The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  Yes, many had thought “opportunist,” and it didn’t seem exaggerated after the fact. But the anger passed, the disappointment faded, and Gerda remained. She was made like that, she was volatile and willful, a meter and a half of pride and ambition, without heels. You had to take her as she was: sincere to the point of hurtful, affectionate in her way, in the long term.

  She was sincere when friendship required it, not when she could give a Hollywood touch to her ordeals. For example, she loved to make the Red Frog, Pieter’s convertible Opel (entrusted to a friend who had dropped her at the station in Strasbourg and returned to Stuttgart in the morning), the co-protagonist of her break across the border. When she recalled that trip, Gerda skipped over the border controls and would never confess a moment’s fear, even to close friends. She wanted only to show off, hold court, broaden the claque of admirers who came by her table. Had that brief trip really been so similar to a grand tour?

  But there was no doubt that the former boyfriend had helped a lot after the flight to Paris—“MONEY ARRIVED STOP YOU’RE A TREASURE STOP”—because the Dachshund had gone with her to the post office in Montparnasse several times to pick up the money orders.

  Only now, from the linear distance of Hertel Avenue, does Dr. Chardack realize that he understood the most important things too late. Even in the exact sciences, the observer modifies the facts, and he, at the time, was certainly not observing a body that moved in a neutral field. His sensors had grasped that you couldn’t count on Gerda’s loyalty in the strict sense (which induced flutterings of hope), but hadn’t picked up the most relevant empirical fact. It was impossible to calculate what she would choose if the perfect occasion presented itself, for example the coffee business in South America, or under extreme pressure. Gerda would act according to her own advantage, yes, it’s likely, but certainly she wouldn’t turn back.

  It must have been around the beginning of ’34, Friedmann had not yet appeared, and in spite of herself Gerda had sunk back to the point of departure. She could display the money orders from Stuttgart as the proof of self-sufficiency necessary for the renewal of her residency permit, and then pay for the hotel room, but getting the sack from Dr. Spitz forced her to scrape by day to day. She would go out at dawn, walk the boulevards with a pack of newspapers that in the arms of such an attractive colporteuse tended to go quickly. She allowed herself a very sugary coffee, took care of the typing jobs, which were in short supply, and then went to sit in the sun in the park. She was Gerda: she had a magnificent appearance, like an idle beauty. Ruth also, with her earnings as a model or, in summer, as a gymnast demonstrating floor exercises to the members of a swimming club on the Seine, didn’t outwardly betray the difficulty of making a living: she who had studied dead languages at the Gymnasium and so for the most part found silent jobs.

  The Dachshund was aware that the girls weren’t having an easy time, and yet he didn’t understand how on earth, especially on weekends, Ruth and Gerda disappeared. “Did a rich admirer take you out of town?” he had finally ventured one day, meeting them on the street, with a hint of anxiety directed toward whichever one would accept the invitation without scruples.

  “If only! We stayed home the whole time—you save a lot of calories if you stay under the covers.”

  “What do you do?” he had asked, bewildered.

  What a question! They chatted, read, did their nails and eyebrows, mended their stockings with nail polish and, when their stomachs rumbled (who’d have thought, Ruth laughed, that Gerda could produce such growls), they shushed them by striking up not some light song, no, but a song of revolt, because the empty belly demanded it . . .

  They rushed to see Kuhle Wampe in the winter of ’32, drawn by the “empty stomach” of the title and the battles against censorship that had kept the film from being shown in some theaters.

  Dr. Chardack remembers clearly only the beginning, which, like a slap at his conscience numbed by time, brings Germany back to him, now near the end. That river of bicycles rushing through Berlin as if racing for a medal but in reality competing for a day of work. The young cyclist who returns home defeated, swallows a bowl of soup, along with the reproaches of his parents (“Anyone who applies himself will get something”), and doesn’t say a word. As soon as he’s alone, he takes off the only thing of value he has, his watch, and flings himself into the courtyard. A sharp cry, one unemployed person less. The death of a contemporary in a few minutes of film.

  Kuhle Wampe was much more successful than expected. The audience emerged moved by the actors, who, speaking in thick Berlin accents, didn’t seem like actors. “All true!” In Dina Gelbke’s salon a debate was kindled that was in some ways unpredictable. Willy hadn’t asked himself who those sullen comrades were, precisely, but it was clear to him that they belonged to a sort of workers’ aristocracy. Unexpectedly, the mistress of the house and her acolytes, who were full of praise for the Proletkino theorized and dramatized by their friend Brecht, found themselves contradicted by the real proletariat.

  “Where were your Brecht and his comrades from the artistic collective when we organized strikes and pickets?” they protested. “Out for a walk with the Fräulein? Learning poems by Goethe?”

  The vehemence of the reaction had left even the friends of the Kuritzkes brothers dumbstruck. Weaned on cinema, they would never have taken the most realistic of films for a mirror of the real. They sided with those who responded that a film has to generalize its message.

  Among those present was a man who rumor said had been Dina Gelbke’s great love. It didn’t often happen that a woman got divorced from a husband like Kuritzkes, who gave her everything, to plunge into an affair with a penniless bohemian goy, without even bothering to conceal it from the children. Her second marriage, to Dr. Gelbke, at least assured those three poor kids a roof over their heads was the comment of Willy’s mother. He had ignored that gossip. And when, in high school, some of his girlfriends got curious about the story and that fascinating man, he had answered with a curt “I don’t know anything.” Willy knew only that the Kuritzkes brothers had always mentioned a certain Sas, who later showed up at their house. He was a friend of the family. A former worker who had become a schoolteacher and a music teacher. He liked to be in the company of young people and they returned the favor. That was it.

  So it wasn’t odd that Sas followed them to the attic, or even that he wanted to continue the discussions with them. But in the diatribe on Kuhle Wampe he had exploded. Absolutely right to believe in youth, he cried, you are the most affected by this war against the working class! But it’s crazy to point a finger and give up on all the workers who can’t understand their current poverty. His disagreement with the Communist Party, and the fact that he did nothing to hide it, except for a now completely obvious respect for Dina, had been a further reason for admiration. But because they sensed a double friction—on the one hand political, on the other the abrasiveness of a very private bond—once the laughter was over they no longer knew what to say. The most quick-witted was the girl who would never lose her presence of mind because of any embarrassment of feelings. Gerda had begun to describe the last time she went to see Georg. Kuhle Wampe had just been released, and they had to cross half Berlin way in advance, because at the Atrium-Palast di Wilmersdorf, the only theater where it was showing, there was an endless line. The pilgrimage of an audience so varied—workers and famous cultural figures, theater people and shopgirls, a few nightclub hostesses, and so forth—had made an impression on her, and then the music, the dialogue, the sensational editing! The scene on the U-Bahn that introduces the Solidaritätslied, a refrain impossible to get out of your head! But then there was that women’s boat race, as if rowing—eins zwei hop hop—were the most useful and delightful method for changing the world. I said it to Georg and I’m not embarrassed to repeat it: you want to compare when they sing and waltz in Congress Dances?

  “Stop! You shouldn’t even mention
that reactionary treacle beside the musical genius of Hanns Eisler,” Sas had said, darkening, rising to the bait.

  “What do you want,” Gerda had retorted, satisfied, “if Communism in the movies is boring, the reactionaries will always win, you can see it in the reelections of Hindenburg . . . ”

  His thin glasses sparkling, Sas admitted that he couldn’t say she was wrong. “But now tell me: would you give a dancing class at my music school, like the ones for debutantes?”

  “For you, that and more! Or for the education of the masses, if you’d rather . . . ”

  And Gerda’s reply dissolved in a crystalline laugh that infected them and drew them along, definitively clearing the air of the attic.

  Better to laugh: then, as well as later, in Leipzig as well as in Paris. Better to make light of calamity than to remain trapped in discussions that, though rendered absurd by the Hitlerian suppression of the entire left, were revived everywhere: in the groups and editorial offices in exile, in the former barracks used as dormitories for refugees, in line at the préfecture or in the cafeterias where social democrats and Communists clutched the same chipped bowls as the first disoriented representatives of the Jewish bourgeoisie. But especially in the cafés, where time was abundant, and the persistence of the voices assaulted those sitting at the nearby tables. Certain former deputies, perched interminably before empty cups, claimed their old positions as if these were the ultimate foundations for their pride. Better not to stay and listen, better to joke about it. Better to feel privileged to have a student life, like the Dachshund, or to be thankful for the intimacy of a run-down hotel room, filling it with a song of proletarian struggle, and, humming, absorb the very recent notion of belonging to the unemployed Weltproletariat. Better still to go out into the open, repeat the duet for a public more grateful than bedbugs, and make it a hymn for the comrades stranded on the terraces of the Left Bank, with the added pleasure that the Parisians understood only that you were singing in German, and that it was a march.

  Vorwärts und nicht vergessen, worin unsere Stärke besteht. Beim Hungern und beim Essen, vorwärts, und nie vergessen—die Solidarität! (“Onward, and let’s not forget what our strength consists of. Hungry or full, onward, let’s not forget—solidarity.”)

  Some two years after the worst hardships for Ruth and Gerda, they found themselves at an evening in support of the anti-fascist struggle in Germany. None of them had problems of pure subsistence anymore: Gerda and Ruth no longer shared a bug-infested bed, and the song about asserting solidarity whether you were hungry or full had been performed by Brecht’s wife, Helene Weigel. Small and thin, she had a burning gaze and a face from Greek tragedy (and a bit monkey-like, to tell the truth), and she sang with the intensity of an actress, not with the full, bold voices of her friends. All that suggested to Willy the profound difference between life and the theater. Arriving late from his internship, he lingered at the back of the Café Mephisto, on Boulevard Saint-Germain, but immediately located the heads of friends and acquaintances: Ruth and Melchior Britschgi, the printer she had recently married, Gerda with the Steins and a small group, chattering in various languages, that André Friedmann, now a habitué of the bathroom-lab of Montmartre, had picked up. But this soirée was attended mainly by German émigrés, and while at other times all that Heimat had roused in him a slightly claustrophobic impatience, this time knowing so many people gave him pleasure, a simple pleasure, something like what he had caught on the faces of his parents when he went with them to a concert or the opening of a play: here we are, right here in the middle of the society that counts!

  There none of them counted for much among the great names of German culture in exile, so imagine outside, in real Paris. But they recognized each other at a glance, a nod of the head, a gesture sketched by a hand. The closeness of the early years had reawakened that primary sense of orientation. They had acquired the solidarity you don’t forget, because it arose out of material needs. Willy Chardack had never much believed in a new humanity produced by socialism, but that way of staying united had pushed them onward, vorwärts, as the Solidaritätslied song said, and with a force that they might not otherwise have found.

  That was what he recognized, especially in Gerda and the broad agglomerate gathered around her irresistible, dear person. And suddenly he remembers that, meeting her on the street or seeing her get up after putting out the cigarette with a display of energy—“That’s it, I can’t stay any longer, I have to find out this or that, be in such-and-such a place”—he had nicknamed her Fräulein Vorwärts. It was only a joke with himself, an attempt to convince himself that he had emerged from Leipzig’s mantle of jealousies, as oppressive as the sky covered with low clouds and industrial smoke. But not even that evening when, standing at the theater, Gerda seemed so close to him, did he have any idea of how unstoppable the propulsive force of his Miss Onward was . . .

  Dr. Chardack is passing by the closed shutters of a supermarket, a women’s hair salon, an emporium for household and garden tools, a laundry, an open gas station. He encounters kids in light clothing, too garish for his taste, families that seem to have just emerged from a faded photo of grandparents in their shtetl, except for the rubber-soled shoes of the wives in wigs. Can it be that by thinking about other things you wonder if this is America? Everyone comfortable, everyone practical, everyone walking in the same saddle shoes. Capitalism invites us to acquire equality, he reflects, real socialism assigns the best to the most faithful. The man who had gone to live in the family house on Gohliser Strasse: first a bureaucrat in the Nazi Party and now, you can bet, a bureaucrat in the Socialist Unity Party. Maybe it would have been better if it had been hit by the bombs that flattened the building on Springerstrasse where Gerda Pohorylle lived.

  “Cold war,” Dr. Chardack often says to himself, is a good phrase for a country that hasn’t been destroyed by real war, even if certain alliances were conclusively ruined by the chill of peace.

  Keeping the visa stuck in his passport, seeing stamped on it “Enemy Alien,” hadn’t been nice, but war was war and he understood it. Yet then William M. Chardack, recently naturalized American, had had to answer the question whether he had ever been enrolled in the Communist Party or in the SAP, the German Socialist Workers’ Party.

  “No,” he had answered correctly.

  But he had spent time with various members of that revolutionary Marxist group.

  “Yes,” he had admitted, “but for reasons of personal sympathy.”

  It turned out, though, that he had participated in various activities organized by that party, in Germany and in Paris.

  “They were anti-fascist initiatives,” he declared.

  Agreed, but the sponsor was Trotskyist.

  What was he supposed to say: That they were the only ones who were committed to a unified front on the left? That the SAP was critical of Stalin?

  “I was studying medicine,” he responded. “I spent my time in classes, interning, and preparation for exams. But if I found out that there was a demonstration against the Nazis, I didn’t have too many scruples about who had organized it.”

  And at that point he thought: so send me to Palestine or send me back to Germany. But they had asked no more questions.

  Several years later, when he returned from Korea, they had summoned him again.

  “We’re sure, Dr. Chardack, that you’re loyal to the United States. But maybe you can do something more for your country.”

  They asked him if he knew any of the people friendly with a photographer, a woman, people whose closeness to the Communist Party, and to her personally, they knew about. Among the names submitted to him he recognized only Robert Capa, with whom he’d had no contact in the USA.

  “No one else?” they had pressed him. “Think about it for a moment.”

  In that moment Dr. Chardack wondered if they really believed that someone like him could turn out to be an informer. />
  “Willy Brandt,” he answered, “who is now president of the chamber of deputies in Berlin, West Berlin, of course.”

  Not that there had been any intimacy between Chardack and his namesake, but they had met several times at spur-of-the-moment dinners organized by the Steins, during which Willy Brandt had been attracted by Gerda’s charm, like everyone.

  When the tragic news arrived, and then Gerda’s remains, he was the one who gave voice to the fear that she had not died in an accident under the tracks of a tank. That rumor, maybe spread by Fred and Lilo, had begun to ascend the Left Bank and circulate from café to café. The suspicion was horrible. Willy Brandt was the rising star whom the militants of the SAP trusted. Gerda, however, had been crushed right outside Madrid in July of ’37, and Willy Brandt hadn’t set foot in Spain for around a month, when he had escaped by a hair’s breadth the roundups of “Trotskyists” in Barcelona. On the basis of what sources had he formulated that terrible hypothesis? Against it, there was that Canadian journalist who was seriously wounded in the collision that had killed Gerda. He had come to Paris, and Ruth had seen him. He had planted himself in Capa’s hotel. He followed him around on crutches, struggling, a convict in chains. But the SAP comrades were not reassured. Injured legs didn’t guarantee that the unaltered truth would come out of the mouth of that witness. It was discovered that Ted Allan had been a political adviser, a comrade bound to report on every deviation from the Moscow line. And that was enough for the conjectures about Gerda’s death, the darkest hypotheses, to go on circulating for a long time.