Berlin Finale (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Heinz Rein

  There must be something worth living for, but he doesn’t know what it is, it has been withheld from him or counterfeited, lies and slander have been sown so deeply within him that the weeds of prejudice have overgrown his capacity for thought.

  Lassehn looks in the mirror again and runs his right forefinger along the contours of his face, it runs gently over chin, cheeks, lips, nose, forehead, ears, and that calm contact of his own finger makes him feel strangely good, as if it is instilling breath within himself again, as if that touch has re-established contact with life.

  ‘No,’ he says again and shakes his head, a faint smile curls his pale, bloodless lips. He isn’t dead yet, he’s only seemingly dead, he has had life breathed back into him through the mysterious power of an unknown idea. The time that lies between the beginning of a flight and the start of a new light is no longer a dead, empty gap in the deepest trough of his life. It is like a musical pause after a painfully fading coda, a quiet bar in which energy collects into new chords, which leads from the border of deadly resignation into a defiant will to live. He knows that he will now fight for knowledge, but it is not yet clear to him where he will find it and who will convey it to him, but right now that does not concern him.

  His thoughts leaped directly to Klose, and now his faintly curving lips really turn into a smile that wrinkles his nose and draws two distinct lines towards his chin.

  Klose is in fact the only person in Lassehn’s field of vision who was not washed over or torn down by the wave of National Socialism, from whom all the high-sounding speeches and refined propaganda tricks slid off ineffectually, who has been corrupted by nothing. Lassehn doesn’t know that there are still such people, since he hasn’t met one, neither does he know where Klose’s resilience comes from and why his capacity for resistance is so unbroken, but he guesses that the roots of that power must reach back into a time when he, the college student Joachim Lassehn, was not yet consciously thinking. He knows nothing of that time, or only what the teachers, the youth leaders, the propaganda officers, the newspapers and the radio broadcasts let him know, and that was …

  His chain of thought is suddenly interrupted. All at once the anti-aircraft guns suddenly bark and hammer away, a mighty roar is slung into the silence, the fine, singing notes of the planes drifting above them and the wail of the falling bombs as they hurtle to the ground. The ground vibrates, the house shakes to its foundations, the blast forces its way through all the cracks and chalk-dust trickles from the walls.

  For a few minutes Lassehn listens to that infernal concert, then he picks his coat up from the floor and lies back down on the sofa. Events outside do not concern him, he pushes his ski-cap over his eyes and pulls his coat up around his neck.

  A few moments later he is fast asleep.

  III

  14 April, 11.00 p.m.

  When Lassehn wakes up again, he doesn’t know whether he has been asleep for only a few minutes or for many hours. A cloud of exhaustion still weighs down on him. He wants to abandon himself to sleep once more, when a voice reaches his ear. It is not Klose’s voice, that slightly droning, rather rough voice with its Berlin accent, it is a cultured, harsh, matter-of-fact, rather mannered voice, the voice of a practised and experienced speaker.

  Lassehn pushes aside the cap covering his eyes and raises his head, but he can’t see anything, he has to sit up to turn his head, and then he sees …

  Klose is sitting by the radio, but he is not alone, there are two other men there, sitting right by the radio, with their heads leaning forward and their hands behind their ears as if they are listening. They have hard, angular faces, their muscles tense with resolution and defiance.

  The voice that woke him is coming from the speaker, it is clear and unrhetorical, it makes no attempt to sound beautiful, it calls a spade a spade, it pours bitter, stinging mockery over the Nazi gods and turns them into bestial, belligerent, bloodthirsty philistines.

  Never before has Lassehn heard such language. His heart starts thumping wildly, an iron circle settles around his forehead, he blinks uneasily and looks anxiously around. He would like to ask, but instead he listens as if under a spell. He holds his breath so as not to waste a single word. The voice over there comes from a completely different world, a world not held in the iron vice of violent rule. Lassehn wants to shout, there is something inside him that calls out to be shouted, joy, hope, liberation, hatred, torment, but all that issues from his throat is a hoarse croak.

  Klose turns round and puts his finger to his mouth, while the two other men remain in their position without looking up.

  ‘Soldiers’ radio, western station, on short wave forty-one and thirty-two metres. Our news broadcast …’

  A crackle in the speaker, Klose has turned off the radio. Lassehn swings his feet from the sofa and gets up, brushes his hair with his hand and straightens his jacket, then he stands uncertainly in the middle of the room.

  ‘Come here, Joachim,’ Klose calls and waves to him, ‘let me introduce my friends.’

  Lassehn walks slowly over.

  ‘Don’t be shy, lad,’ Klose says encouragingly, and points at the two men in turn. ‘This is Dr Walter Böttcher and this is Friedrich Wiegand, former trade union secretary.’ Lassehn makes two stiff, clumsy bows and murmurs his name.

  ‘Sit down, son,’ Klose says, ‘and don’t be such a stranger, I’ve already told them both about you, you little deserter.’

  ‘Mr Klose,’ Lassehn says pleadingly and settles heavily on a chair, ‘please don’t use that term all the time.’

  ‘Why not?’ asks Dr Böttcher and looks carefully at Lassehn. ‘Being a deserter is no shame, Mr Lassehn, on the contrary. By deserting you have shown more courage than your comrades, who are presumably still stubbornly doing their duty. I am in fact of the opinion that your desertion is not an act of cowardice, because by deserting you have cast off your hated bonds and will no longer be abused, because you don’t want to make yourself guilty of the crimes that are being committed on foreign people and on the German people. The true cowards are the others who carry out all orders, however cruel and violent, and thus kill off their conscience. By old Prussian standards they are dutiful and courageous, but only because they are cowardly, because they lack the courage to put an end to it all and resist. That’s how you must see it, Mr Lassehn.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ Lassehn says quietly and looks Dr Böttcher in the face. ‘It is hard to find your bearings, there are no standards, no guidelines.’

  ‘Your generation, Mr Lassehn, is in a regrettable situation,’ Dr Böttcher says gravely. ‘We, particularly Wiegand and I, and our mutual friend Klose, have talked about it often and reached the conclusion that no young generation has been as unhappy as yours. The magnitude of your misfortune will only become apparent in its full horror after the collapse, which is only a matter of a few months away. Your generation will lose the ground beneath your feet because of the shattering of its foundation and plunge into the void. It will stand there empty-handed and with a disappointed heart, it will recognize the betrayal and the seduction to which it has fallen victim, but it will also recant all other ideals and every new faith it is offered. It will look at anyone who claims to offer leadership or who speaks of a vision of the world with deep suspicion and contempt and it will, consciously or otherwise, measure using the standards it has been brought up with.’

  ‘These young people, Doctor, of whom I too am one,’ Lassehn objects, ‘have known nothing else. The contempt for everything that existed before National Socialism has become its flesh and blood, and even if one day it should recognize the worthlessness of National Socialism and the criminality of its leaders, it does not mean that it places any trust in the spiritual and political leaders from the time before 1933.’

  ‘You are completely right,’ says Wiegand, joining in with the conversation. ‘At first it may be less a matter of immediately presenting this young generation with ready-made old ideas, or even new ones, and more one of ma
king them forget what National Socialism has allowed to seep into it from many dubious sources, ceaselessly and with searing acids.’

  ‘It is clear, people,’ says Klose, ‘that what is drummed into you in your youth is fixed within you as if with a barbed hook. When I went to school, Old Kaiser Friedrich and Bismarck were still glorified, and to be quite honest I didn’t think critically about them until much later.’

  ‘It was the same for all of us, Klose,’ says Dr Böttcher, ‘but in the Kaiser’s Germany there was an opposition, there were certain freedoms, there were ways of getting hold of other information. But our young generation today has no opportunity to do that, it is excluded from everything that lies outside the circle of National Socialism, it encounters everything as if through a distorting mirror, the so-called National Socialist view of the world is filtered into it ready for use as an elixir, and all the things of this world, whether they be German history or stamp-collecting, biology or dance music, are interpreted for it in this sense.’

  Lassehn sighs deeply, and helplessness and torment appear in his eyes. ‘What does it say in Faust?’

  ‘Oh happy he who still can hope

  To rise again from this great sea of error,

  What we do not know is the very thing we needed

  And what we know we cannot use.’

  ‘That’s exactly how it is. I envy you, Doctor, I envy you all, for your … How should I put it? Yes, in a way I envy your age.’

  Dr Böttcher laughs bitterly. ‘Yes, that’s how it is. Probably for the first time in the world youth does not feel superior to age, it is not proud of being young. When you just said, Mr Lassehn, that you envied us our age you didn’t phrase it quite correctly. It is not our age that now appears so desirable to you, it is the knowledge and experiences that we accumulated at a time when National Socialism had not yet limited thought to a few primitive phrases. Admittedly this knowledge has not yet seeped into the consciousness of most of your generation, because it is still covered over with war and the frantically confident speeches of Hitler and Goebbels, but one day the war will be over and Hitler and Goebbels will no longer be there, once the great silence falls upon them and there is no one there to tell them everything they are doing is right, when their mistakes are held up to them on all sides, only then will they recognize that their youth has been shamefully betrayed, their capacity for enthusiasm scandalously abused, their thinking misled. Then the great vacuum will open up in front of it, because while the older generations can still flee into older visions of the world, into socialism, into communism, liberalism or democracy, the Church or some philosophical system, the youth will stand there spiritually naked. Do you have any idea of what will come after the inevitable defeat, Mr Lassehn?’

  Lassehn shakes his head. ‘No, Doctor, how could I,’ he replies. ‘In the past Hitler’s Germany always struck me, in spite of everything, as being an orderly state …’

  ‘… built on unscrupulous betrayal and held together by the violent application of force,’ says Dr Böttcher.

  ‘Certainly,’ admits Lassehn, ‘but if that order should fall, when all the repressed instincts and passions are liberated, only chaos can rule.’

  ‘There is no doubt,’ Dr Böttcher says thoughtfully as if weighing every word, ‘that our war is driving us into the greatest disaster of our history, but then again we do have some experience with losing world wars, Mr Lassehn. After the war of 1918 an army of millions returned home, men who had known nothing for years but trenches and army brothels, murderous hand-to-hand combat and the satisfaction of only the most primitive needs, who had been horrifically degraded in a spiritual and physical respect and who had only atavistic memories of a normal life. These men, and among them there were many hundreds of thousands who had gone straight from the schoolroom to the battlefields, and who knew just as much or as little about life as you do today, returned home one day too, and a wave of coarseness and vulgarity, murder and violence ran through our country, but there were also forces there that ordered chaos and tamed the forces unleashed.’

  ‘The tamers were later overwhelmed by the tamed, my dear Doctor,’ Klose says. ‘Your fault …’

  Dr Böttcher silences him with a sudden movement of his hand. ‘Let’s not judge our faults and yours for the umpteenth time, my dear Klose,’ he says. ‘What is important here is to make it clear to this young man – who has never believed anything, or had the opportunity to believe anything, and who seems to be refusing to believe anything in future as well because, quite unconsciously I have no doubt, he is still filled with Nazi terminology – that even after this war a new order will arise in Germany, not even though but because National Socialism will have disappeared.’

  ‘I cannot imagine, Doctor,’ Lassehn says dubiously, ‘that a way might lead into an orderly life, a life with cleanliness and freedom, music and love. What might the nature of that order be?’

  ‘We don’t yet know,’ Dr Böttcher replies, ‘in the end it will depend on the final phase of the war. But to return to the starting points of our conversation: even then there were many people, mostly from the middle class, who simply couldn’t imagine Germany losing the war, because it would mean the downfall of their world. Well, the world did not collapse, all that collapsed was a certain world of the bourgeoisie.’

  ‘But it only seemed that way,’ Wiegand suggests, ‘the capitalist and agrarian ruling class only disappeared from view, they went on living, modestly at first, reticently, they were barely apparent, but in silence they carefully preserved all of their spiritual and material components, before gradually deploying them again with all their full weight, since they had been left astonishingly untouched, and in the end they became the basis for National Socialism. This war, whose final act we hope we are living through now, is basically only a continuation of the First World War, which left Germany floored in a material sense, but also politically untouched.’

  ‘That is the great accusation to be levelled against the victors of Versailles: they did little to encourage democracy in Germany,’ Dr Böttcher says, nodding, ‘with their politics they created a situation whereby the politically immature German people confused cause and effect, some of them rejected democracy, some didn’t know how to use it, and slowly but surely they slid into the arms of militarism and nationalism in its various guises. That must be prevented this time, and I am completely clear that it will be possible only with the help of our present supposed friends.’

  ‘But we must be clear about one thing,’ Wiegand says when Dr Böttcher pauses briefly. ‘The soldiers who will return this time are not soldiers like the ones after the First World War, coarsened, degraded, disappointed, embittered and weary. These soldiers have passed through the school of the so-called National Socialist philosophy, in their awareness of belonging to a master race they have committed unimaginable acts of cruelty and laid whole nations waste, they have fully enforced the maxim that might is always right. If soldiers in the First World War to some extent killed their uniformed opponents in self-defence, man against man, the soldier of this war, in the awareness and belief in his racial superiority and his people’s claim to superiority, murdered not only the soldiers on the other side but also countless people of every age and sex and robbed them of their possessions. This spiritual attitude will not be removed without further ado by military defeat. It will go on affecting people for a long time to come, at least until they learn to see that it was not strategic errors that led to their Führer’s defeat, that it was not war that was an error, but that the whole so-called movement was a crime in itself.’

  ‘You speak of the coming defeat as if it is an inevitable fact, gentlemen,’ Lassehn says. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hope for victory, because I am clear that in the event of our victory we could develop into a dangerous race of human beasts of prey, but just wish to establish that …’

  ‘Good God, Joachim,’ Klose interrupts him almost angrily, ‘the Soviets are at the Oder, ready for their last
leap against Berlin, on the other side the British and the Americans have crossed the Siegfried Line and the Rhine, and even reached the Elbe in places, and you still have doubts?’

  ‘I don’t even consider the territorial element to be the crucial one,’ Dr Böttcher says, commanding their attention with a gesture, ‘what is of far greater moment is our absolute material inferiority. Are you not aware that the famous anti-tank grenade is only a surrogate because we lack heavy anti-tank guns? Are you not aware that the Luftwaffe is often unable to take off for want of fuel? Have you not seen that the American and British Air Forces can bomb any point they wish to hit unhindered and at any time of day or night? Are you not familiar with the fact that the very last reserves, half-children and elderly invalids, are being sent to the front as part of the Volkssturm? Do you not see these ridiculous anti-tank barriers in the streets of Berlin, which are supposed to stop the enemy, who have swept over the Atlantic Wall, the Siegfried Line and all the great rivers as if they were playthings?’

  ‘He believes in the miracle weapon,’ Klose says with a smile.

  ‘You are not far off, Mr Klose,’ says Lassehn. ‘I don’t believe in it, but I do fear that those people at the top are preparing something terrible. There are so many rumours about whether it is the V-3 or some kind of weapon of desperation, gas shells or bacteriological war …’

  ‘Good God, Joachim, music student,’ Klose laughs, ‘you’re going to fall for that one? Yes, if they had any of those things in the making …’

  ‘You shouldn’t laugh, Klose,’ Wiegand says seriously. ‘I admit quite openly that there are moments when Goebbels’ and Fritzsche’s stubborn confidence strangles me like a garrotte.’