Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  What with her delight in the boats of Fisherman’s Wharf it’s easy to miss a bus, even a taxi, to the San Francisco Airport; she approved our suggestion that we make the trip triangular. When a young lady in the company of an older one marches past a liveried hotel porter with no luggage except a ticking package, the house is honored to put them up for the night: if we act like we do this every day, like D. E.!: the child cries, looking forward to seeing him again.

  Marie brings up Professor Erichson, who has departed this life in a northeastern part of Europe, once again when she praises her mother for rebooking a plane reservation: the way he’s taught us to do it!: she declares. She carefully observes New Orleans for him, hoping he’s never been there and she’ll be able to tell him that you get out of that airport only in a six-seater limousine whose driver takes his last two passengers, unasked, to a family-run hotel between Canal Street and the Mississippi and drops them off at a narrow staircase with the shout: Folks, I’m bringin you some’un! And again a reception clerk was amazed when we actually copied a passport number into the register!

  As long as we’re irrevocably booked for a return flight to New York tomorrow morning, she’s willing to accept a city on the Mississippi. The river does seem yellow to her, dirty; its harbor ferry is a poor substitute for the one in her city. The balconies in the Vieux Carré, the wrought-iron ornamental grilles outside the inner courtyards with magnolia trees inside, long shiny leaves and pinkish white flowers—she looks upon all of that as a quotation from the Europe looming on Tuesday and not a moment too late; she doesn’t complain but she does mention the heavy hot humidity, the cool musty odor, – like a cemetery: she now finds it, making Mrs. Cresspahl shudder in anticipation of a discussion of coincidence, since now it will be expanded to include the topic of premonitions. What earned the city points for Marie was a big turn-of-the-century hospital, from which emerged dignified dark-complexioned fellow Americans, looking concerned. The newspapers printed on yellow and lavender paper—she likes that just for the variety. The unused areas in the restaurants are dirty, in her view; only the front halves of the grills are shiny, unlike in New York, where the whole surfaces are polished. Some streets near Canal Street are so poor and rundown that Mrs. Cresspahl, too, wonders how a person gets here—surely not by plane. In a luncheonette, Marie liked the cat longingly eyeing her double-decker sandwich.

  On June 9, 1953, the custodian of the East German Republic made a few suggestions to his citizen Gesine Cresspahl, with respect to her possible return into his clutches.

  His party, he said, intended to disclaim one of its virtues of the nonhuman type: infallibility. It had, in fact, committed errors. One consequence of which was that numerous persons had left the Republic. This applies to you, Miss Cresspahl!

  Since the party had gone so far as to reset the scales to zero with Peter Wulff, as promised—“to zero grams!” as it liked to say in its zeal—it planned to go so far as to allow him to reopen the grocery store adjacent to his pub. It intended to supply him with goods to sell, even. And no need to worry, for now, about the taxes and social security deductions not paid since 1951. An end to repressive measures, Mr. Wulff!

  Now as for the others near and dear to you in the Republic, Miss Cresspahl. Ever striving to stay true to our principles, we have converted a cooperative farm on the Baltic near Jerichow to “Devastated” status, so that no receiver would want to touch it with a ten-foot pole, and if Mrs. Sünderhauf, Mr. Leutnant, Mrs. Schurig, Mrs. Winse and all the children—The Englishmin, Epi, Jesus, Hen and Chickee, and the others under eighteen—cared to return to Johnny’s agricultural endeavor they would get their property back along with aid in the form of credit and inventory. How do you like that, Gesine Cresspahl.

  We plan in earnest to send your Georg Utpathel home from custody along with all the other people sentenced to just three years under the Law for the Protection of the People’s Property. We would prefer to keep the ones we’ve convicted of graver crimes, such as Johnny Schlegel, notorious atheist and enemy of the nobility. But maybe not Otto Sünderhauf, let’s talk.

  The last time you paid a visit to Wendisch Burg you were mad at us for having harassed a girl by the name of E. Rehfelde over her Protestant faith and adherence to the Church; we’d persisted until Klaus Niebuhr and his girlfriend Ingrid Babendererde renounced their graduations too and left the country, obviously thinking that this would preserve their equality under the constitution. Well, Rehfelde is to be readmitted. If Students Niebuhr and Babendererde decide to return to Wendisch Burg, they too will be permitted to make up their final exams. What do you say to that?

  And as for you, Lib. Arts Stud. Cresspahl. We made an exception in your case when we let you go to university, but in future this will be our general policy for talented young people from the middle classes. Once we no longer consider that a handicap, Miss Cresspahl, you might even get a scholarship.

  Regarding your father, too, would you mind taking into account the following couple of concessions. The additional food cost we imposed in April will be abolished as of June 15—that’s this Monday. We will also inform Jerichow City Hall that Mr. Heinrich Cresspahl, Brickworks Road, is again entitled to coupons for rationed articles, effective immediately.

  So now tell us what you think, young lady. Just come back—we’ll act as if you’ve just been on vacation. If we have already confiscated any of your belongings, we’ll give them back. Or make restitution. Ration cards, German ID—it’ll all be yours. Please come, Miss Cresspahl, and bring your friend Anita too!

  These were some of the suggestions that the East German custodian’s Socialist Unity Party made to Cresspahl’s daughter in the event of her return.

  You spent the summer months of 1953 in the Grunewald neighborhood of West Berlin, Miss Cresspahl?

  As you already know, apparently.

  In a mansion in Grunewald?

  In a house in ruins from the second floor up.

  Would you care to tell us the name of the street?

  Forgot it.

  The name of your host?

  I don’t recall.

  The circumstances behind your connection to this household?

  You know already. A dog named Rex. Or King. Or Voshd, whatever you want to call him.

  What can a dog born in 1933 have to do with anything twenty years later?

  I saw him again before he died. A stubborn patriarch of a German shepherd, gray-black all over. When he went outside he didn’t seem blind. A hundred and twenty-six in human years.

  And that was why you were in Berlin no later than 1951 to obtain carpentry tools by the criminal conversion of Western currency?

  I was seeing a family friend.

  Friends because you shared the presence of a dog in your family photos? Or because of business relations in 1944, 1947, 1949, and 1951?

  No comment.

  Someone gives you a room and breakfast and a house key and pocket money all because of fond memories of Cresspahl?

  Strange but true.

  We’re supposed to believe that, coming from you?

  Take it or leave it.

  Anita worked for department stores and ad agencies over the holidays, addressing envelopes, one half West pfennig each, until she found people who would offer her one mark per page for translations from Russian. (Let us refrain from discussing those bastards; we will say: they wanted the work done for the Department of Cultural Cooperation at the French Army headquarters, West Berlin. That’ll have to do.) We had a standing arrangement to meet at Nikolassee streetcar station for Wannsee Beach whenever Anita had time. We had to keep our eyes peeled “for the less expensive pastimes”; we were too poor for movies or plays. Again and again, whether we were swimming the Havel from north to south or I was spending the night at Anita’s room in Neukölln on Mrs. Machate’s ironing board, she would be surprised to hear the latest argument her friend Cresspahl had dreamed up to give her a reasonable path back to Jerichow or Martin Luther University. One time i
t was that she’d remembered the news that in April all the Jewish doctors Stalin had accused of a plot against the Soviet Union had been released and fully rehabilitated, professionally and civically. Mightn’t one draw a line from that straight to an eventual rule of law in the East German republic?

  – Tell that to the two who died under torture, Kogan and Etlinger!: Anita said. – Tell it to the Jewish writers who that bloodthirsty killer had shot just last summer!: Anita said.

  Stalin had died on March 6: Cresspahl offered.

  And how did you feel when the East German newsreels in Halle showed the funerals from Moscow and the East German ceremonies with their lowered flags and inconsolable music?

  Cresspahl admitted that the sight had caused in her, too, a creeping nausea.

  So the passing of Stalin, which fills all progressive humankind with deepest sorrow, is an especially heavy loss for the German nation? The Socialist Unity Party will remain forever true to Stalin’s victorious teachings? Forever?

  That was what they’d promised: Anita’s friend admitted.

  And now Anita could have said: See? But she didn’t give advice; she was helpful, she reviewed the vacillating Cresspahl child’s papers and checked them for anything missing, anything invalid. – Technically you’d be safe on a trip to Halle anytime until September 10: she concluded, exhaling deeply—it was practically a sigh. Anita and the freedom of a Christian.

  Lib. Arts Stud. Cresspahl spent June 16 on the Havel; on the 17th, as she was going to check with her own eyes the radio reports of an uprising in the Eastern sector of the city, the streetcar she was on, line 88, was stopped at Lützow Street, where it normally crosses Potsdamer Street and runs to Kreuzberg along the border to the Eastern sector—by West Berlin police who were trying in vain to move the curious off to the south, one by one. (She wasn’t cocky enough to attempt a streetcar ride into East Berlin itself; the station patrols could easily pack her off to Halle on the Saale sooner than she wanted to go.) And so she experienced the uprising only as news, in words and pictures, and as hearsay from students who made it from Halle into the refugee camps in West Berlin:

  Two or three hundred women stood outside Penitentiary II on Stein Street, shouting: Let our husbands out! A column of striking workers from the Buna and Leuna plants who were marching up saw this and stormed the gate, taking the prisoners out of their cells, many of them women and in bad physical shape. The workers cleared out the court building. A female warden waved her pistol around, was beaten up. The Unity Party’s headquarters on Willi Lohmann Street, the district headquarters at Stein Gate, the headquarters on the market square: stormed. Volkspolizei were waiting at the gates of the Red Ox, by the Church Gate—guns drawn, safeties off. The crowd pushes open a side door; is fired on from the roof; disperses. Here there were apparently people wounded. The main post office remained in police hands until morning. At around six p.m., about thirty thousand people are gathered on Hallmarkt. The speakers’ demands: General strike against the government; loyalty to the Red Army. Discipline. Punishment for hoarding, looting, killing. Dissolving the government. Free elections. Reunification with West Germany. Around seven p.m., Russian tanks come rolling from Obermarkt; cautiously. Joining the pieces of paper that had already come sailing out the windows of the stormed government buildings were copies of a flier signed by the garrison commander and military commandant of the city of Halle (Saale), declaring a state of emergency, banning demonstrations and gatherings, imposing a curfew for the hours between nine p.m. and four a.m., and threatening armed force against any resistance.

  There is a photograph of the striking workers, men and women, marching into Halle. It shows about ninety people in all—the women in summer dresses, the men mostly dressed as if for work, in gray or dark overalls or pants and shirts. They are in uneven rows, arms swinging, a few people waving at one another (unaware of the camera). Two people have brought luggage. There are eleven bicycles visible in the picture; why would these people have brought such expensive articles with them if they were planning to cause violence or expecting to suffer it?

  On June 21, the Central Committee of the East German Unity Party gave Citizen Cresspahl one additional suggestion, for the event of her return: The uprising in its republic must be understood as merely events that happened. As the work of the American and (West-)German warmongers who, disappointed at the gains of the peace movement in Korea and Italy, wanted to throw the torch of war across the bridgehead of West Berlin . . . discovered by means of bandits with weapons and secret radio transmitters being dropped from foreign aircraft . . . trucks full of weapons on the Leipzig-Berlin autobahn . . .

  She got a letter from Gneez saying that workers at the Panzenhagen sawmill had opened the cellars under the district court, shouting: We want our exploiters back! She presumed, in all modesty, to know the workers better, even by sight, than the East German custodian, and know their complaints: the revoked discounts for train tickets, the family fights caused by reduced minimum pension rates, spa treatments now counted against annual vacations, workplaces polluted by informers, the sense of travailler pour le Roi de Russe as exemplified by the Unity Party’s insistence on a 10 percent increase in work norms the very day before—on the morning of June 16. She would have gone back anyway, if everyone from Gneez to Halle were now allowed to say: We’ve seen who’s in charge in this country—the Soviets. When she did decide to leave, it was hardly because the Americans were the occupiers in charge of that other Germany; it was because she was afraid of being called on in a seminar at the university by the Saale and expected to recite that on a certain date, X, it was not the workers who . . .

  Memory offers—insists—that she arrived at the Berlin-Marienfelde refugee camp. The writer today may not be sure that it was already in operation in July 1953; the mind asserts that it was under construction starting on March 4. In any case, whether in Marienfelde, on Kuno Fischer Street, or on Karolinger Square, she there for the first time met a young man from Wendisch Burg—a skinny boy, bullheaded, with blond hair then, absently trying to strike up an acquaintance on the basis of his connection with the fisherman-Babendererdes and the teacher-Babendererdes as well as the Wendisch Burg Niebuhrs. On a stroll around Dahlem, near the West Berlin university, he observed the local students disdainfully and called them “all these beautiful young people”; she at first thought him conceited about being an upperclassman (physics). She described her amazement that Klaus Niebuhr would give up his school, his residence in Mecklenburg, all for the idea that he should renounce his citizenship to avenge an insult against a girl named Rehfelde. This Erichson (dipl. phys.) liked that; he immediately accused Miss Cresspahl of similar conduct. – For five years you accepted the gap between your thoughts and the things your schools demanded of you; now that the gap has grown just a little bigger than you’d like, you’re through. Ever heard of the third principle of dialectics, the transformation of quantity into quality? You can apply it somatically too: he said in response to her excuse that she wasn’t feeling well. Hardly a courtship. He let himself be flown out of Berlin before she’d even reached Preliminary Examination I in the refugee emergency admittance process.

  The official questioning grew more and more repulsive from one office (“station”) to the next. The medical examiner determined she was twenty years old and nothing he had to worry about. Station Two was responsible for determining responsibility. After the referral, the police, and the registration came Station Seven: preliminary examination by the Task Force Against Inhumanity. This group didn’t take a liking to Undergraduate Cresspahl, nor did the next—the Investigating Committee of Free Jurists—since she blamed them for their part in the verdict against Sieboldt and Gollantz and moreover made fun of their initiatives, like the one according to which people in the “Soviet Zone” were to proclaim their resistance by boycotting movie theaters on a given Wednesday, and as a result, obviously, everyone rushed to the Renaissance Cinema in Gneez to shore up their political reputation. Here she
was given reprimands, bad grades, as she realized once she got to Station 7c, Police Commissioner’s Office, Section V (Political Section)—they looked at her like a bad, recalcitrant schoolgirl. For 7d, British Counterintelligence, she’d gotten Anita to brief her about the prison camp in Glowe on the island of Rügen, where around four thousand forced laborers, in exchange for bread and margarine and potato soup, slogged away at a circuit rail line around four runways for bombers and jet fighters, at a naval base for submarines and light surface craft; this was one of the rumors going around Mecklenburg. (Unfortunately for the Soviet strategy. Cresspahl was still mad about the “Red Corners” on public squares, known as Stalin’s icon altars; she and Anita agreed that the Soviets had brought in their tanks on the 17th so carefully because they were only carrying reserve troops and equipment for the brutal strike should it be necessary.) Alas, the rumor was known to the British gentleman with the woolly mustache as well; he waved his pipe with regret. The recording secretary, with nine rings too many on her fingers for a woman only twenty-five years old, gazed with preemptive schadenfreude, not fellow feeling, at this girl from Mecklenburg trying to buy support for her refugee ID with such cheap coinage. The next question was about the students at the Fritz Reuter High School in Gneez who’d volunteered for service in the Armed People’s Police.

  The interrogatee twisted her statement away from that topic to Martin Luther University in Halle, where students in all departments could use small-rifle and radio-unit training by the banks of the Saale as a way to keep their noses clean; she then said she wasn’t feeling well; she was sternly admonished to return to resume the examination.