Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  – What? You’re kidding me, Gesine.

  – There was a Law for the Further Democratization of the Structure and Function of Government Institutions in the States of the GDR—July 23, 1952. You were only allowed to say “Mecklenburg” in a linguistic or anthropological sense. Otherwise it was now three regions: Rostock, Schwerin, and New Brandenburg; the state parliament and state government were transferred there. They picked up a piece of West Prignitz in the south, and Uckermark in the east. But since the law abolishing the states referred to the states, the regional legislatures kept electing representatives to the state senates until 1958, who had to keep showing up and declaring that they had no objections to the law of summer 1952.

  – Are you sad about the end of the Blue, Yellow, and Red?

  – I miss the blue, because Rostock’s golden griffin looked so good against it. I miss the red and gold, for Schwerin. The red of the tongue in the black buffalo head for the Wendish lands. Another piece of one’s origins wiped out.

  – And you left Mecklenburg because the workers and peasants later rose up against the government of the workers and peasants.

  – These stirring words, Marie!

  – That’s what they teach us in school.

  – American schools tell you that as the first and most important thing to know about Socialism so that you’ll ignore the Negro uprisings from Watts to Newark!

  – Gesine, you said not till October.

  – Sowwy. The Gesine Cresspahl of back then didn’t know a single worker well.

  – Excuse me, there was one.

  – Two, actually; because of one mistake. In May 1953, Lib. Arts Stud. Cresspahl was actually short of money, and had forgotten to get a free train ticket from Jakob, and wanted to discuss something with Anita. To save some money she took the train just to Schkeuditz and then stood on the autobahn cloverleaf between Leipzig and Halle, book bag under her left arm, right arm raised and waving. That lasted one and a half hours. Most of the drivers in the West German cars flicked their brights, which meant “Sorry!” because picking up passengers in the transit zone could get them in trouble with the People’s Police. Round flashes of lightning, brighter than the morning sun. The people who eventually did stop for a demoralized undergraduate were two beefy guys moving furniture from Saxon Vogtland for some POB; they were pleased with the company and kept their guest quiet by repeatedly trading stories featuring ladies waiting at night by the side of the road prepared to remunerate their free ride in various positions on the bench behind the driver, at which point he almost steered the unwieldy truck into a ditch from sheer anticipation. On Frankfurter Allee in Berlin, which had been rebuilt in honor of Great Comrade Stalin, they turned on the girl they had, until she forked over twenty marks, more than the train would’ve cost. Good-natured threats of being prepared to get rough.

  – How sleazy.

  – Only fair, if you ask me: a lesson on the community of interests between workers in the transportation industries and students between Halle and Leipzig. It’s true that that was the very year when a compass, representing “technical intelligentsia,” was added to the hammer and ring of grain on the East German national emblem; that wouldn’t have stopped the two Vogtland guys from being just as ready to kidnap and extort money out of an engineering student. Anyway, we were—

  – “We”?

  – Anita and her Mecklenburg friend were constantly amazed at what the workers in East Germany put up with: changes to the collective labor contract in January 1953, namely the addition of “Socialist content,” which meant raising the work norms, which to wage earners meant a slow decline in the amount of food they could buy for their money. The custodian wanted to take back the higher wages he’d decreed the previous summer; excess purchasing power gave him a hard time, since he’d opposed things like the primacy of consumer-goods industries on “scientific” grounds and now had too few shoes and pots to put on the market; because the party is not a human being, the party is always right.

  – You knew Eckart Pingel’s father in Gneez.

  – Ol’ Pingel would have greeted Undergraduate Cresspahl with a quick wink, meaning the cheerful, amused question: So, Gesine, you here too? He’d have taken his cap off before shaking hands and starting a conversation. If I’d asked him about the engineering work quotas courtesy of the Soviet Union, he’d have sidestepped the question as overly intrusive. Because around then, when Eckart Pingel had practically run away from school (“because he told the truth”), his father saw anyone allowed to go to college in the New State as one of its minions—an ally of the authorities.

  – You knew farmers.

  – Not many. After the war, the nobility’s estates near Jerichow were given away to settlers (except for the von Plessens’, to the south, and a much smaller one, formerly the Kleineschultes’, on the Baltic; the Red Army kept those two to handle their own supply of meat, flour, butter). (And a third one, the Upper Bülows’, taken over in one piece as a people-owned farm under contract with the Wismar city hospitals.) Not many of the people who’d taken over five- to ten-acre plots of land in 1946 were farmworkers from the old days—who understood the business and knew better than to try to make it with less than twenty-five. There was one single village with only peasant farmers, since the fourteenth century. Traffic sprang up there in the black-market days, so the Cresspahl house got some potatoes for the cellar: but it was Jakob who took care of that until 1950, by which time Cresspahl had relearned how to go for walks around the countryside. The Cresspahl child had been going to school in the city of Gneez since 1944, and recently even farther afield. She didn’t know any farmers. She’d taken a detour on her bike at Dr. Kliefoth’s request, once, through Pötenitz and Old Demwies; she reported back on empty farms abandoned by their settlers when the custodian, after only six years, tried to take his gift back by converting the farms into Agricultural Production Cooperatives. (Now we know!) She’d heard unwatered, unmilked cows bellowing in pain; she was cured of the superstition that no Mecklenburg farmer would ever leave a head of cattle without food and supervision for a single night. Didn’t know any farmers.

  – Georg Utpathel.

  – He ended up in the usual way, but at least he’d been in jail a long time; he could make himself feel better, tell himself he’d lost his farm to the law. Wait, I knew one farmer!

  – Johnny Schlegel.

  – He was one of the exceptions. An educated man, with opinions about how they’d run agricultural communes in the Weimar era. According to one of these opinions, a proletarian working the fields, even if granted (bribed with) a cottage and garden plot and grain allowance, would never consider his labor his own—it only went to maintain and increase the landowner’s or leaseholder’s property. Under the scourge of Hitler’s and Darré’s agricultural laws, Schlegel had to work his three hundred acres in the old feudal way; now that they’d lost their war, at home and abroad, he’d handed out his inheritance in ninths to refugees from the lost eastern territories, as long as they were farmers or willing to learn to be. For each of these gifts, nominally loans, he’d entered an invented amount of money in his farm’s books and at the land registry; he operated an agricultural commune on his own terms under the protection of his friends in the Red Army. Even in 1951, an inspector from a people-owned land purchasing and incorporation business wouldn’t scare him off the road. Then came the East German government’s scientific recognition that a Socialist agriculture meant large-scale farms; then came their shock that in 1952 some people on the Baltic near Jerichow had long since been working in a cooperative advanced far past Socialist Type III, in which only the collective use of the land, draft animals, vehicles, and tools was supposed to have been socialistically introduced. At Johnny’s farm, household tasks were done in common by all the members too—the food cooked in one kitchen, meals eaten at one table. The fictitious sums of money had now turned into the kind with which Mrs. von Alvensleben could be bought out for her share when her children asked
her to join them abroad to fulfill a grandmother’s duties; that money came right back when Mrs. Sünderhauf brought her brother over from the West, where he’d had to work underground, mining in the Ruhr. Assessed as farmers with midsized holdings, the members of Johnny’s project were required to deliver quotas several times higher than what was due from the settlers and small landholders: eight double centners of wheat per hectare instead of two, seventy-five of potatoes instead of twenty-five, fifty-nine of meat instead of thirty-eight; and still, as late as the end of 1952, they were in good enough shape that Johnny could reply to a worried visitor: like this!

  – Gesine! How can you bend your elbow and make a fist in an American airplane?!

  – This is an international flight. Io sono di Ierico.

  – You gave the old man across the aisle such a start! He knows what that gesture means.

  – Vi forstår desværre ikke amerikansk, kære frøken.

  – And now you’ll say something like: Envy is an unpleasant trait even in a Socialist administration? Socialist rulers have human feelings, too?

  – How can you even think such a thing! No, they longed to learn what held Johnny’s world together/in its innermost core; the quota experts carried out an in-depth investigation. The 1952 harvest had been so-so, the Schlegel collective had fallen behind on milk; the collection officers magnanimously and per regulations gave him permission to deliver pork instead, and if that meant he was short of his pork quota, he could deliver that in beef instead.

  – That means he’d get even less milk in his buckets!

  – No, he was allowed to keep his pledged cow in his own stall—he just had to pay for it.

  – For his own cow?

  – At quadruple the price. If he’d actually handed it over for his quota, only the 1941 fixed price would have been credited to him.

  – I’d make mistakes in my books, too, with all these twists and turns.

  – Johnny’s books were perfectly exact and complete. Alas for him. Now the tax inspectors could decode from regular “withdrawals” that Johnny, in fall 1947, had gotten from the von Maltzahns a wedge of land that had been bothering him for fifteen years—a few acres—and he had paid the money for it into their foreign account in Schleswig-Holstein via West Berlin. Private foreign-currency transactions.

  – Arrest?

  – In February 1953.

  – Ah-hah! said the judge. Very bad.

  – Excellent: thought the judge. And Otto Sünderhauf had exchanged the money for his share in Frankfurt, where he only had to put down twenty-three Western marks to get one hundred Eastern ones. The criminal exchange rate of the imperialists.

  – Supply and demand.

  – And thus the defendants were found guilty of being profoundly arrested in capitalist ways of thinking.

  – That makes two!

  – That made four. After Sünderhauf, Mrs. Bliemeister and Mrs. Lakenmacher were brought in for questioning. It turns out Johnny’s collective followed a different plan than the one they’d handed into the authorities in duplicate, triplicate, and more. In that plan, provision was made for the death of young animals.

  – Gesine!

  – You think it’s only babies who die prematurely? A calf can catch cold and die of pneumonia too.

  – That’s what doctors are for.

  – Out of the five veterinarians in Gneez, three had “made their way West” by that point, Dr. Hauschildt in the lead as always. When Johnny factored into his calculations his own knowledge of veterinary medicine and what expert assistance would have cost, a certain amount of lost head-count was to be expected. And the state—the same state the veterinarians were fleeing—turned this into accusing Johnny of slander. Economic criminality. Incitement to Boycott. And when Johnny, in his closing statement, wanted to know why the court was tearing asunder what the Krasnaya Armiya had sewn together for him: that was breaking the Law for the Protection of Peace.

  – They threw the book at him.

  – Fifteen years in prison. For the other defendants: eight to twelve. Confiscation of property. By April, Johnny’s cooperative had been cleaned out. The members had hightailed it to the refugee camps in West Berlin, with all their children. Inge Schlegel stayed a while longer; she wanted to try to save the house at least, and someone had to take care of Axel Ohr, send him his packages in prison. Now it was clear where Johnny had miscalculated: she needed him there. If a woman alone is trying to keep a large farm in working order, it’s going to have sagging doors and holes in the roof after a month. She’d been left with a single horse: Jakob sin Voss, the sorrel. Once the horse had been shot, she left. That’s a story. . . like the one about little children falling into a rain barrel.

  – Well, I have to learn to be brave. Tell me.

  – Don’t ask, Marie.

  – I’m eleven years old already!

  – You’ll be sorry.

  – It’s on me.

  – Jakob’s sorrel was listed in the books as one midsize workhorse. That requires, per year:

  10 double centners of hay,

  16 d.c. straw,

  20 d.c. turnips,

  18 d.c. grain feed,

  and 30 d.c. green fodder,

  some of which it can forage from the fields on its own. Now if you figure that a centner of oats cost twenty-five marks in 1953 . . .

  – then a horse like that will break Undergraduate Cresspahl’s budget.

  – The spring semester of 1953 ended on May 9; by that Monday I was visiting Inge Schlegel. She held me by the shoulder when Jakob sin Voss was led past us; I followed him into the large fodder-preparation kitchen. The man holding the lead turned around with a goofy grin on his face, like he was inviting me to come watch a show, a surprise. The horse walked cheerfully along, with friendly nods at the guy’s encouraging patter. A few ribs were showing; he was totally healthy. His looks said: you did let me go hungry for a while, you humans, but now you’re taking care of me again, I’m glad we’re back on good terms. When the bolt gun was placed on his forehead, he trustingly closed his eyes; this was a new one from the humans. After his death, knocked onto his side, his legs jerked violently, every which way, and kept beating against the echoing floorboards. It looked like painful agony; from a scientific point of view it was just residual functioning of the nervous system. The sweet-tempered animal Jakob sin Voss had suddenly turned into a disgusting piece of meat wrapped in blond fur; still recognizably him, from the open eyes.

  – Gesine! You didn’t wait outside the door?

  – How could I know that the stranger was a butcher from Gneez! I saw his two assistants with the knife too late.

  – The next time I brag about how old I am, Gesine, just put a stop to it then and there. Give me a slap in the face if you have to.

  – We are now over Salt Lake City, Utah.

  – You’d had enough.

  – I still had to watch Elise Bock’s bedroom furniture being auctioned off in Gneez—it was People’s Property once Elise moved to West Berlin. People crowding and pushing in a narrow, dirty yard outside the open shutters of Elise’s windows; a man in a threadbare suit inside, with the Unity Party emblem on his lapel, holding up photographs for the gathered crowd: a chair, the lamps. The bidders, Alfred Fretwust in the lead, hooted their humorous comments like a bunch of kids, or drunks. That was when my leaving started.

  – Were you legally adult?

  – Under East German law. Cresspahl and Jakob’s mother stayed up a whole night with me, listening. I was scaring an old woman. Cresspahl hoped the child would reconsider. He said something about recuperating and feeling better. “A vacation at Anita’s.”

  – And Jakob?

  – Jakob gave Undergraduate Cresspahl a free ticket to Halle University, not via Stendal but for the route Gneez–Güstrow–Pritzwalk–Berlin. But the child at border control, without complete papers, under suspicion, liable to end up behind bars! He prevented that. And he’d realized that in June the mornings are bright,
the sunlight dances in the woods, the lakes near Krakow and Plau glitter—that was to be her farewell sight. Only when the conductor gave her back her ticket with its brown horizontal stripe and the Reich Railway stamp, like a coworker, did she realize: Jakob had given her a round-trip ticket.

  – Welcome to San Francisco, Gesine!

  And what are the Chinese doing in SF?

  Some of them are standing around glumly in a shooting gallery where you aim a BB gun at moving targets. They see a European tourist and her American child exchange words in a foreign language. The lady walks up, takes a rifle, and in ten shots has won an alarm clock, the grand prize. They clap, unenvious, these spectators. That’s what the Chinese are doing in S.F.

  August 16, 1968 Friday

  Trying to find today’s New York Times in New Orleans is like chercher une aiguille dans une botte de foin; a copy turns up like something exotic in a bodega on Canal Street offering mostly products of the foreign press, and is sold with a ten-cent surcharge—air freight. The only news for us: yesterday there was a fire in New York. At shortly past noon a midsized fire stripped bare the Rockaway Parkway elevated subway platform: exactly where we spent Tuesday with Jakob’s letter from Olomouc, ČSSR. Marie asked for the page with the photo of the site, despite the resulting increase in the weight of our luggage, in preparation for a discussion of coincidence with D. E.; – for when we’re back home.

  Marie can’t get enough of the Chinese of San Francisco—their sympathetic way of watching the yellow- and black- and pink-skinned people dealing with one another on the sidewalks and in the cable cars, making room for people according to fragility and age, in solidarity. Maybe also because they remind Marie of a Sunday walk in New York in July with D. E., where a dark-skinned fellow citizen was lying on a wall along Riverside Park with his eyes closed, a wall with a fifty-foot drop; asleep and trusting the sun. – That’s all we’ve managed in our city!: concludes a shamed and disappointed child.