by Heinz Rein
Lassehn shrugs. ‘I haven’t thought about it all as much as you have …’
‘Thought? Did you say thought?’ Mrs Buschkamp interrupts. ‘There’s nothing to think about, it’s all about feeling, you can see that if you’ve got eyes in your head and take the trouble to open them. You don’t look to me as if you were born stupid and never learned anything, and you don’t look like a farmer to me either. With that face and those hands? Exner only believed that story you told him in the cellar because you’re my nephew. You can tell there’s something not right about you by the tip of your nose, you can’t hide it, not you.’
Lassehn is startled. ‘Do you think so?’ he asks hastily.
Mrs Buschkamp laughs briefly. ‘You see, that question gives you away already! What’s up with you? Do you really have no papers?’
‘I do,’ Lassehn replies. ‘I’ve got papers, I’ve even got real ones, but they’re incomplete.’
‘So?’ Mrs Buschkamp looks at him quizzically.
‘Sometimes incomplete papers are worse than none at all,’ Lassehn replies.
‘Hang on a second,’ Mrs Buschkamp says suddenly, ‘incomplete papers are worse …’ She shakes her head violently. ‘No, I don’t get it.’
Lassehn hesitates for several seconds. Should he tell the old woman the truth? Is he obliged to do so? But then he makes his mind up. ‘It’s like this,’ he begins slowly, ‘I have got my Soldbuch, but no leave pass, and that means …’
The old woman’s eyes gleam. ‘Now I’ve got it,’ she says and nods. ‘You’re one of those fellows. And still you’re running about in plain clothes. You’ve skedaddled, you’ve done a bunk. Am I right?’
Lassehn just nods, even though he knows that this woman isn’t a threat to him, he can’t bring himself to say a word because she knows his secret.
‘I’m impressed, Mr Kempner, I’m really impressed,’ Mrs Buschkamp says admiringly. ‘But you should clear off now, Exner might be on the way, that brown-shirted bastard, he might be coming after you, and that’s something we want to avoid.’
‘What about you?’ Lassehn asks the question that preoccupied him a little while before. ‘Have you never done something? …’
Mrs Buschkamp waves the idea away.
‘I’ll sort out Exner, don’t you worry about him. But if you have nowhere to stay, then come to old Ma Buschkamp, she’ll put you up. And now if I were you I’d make myself scarce …’
Lassehn nods. ‘But I actually wanted to see the Niedermeyers …’
‘There’s no one there now, Mr Kempner,’ Mrs Buschkamp says. ‘The old aunt certainly isn’t at home, as soon as she hears the words north-west Germany she’s straight out of there and into the bunker at the Zoo, and Irma was just leaving when you arrived, there’s nothing to be done, you’ll just have to come back later.’
Lassehn turns to go and holds out his hand to the old woman. ‘Thank you, Mrs Buschkamp,’ he says warmly. ‘I’ll definitely be back. Goodbye!’
‘Goodbye, Mr Kempner!’
The phrase ‘Mr Kempner’ is like a slap in the face for Lassehn, it hurts him deeply because he hasn’t told the old woman the whole truth.
VIII
Ethnology of a Small Town in Germany
‘People have voluntarily given up their nobility, they have voluntarily brought themselves down to this lower step. They flee in horror from the spectre of their inner greatness, they acquiesce in their poverty, they decorate their chains with craven wisdom.’
Schiller, Don Carlos
The character of a place is determined by certain facts. It may have emerged from the landscape or from certain features of the landscape, the presence of a ford, a confluence of rivers, the crossing of roads, the abundance of nature, the fertility of the fields. Or else it has simply been founded, it owes its existence to a not entirely risk-free speculation if its birth occurs not in the depths of the earth but in the spartan office of an estate agent, when the seed that generates it and the ovum that receives it do not belong to the primal forces of nature, but are the fruits of a commercial spirit, which sees in the soil only parcels of land, in the forest only wood and in the rivers only the stretches of shoreline that bring in revenue, and balances everything out accordingly. The spirit which is manifested in the begetting of such places, and which acts as godfather at their baptism, accompanies them along their subsequent journeys. A village or a city are not just material, stone and wood and iron and asphalt, they have been moved and assembled by the human spirit, it leaves its mark on them, they absorb it into their pores and send it back out again. This interaction grows weaker or stronger over time; either the material overwhelms the human being, or the human violates nature.
Eichwalde, on the suburban line from Görlitz Station to Königs Wusterhausen, is the result of a project that sprang from the brains of businessmen and property speculators. There is no tradition here, no heritage, no agricultural necessities have played any part here, all that mattered was its proximity to the transport network and the proximity of the big city. The town was arranged according to a predetermined plan. Many things remained at the stage of publicity and enticing promises, since the rapid urbanization of the settlement seemed to render their fulfilment otiose. From the outset the planners had aimed to attract a certain social stratum of the population, officials, senior executives and mid-ranking businessmen. This group drew its economic power from the industrial proletariat, but otherwise remained remote from it and above all did not want to be disturbed by the sight of workers – and later of the unemployed – in its residential areas, but was also unable to afford the exclusiveness of the haute bourgeoisie of Wannsee and Nikolassee, Dahlam and Grunewald. They looked down on the neighbouring town of Schulzendorf, whose houses had largely been constructed by the building workers themselves over months and years of difficult labour during their leisure time after work and on Sundays. It was contemptuously sneered at as the ‘bricklayers’ estate’. But they had not been able to prevent the influx of non-bourgeois elements entirely, since anyone was eligible to purchase new land. So into this middle-bourgeois milieu there trickled a number of existences which, in Marxist terminology, belonged to the labour aristocracy. Still, however, the population of Eichwalde – a few exceptions aside – formed a homogenous whole, and that homogeneity was essentially down to a single cause: landed property. It is the landed property of the middle and petit-bourgeois people who have attained ownership through work, luck and other favourable circumstances, who cling firmly to it, defend it with every means to hand and look down contemptuously on anyone who has not managed to do the same. That here – where the terror of expropriation reigned – there could be no room for socialist ideas, should be clear to anyone familiar with the character of such settlements.
In this place – and here Eichwalde stands in for hundreds and hundreds of places, villages, small towns, settlements, hamlets, parishes, communities – people live for themselves, here each person sees himself as having a particular individuality, but it is the individuality of sheep, sheep that are not herded closely together, but driven a large distance apart. The restriction of their space for economic movement corresponds to the constricted nature of their intellectual world. Subservience and reverence for political and military strong men is complemented by their contempt for the weak, the oppressed, the fallen. It is here that National Socialism finds its most fertile breeding ground, when it turns out that it is entirely socially acceptable, that even bankers, industrialists and senior military officers, university professors, poets and artists wear the Party badge, and the term ‘workers’ party’ is only one of many decoys used by the man from Braunau. If these people had previously followed one of the thirty-three parties in the Weimar Republic, and thus a misunderstood democracy, now they are now gripping with both hands the strong rope of a new kind of authority. The undisputed authority of the monarchy was followed by a vacuum in which all authorities, government, Church, family, became unstable, offered no solid footi
ng and finally dissolved, while social respect and economic certainty were lost. As a result, people unhesitatingly projected their own sense of inferiority upon the nation as a whole, and it became the norm of behaviour. The unfortunate German inclination towards the doctrinaire, the categorical and the exclusive is in harmony with the claim to total power of the National Socialist tyrants. People willingly allow themselves to be crammed together and levelled out into a so-called ‘national community’. Then they play their own part in the process of adjustment by appropriating the terminology of the regime, which contains, in a horribly intensified form, all the ingredients of what might be seen as the German character: national pride and a sense of community, militarism and an entrepreneurial spirit, pioneering work and anti-Semitism. The constitution of a new middle-bourgeois class now seems assured, after the rise and power of the working class has raised it to the same level and thus robbed the petite bourgeoisie of its claim to a position on the last-but-one rung on the social ladder. The authority of God’s mercy has been – after the interregnum of a period without authority – replaced by the claim to power of a new autocracy, which is only hesitantly recognized, since it comes from within the ranks of this class, and then greeted enthusiastically because it is successful. At the same time the credulous middle and petite bourgeoisie, who have come worryingly close to the level of the proletarian masses through the loss of their property and savings as a result of inflation, spot the chance of economic growth, and when has a bourgeois heart ever resisted the blandishments of economic growth? They see the boost in the economy and hear the cries of work and bread, they laugh at the warning voices prophesying that the very same boost can be twisted into a terrible dance of death, that they will one day be destroyed by that work and choke on that bread. They do not feel the fetters that National Socialism places on its subjects as being such, because German submission to raison d’état and orders from above is raised to a new level by elevation to the noble race, the right to self-determination, and personal freedom is compensated by the primacy of the German people in the world. Dazzled by the economic successes of the illusory boom, the petit-bourgeois masses devote themselves to National Socialism and identify with its goals, making them their own and over-emphasizing them with the pride of the parvenu. They deprive themselves of their own decision-making capacity, and renounce any independent moral thought, since the Führer is always right. And since no one else speaks, they slip at last into a psychic trauma, in which their complete intellectual and mental violation is accomplished. The pendulum of the German sense of being has always swung back and forth between self-contempt and self-over-estimation, and the action in one direction is now followed by the reaction in the other. They sigh with relief at dissolving into a nation of brothers, who all belong to one and the same Party, or at least act as its followers. The inversion of all values into their opposite, their grotesque distortion and the disparagement of all ideals that even call into question the hegemony of the Nazi programme, all of this is accepted without objection, people enter a form of tutelage that is followed by an inconceivable intellectual alienation. The deployment of hatred as the governing idea of the state is greeted enthusiastically, the accumulated resentments of the petit bourgeoisie are discharged against political, religious and racial minorities. They listen as if enchanted to that mighty voice which, with impudent sarcasm, declares the intellectual achievements of 4,000 years of world history to be invalid, which moves each stone in Germany and turns each wheel, which sets the armies in motion and ploughs the world’s waves, to which all is owed and which is always right. At the same time these people are not aware that loyalty has become a lack of character, respect has become servility, obedience slavery and service of the state the practice of denunciation.
Where Eichwalde passes into the parish of Zeuthen, in a small, short side street there is a cottage, narrow and with a pointed roof, not in fact any different from the other houses in the surroundings, it is built far back from the street, and is surrounded by a few tall pine trees, while towards the street it is shielded by a clump of spruce. This house, as unremarkable as it may appear from the outside, has long been at the centre of general interest, until that interest, a mixture of curiosity and gossip, was covered over by other, greater events, since gossip and curiosity cannot be permanent conditions. On a number of occasions public attention has been drawn repeatedly to this house, and its obscure past was remembered. Nothing stays so clearly in the mind of the petite bourgoisie as the recall of things that diminish others and thus elevate one’s sense of oneself, and nothing is better suited to making one appear complacent in the eyes of the ruling party, and to be seen as a loyal citizen, than to join in the boycott of those disliked by the regime.
The house in question belongs to the former trade union secretary and Reichstag member Friedrich Wiegand. But he has only rarely been able to delight in his own home, and in the idyllic peace and quiet of the Brandenburg landscape not at all, since he moved into his house at a time when the most severe labour struggles were being fought out, racing from one tariff negotiation to the next, from Berlin to the Ruhrgebiet, from the North Sea coast to Upper Silesia, from Saxony to Baden.
These years were followed immediately by the rule of National Socialism, which for Wiegand meant only persecution and arrest. He was arrested for the first time on the day of the Reichstag fire, then released after twenty-seven months and placed under very close surveillance over the following years. Whenever there was any internal and external crisis in the Hitler regime, he was imprisoned again and interned in concentration camps. Shortly before the invasion of the Soviet Union he chose to go underground, since police surveillance and the constant checks of the Gestapo left him with no freedom of movement and clandestine work took up the whole of his being. Wiegand disappeared from Eichwalde, he simply wasn’t there any more, no house search brought any clues to his whereabouts, no surprise nocturnal raid led to his discovery or pointed to his trail.
His family had stayed in the house, his wife and four children. His wife, Lucie Wiegand, is one of those wives who stick by their husbands for good or ill, not because custom and morals decree it, and not out of habit or natural persistence, but because an irrepressibly strong emotion and an unshakeable faith in the cause for which he fights binds her to him. Not for a second has she wavered, she has never in moments of weakness struggled with a fate that has frequently robbed her of her husband. Neither has she ever tried to play her husband Friedrich Wiegand off against the politician Friedrich Wiegand – on the contrary, she has always taken strength from him not to give in. She has never thought of persuading him into the Nazi camp to escape the dangers that threaten him, and thus attain some kind of peaceful existence.
Socializing with criminals in the Nazi state is not necessarily dangerous, but socializing with so-called enemies of the state and politically unreliable elements (and of course with Jews) is considered a serious felony.
A magic circle soon formed around the Wiegand family which no one dared to enter, as the floodlights of police surveillance illuminated everyone who even dared to approach that circle. But there was no one there who would have risked such a thing, since it would have run contrary to the efforts of the German bourgeoisie not to stand out or make oneself unpopular in any way. The hatred that had raged in most of the residents of the settlement suddenly came to light and flared up.
Lucie Wiegand had proudly endured the ostracism imposed upon her after the takeover of the government by the Nazis, she had made no attempt to break through the ring of silence placed around her, and not returned any greeting that she was given in a secret or a furtive way. She had always had little to do with the bourgeois world that surrounded her, her points of contact with it had only ever been general and superficial. She didn’t miss the social contact, and the ostracism caused her no pain, but she revealed the cowardice and dishonesty of the bourgeoisie in her immediate vicinity, to whom she had suddenly become unacceptable.
&n
bsp; Lucie Wiegand is a delicate woman of medium height, she is still as slender as a young girl even though she has had four children, her narrow face, whose beauty is only slightly dimmed by the shadow that care and suffering has thrown upon her, has the delicate complexion of strawberry blondes. The physical charms are equal to those of the soul and the mind. Just as her body, in spite of its delicate constitution, is unusually resilient, so too is her spiritual and mental attitude determined by the strong will not to bend to any external compulsion, and even in her darkest hours she has never been bowed by what is normally known as fate, but has always organized her life in a positive way, she has not, like most women, frittered herself away on trivial matters, but always had one great goal in mind. When in the spring of 1941 there was a purge against a series of former Communist and Social Democratic functionaries, and against left-wing bourgeois and Catholic politicians, and Friedrich Wiegand expected to be thrown into a concentration camp, she immediately agreed to live underground when that presented itself as the only way out.