago River, we toured a model apartment as if we were planning to move in; there was a gentleman in the elevator in an Italian jacket, winking confidentially. Marie thought that’s how it goes when a lady gets a proposition; he was definitely from a different society. And, so that the telephone behind the locked door of the Cresspahl apartment can spend the day ringing into the empty air, today is perfect for an excursion out to Rockaway Peninsula in the Atlantic, taking more than an hour to get to by subway—the only stretch where you have to pay a second token.
Here we have a child about to take a trip in seven days that she is not looking forward to—the country is too foreign; she wishes she could talk it over with someone but he is unreachable at the moment on the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic. So it’s time to give her something, a foretaste, long saved up to be used in case of emergency. Does Marie know that Jakob, in the fall of 1955, wrote a letter from Olmütz, Olomouc, where he was learning the operational techniques of dispatching at the hl. n., located at railway kilometer 253 from Prague?
In Brooklyn the train to the beaches of Rockaway is crowded already. All of the Negroes among the passengers are going farther than Forty-Fourth Street; the white-sand beach, to Sixtieth Street, is indeed covered with none but the pink-skinned, lying in pairs on their blankets. The men are holding their hands still on the girls’ backs; it looks quite unimaginative. On the subway, a young black man has nudged his napping girlfriend in the ribs, tipping her head onto his shoulder; while she puts on a show of comfortably snuggling up to him, he gives himself compensation for his goodness by feeling her upper thigh.
– Jakob used to work where we’re going? Will we go see it?
We’ll go see it, in ten days, if that’s okay with her. We’ll look for a family, Feliks and Tonya, with two daughters who’ll have left home by now—they’ll know who we are when we say Jakob’s name. Jakob lived en famille there; he told the story of how the days began: in the morning there was only a big blue-black window in watercolor, with a pot-bellied lamp in front, on a peaceful white tablecloth, trying to put a plump dent in the darkness outside. At that table, with the guest from Mecklenburg, was the gentleman of the house, still drowsy but acquainted with the work of the day and certain to master it. For now he waits with concealed amusement to see which of his daughters will be first. On this morning of Jakob’s letter, it was the younger, just seven years old, who fetched plates and silverware for five from the cupboards and set the table, all with a tense, worried look about her, perhaps meant to express: Yes, what would you do without me! Then the mother sits down with her tea and coffee pots, four people are already eating when the elder daughter comes to the table, sluggishly half-asleep but in a rush, handed a piece of bread while she’s standing, eating while she walks, everyone’s sympathetic awareness that she has a quiz in school today guarding her back, and not just any quiz: Russian. By now the wind was going at the darkness of the sky with a grater, making long pale slashes start to appear. These people liked to talk. About the farmer expostulating to his cackling chicken: Now they wouldn getcha for those eighteen heller a yours! (that was the price of an egg, approximately: eighteen heller, eighteen cents). Or: Lookit how that redbreast’s puffing up his feathers on the wall, it must be zero degrees outside. Hope the jay comes. Nest robbers have it hard too; a whole swarm of blackbirds just flew at him. Blackbirds? That’s right, “black-birds.” By now the left, northeast half of the sky is almost entirely cleared, the right half dissolved into streaks, so they were clouds; now the light comes leaping in. North wind. Wear your hat today, it’ll be cold. Then they all said Bye, or Adieu, and everyone’s day began at last; Jakob went to the train station.
– Jakob couldn’t speak Czech!
If Jakob wanted to get along with the people from the Czech railroad he would have to spare them his Mecklenburg Russian. What Jakob quoted in his letter: Protože nádraži je velmi daleko. (Because the station’s far away.)
Ne, jejich manželky jsou Češky. (No, careful! Their wives are Czech.) Ještě dělám chyby. (I still make mistakes.)
– The things you can do, Gesine.
But there was a boy standing at the window for Jakob every morning, four years old, waiting for his friend:
– I see you.
– So do I.
– Well, see you later.
– Will do.
And he knew his way around station talk, among Czechs:
– I can beat you, doesn’t matter you’re tall!
– Go ahead.
– Cause I’m short, I can run fast.
Feliks: black goatee above a perpetually white shirt collar; bald circle surrounded by hair. Tonya: A kind look from behind awkward glasses, despite her worries; hair in a bun.
What surprised them both: that such a young man, just twenty-seven, was so good at living alone! She ironed his shirts.
North Moravia district, Marie. On the Morava. I’m sure you’ll be getting to that in school fore long: the Punctation of Olmütz. Around seventy thousand people. An archbishopric. A St. Wenceslaus Cathedral. The biggest pipe organ in Moravia in the St. Maurice Church. Church of the Virgin Mary Visitation on Holy Hill! The Olomouc language island!
– That sounds like lots of lonely walks.
Feliks the railroad man took his colleague Jakob along when he went out for a beer. The family took him to Prague, three hours by express train, and led him from the corner of Kaprova and Maislova ulice to Dušni ulice, Mikulášska, Celetná ulice, to the Old Town Hall, the Fishmarket, the Kinský Palace, the Karolinum, the Assicurazioni Generali building, the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute building, to Bílkova ulice, to Dlouhá třída: so that he could take pictures there, as a good friend in West Germany had asked him to. Since she was unable to visit Czechoslovakia herself at the moment. Since then she’d had a standing invitation. That night they went back to Olomouc and found a wrecked apartment.
– Some people must’ve taken a trip there from Riverside Drive, New York, and broken in!
They’d forgotten about the cat and not left the basement window or back door open for her to slip out of. The cat, however, knew as one of her work obligations that she must relieve herself only outdoors; she felt a pressure in her body, and in her distress she jumped from china cabinet to sewing machine, from the egg basket into the molasses barrel. How sheepish she was when they came back, her human employees. How cruel she thought it was for them to punish her with a laugh and a warm bath. She had problems enough with the son, the affectionate blond boy, useless for hunting birds and mice, too lazy. To be unmasked like that, before the younger generation!
Not at all like dogs: Jakob wrote. With them, scratching is more of a symbolic act. But cats want to bury what sticks unpleasantly in their noses.
You need to fence off a flower garden from a cat—and try finding wire here!
– And so Gesine sent some chicken wire from West Germany.
To thank them for the information, she did. By that time Tonya and Feliks trusted the colleague from Mecklenburg, despite his having been raised to follow Luther and being therefore destined for Hell; they told Archbishop Josef Beran about him. On June 7, 1948, Prime Minister Gottwald signed the new constitution because the president for life, Eduard Beneš, had refused, and he asked the archbishop to accompany him in a thanksgiving service. A year later, though, the archbishop of Prague was prevented from preaching, in August he was robbed of his rights and his ability to leave the house, and in March 1951 he was banned from Prague. As for the titular bishop of Olomouc, on December 2, 1950, he was put away for twenty-five years. In Communism there are governments where you never know.
And to make sure that our colleague Jakob returned to his homeland knowing all about Olomouc, the railway workers entrusted him with the story that the city was most recently famous for. This was the perfume-box plot, and no one was supposed to know about it. The bombs came to Prague in wooden boxes marked “Perfume,” one meant for the leader of President Beneš’s National Socialist Party, Peter Zenkl, one for the Minister of Justice, Prokop Drtina, and one for Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk. The general secretary of the Communists announced in a public meeting that Peter Zenkl’s people themselves had sent them. Now there was a carpenter near Olomouc, named Jan Kopka, concerned by the party’s manhunt since he’d made the boxes himself and knew their intended use too. He went to confess, was accused of lying by the chief of the party police, and had to sign a statement saying so. There were still democrats in the Ministry of Justice and they rearrested Kopka, searched his carpentry shop, and found machine guns, hand grenades, ammunition. Kopka, as a Communist, wanted to share and share alike and named a fellow comrade, a railwayman named Opluštil; a much bigger arsenal was found at his home, which he must have gotten from the Olomouc Party Secretariat, and when Opluštil seemed reluctant to hide the guns, he was warned: you could be crushed between two cars, or fall off a train, without anybody ever knowing how it happened. The person telling him this, Communist Deputy J. Juri-Sosnar, had made the perfume-box bombs himself and was caught because they had the same serial number as explosives from the Olomouc depot, and now who’d been the one to tell him to do it? One Alexej Čepička. Klement Gottwald’s son-in-law. So the case never came to trial, and you’ll already have heard about the situation with the archbishop, Jakob. And now who jumped out of a third-story window the following February? Former Minister of Justice Drtina. And for what did he spend the next five years and three months in prison when he didn’t die? For false accusations of attempted assassination. That’s what we’re known for here in Olomouc, Jakob.