by Heinz Rein
Constantly surrounded by hatred and persecution, encircled by hostility and contempt, she saw her life as neither a disaster nor a gloomy fate, since it had to a certain degree been of her own making, by her political conviction and her desire to maintain it. But her life was shadowed by deep tragedy. It was the tragedy of parents in Germany who were hostile to Nazism for political, religious or other grounds, but who had to look on with impotent rage as the upbringing and intellectual guidance of their children was taken completely out of their hands and forced in a direction whose consequences were clear to them, but about which there was nothing they could do. Apart from that, life had one special surprise in store for Lucie Wiegand.
Robert, their oldest son, was a reckless over-achiever, he had an intelligence that translated all ideal values into material reality. The virtuous disposition was only a rung on life’s ladder, a thing that one appropriated or pushed away as circumstances demanded, the content of the disposition was unimportant as long as it served the goal at hand. This curious feature of the boy’s character had had very unpleasant consequences at school, and brought him reprimands from his parents, but it had at first remained to some extent in the private sphere. But that changed immediately when National Socialism came to power and forced its way with all its demands and blackmail into all the pores of public and private life. The boy suddenly found himself isolated and the target of sneering and hateful remarks, and he soon had to acknowledge that his parents could only give him personal consolation, but were unable to give him any public help or leap to his assistance. Even though he was a good pupil – he was at the time in the lower third of the upper school in Eichwalde – he found his progress hindered or at least inhibited, since now some teachers were taking masks from their faces and trying to win themselves a good reputation with Party officials and the new mayor with their particularly severe treatment of the ‘red rascal’.
Since any form of caution was alien to the boy where his own person was concerned, and where reflection only formed an obstacle, and since public recognition was more important to him than inner confirmation, the thirteen-year-old took a step that abruptly separated him from his parents: he became a member of the Hitler Youth, which was not at the time the compulsory organization for German youth that it later became. But he did not just do that: he publicly disavowed his parents, he moved away from them, and was soon the keenest member of the group.
Lucie Wiegand – at this point her husband had just been arrested for the first time – was by no means the kind of woman who would have smacked her son for his wilful behaviour or heaped him with reproaches; instead she tried to use persuasion. She understood that the boy did not want to stand apart from his bourgeois environment, which with its waving flags had made itself dependent on the new people’s tribune, that he couldn’t bear to see others writhing in enthusiasm and devoting themselves to mass psychosis while he himself had to stand on the sidelines as an uninvolved and rejected onlooker, that he had fallen prey to a serious inferiority complex. But all of her words bounced off the boy’s determination not to play the role of a pariah, but to enjoy equal status and equal respect among the others.
Even when Wiegand was released from the concentration camp and came home, and learned of the transformation in his son, nothing changed, the boy refused to respond to reason, he strode off along his chosen path with an iron resolve that he had inherited from his father, and willingly allowed the poison of National Socialism to seep into him just as he greedily absorbed and appropriated everything that might serve and benefit his new role.
It was a short step from rejecting his parents and their ideals to treating them with contempt. In the end his parental home was merely a place of shelter, of food and drink, and what in fact remained in terms of emotional fragments had been entirely removed through the systematic undermining of parental authority by the Hitler Youth. Lucie Wiegand suffered indescribably under this change in their relationship. When she looked into her son’s hard face, when she felt his cold eyes sliding over her and her husband, a wave of horror ran through her: was this her son, whom she had conceived in love, and who had grown in her womb? Then in her mind she ran through all the stages of his development, from his first time at her breast until the present day. What diabolical force had possessed the boy, that everything good she had tried to plant within him was suppressed in favour of an almost manic ambition?
Time and again she tried in every way she could to breach his walls, appealing to emotions and giving voice to reason, but she could get nowhere near him, his membership of the Hitler Youth released him from all family relationships, from respect and from gratitude. In her despair she even played the materialistic card, but the seventeen-year-old merely laughed scornfully and looked down at his mother standing there in front of him, small and delicate, with helpless eyes and drooping shoulders, he looked at her with a superior demeanour and a contemptuous expression, because the term ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ had just been coined.
The older Robert Wiegand grew, the greater was the tension between him and his father. When the Gestapo took Friedrich Wiegand away again during the Austrian crisis in 1938, his son cynically observed that it might have been better to keep his father constantly imprisoned before he brought misfortune upon the whole family; he wasn’t going to change, he simply lacked the good sense to understand the new way of things, and he didn’t want to either. An enemy of the state was an enemy of the state, and the fact that he happened to be his father changed nothing in that respect.
After Robert Wiegand had left school and completed his year of labour service, he joined the SS as a volunteer. Now, in April 1945, almost three years have passed since he last set foot in Eichwalde. Lucie Wiegand can only think back with horror at his last period of leave, of which he only spent half at her house, because she was forced to acknowledge with a shudder that something which her son had at first seemed to appropriate only superficially as a means to an end had in the meantime become flesh and blood and the most essential part of his life. If a conciliatory trait had appeared rarely, but every now and again, in the boy, with his uniform he also seemed to have put on an armour which tears, reproaches and grief, pleas and curses, bounced off ineffectually; by wearing the uniform he seemed to have acquired a right that exculpated him from any personal bonds, and obliged him to become completely insensitive towards human fates. He had in the end reached the final spiritual state in which there was no more room for individual thought and feeling. And again Lucie had faced the terrible question of whether this boy, who talked about racially inferior people as if they were bothersome vermin, about the necessary debasement of the biological potential of the enemy as if discussing the eradication of harmful plants, was really her son, who had once entered her in the form of a seed and had been nourished on her blood. That night she cried for a long time, not out of grief but out of shame. She tested herself and ruthlessly exposed her own thoughts, but she could find nothing to blame herself for. She and her husband had always done everything they could to make the boy turn out like them, but the external compulsion had been stronger, but – and this had also become clear to her during that night – it could not only have been pressure from without. There must have been something else, some kind of ferment at work in Nazi theories which replaced the protective shell that had been imposed upon people for many centuries and which had masked the wild instincts of the cannibals of the jungle, which awoke the barbarian within and laid bare all the wild instincts, imperiousness and the drive to conquer, rapacity and bloodlust, rape and arson, and spurred and spurred them on. The unhappy mother’s feverish imagination saw her son advancing in cold blood on the tormented inhabitants of the conquered Russian territory with his sub-machine gun and riding whip, throwing burning torches into peaceful villages, carved in his face, which still bore the innocent features of the child he had once been, she now saw the mark of Cain of the SS runes. It was simply inconceivable that her own son should wear the same uniform as thos
e criminals who had taken her husband away so often and even now, from time to time, entered their domestic world at night, turned everything upside down, insulted her with the worst obscenities and took out their fury over the failure of their searches on the objects they found, casually sweeping a vase from the credenza or slinging the dog into the corner with a swift kick.
But in her despair over the psychical cretinism of her son she derived some comfort from her other three children, twenty-year-old Ernst, sixteen-year-old Katharina and thirteen-year-old Rosemarie. Even though they were younger than Robert, and had been exposed to Nazi influence at a younger age than their brother, even though they had barely known anything else, the parental counterweight had managed to achieve a certain balance. But it had not been possible to exclude the Nazi influence entirely, since the image of the world given to them by their parents was riddled with holes. The two girls in particular, for whom emotion was the gauge of things, were unable to escape this influence, but a solid core of doubt remained within them. But emotion also enabled them to renew and cement that core time and again, since it would never have occurred to them to doubt their mother’s integrity, and the very fact that the teachers had always presented their eldest brother to them as the glowing example of a convinced and fanatical Nazi meant that their doubt was repeatedly enriched.
At the age of fourteen, Ernst Wiegand had suffered a complicated fracture which had left him with one leg much shorter than the other, which had freed him from labour service and excused him from the military. He was a curious mixture, a dreamy idealist and at the same time a solid realist, he escaped from harsh reality into an unearthly romanticism, but he also dissected the phenomena of the present with keen logic and surprising discernment. He trod his path like one whose steps find only occasional purchase, and who can see the edges of the path for the briefest of moments, but whose feet cannot find solid ground and whose eyes cannot see how the road continues. He was attracted by much in the teachings of the Nazis, failing to recognize that they used the great heritage of German culture only as a preamble and a shield, that behind Goethe, Beethoven and Kant there marched the endless ranks of eternal soldiers, of imperialist slavers and murderous racial theorists, that at every available opportunity culture was worn without any particular obligations like a Sunday suit (because a murderer in tails is still a murderer), that they impudently faked and twisted their traditional intellectual legacy for their own purposes, with the manners of horse traders. But Ernst Wiegand did not succumb to the Nazi ideology, because what in his sisters assumed the form of a doubt, a mutable but fixed component of their mental attitude, was for him already an (admittedly quite patchy) accumulation of recognitions. Everything that he had always acknowledged as true and right was firmly anchored within him, and in the few hours that he had spent with his father at secret assignations during his years underground he had been full to bursting with questions, and had used that short period of time to cram in as much knowledge as possible. A bright light always emerged from those meetings, they became a place of anchorage for the shipwrecked vehicle of his hopes, the light that his father always lit within him went on glowing until it was overshadowed once again by the official propaganda machine. Ernst Wiegand was driven mad by everything, he believed his father, but he also believed certain things that had been inculcated into the people as eternal truths, as an inalienable tradition and the justified claims of a great nation, it went beyond his powers of imagination to conceive that anything delivered with utter conviction and a respectable demeanour, from pulpits, lecterns and podiums, might be nothing but lies and betrayal, fakery and slander. So because the one ruled out the other he constantly oscillated between that which was to some extent innate within him, and repeatedly reborn in him, and that which pressed upon him with the brute force of conviction and an intransigent faith in the Führer; he sometimes caught himself falling prey to the prejudices so insistently preached and the assessments constantly repeated and he had to summon all of his logic to master them. Yet he could not keep a small remnant from staying within him like a viscous sediment.
He thoroughly despised his elder brother Robert, and his contempt turned to hatred the last time his brother came home on leave, when he delivered the scurrilous observation that it would be better if their father never returned from hiding. Only the fact that Ernst was transferred to Silesia with his firm that same day – he worked as a precision engineer in the electrical industry – prevented the two brothers from coming to blows. His sudden departure spared him a defeat that he would never have been able to deal with, because not only was he physically weaker than his brother, he was also his intellectual inferior. Ernst’s rejection of National Socialism, a matter both of instinct and superficial knowledge, would have had to face the robustness and brutality, power-drenched, self-confident and certain of victory, of the future master of the world. All of his arguments would have been stifled by bloody cynicism and demolished by the dogma of the racial theory that excluded everything else.
In April 1945 Lucie Wiegand was alone. Her husband lived in hiding, only half an hour’s train journey away and yet impossible to contact, her older son was fighting somewhere on the eastern front, she knew nothing of her younger son, as he was with his firm in a factory that had in the meantime been overrun by the Russians, her sixteen-year-old daughter was doing labour service in Pomerania, and thirteen-year-old Rosemarie was in an evacuation camp in the Sudetenland. She herself had been called up to work in an armaments factory, and had to do nine hours of the most tedious work every day near Scharzkopff in Wildau. Her features are etched with the weary, exhausted expression seen on the faces of hard-working women, but there is a gleam in her eyes, it comes alive more and more every day and becomes a glow, because the millstones of the Allied war machine are crushing the front lines with terrible force. When the catastrophe at last engulfs everyone, it will bring one cheering thing with it: the end of Hitler’s accursed Reich.
IX
15 April, 2.30 p.m.
The change of shift at the Karlshorst depot is over. Between the tracks of the railway and the S-Bahn, and the many sidings, the long rows of fast, express and goods trains, shunting locomotives, points and signals, signal bridges and signal boxes, those coming off their shift stream to the Rummelsberg depot. They walk fast, because a few minutes ago the sirens wailed loudly again to announce the public air-raid warning, and everyone wants to get home quickly before the full alarm sounds.
Friedrich Wiegand is in no particular hurry, he doesn’t care whether the alarm forces him to take refuge in a cellar or a shelter here or somewhere else. He has a home, but it is closed to him, he has a wife and children but he isn’t allowed to see them. He doesn’t think about that now, however, he is preoccupied with something quite different, so he walks slowly, he lets others overtake him and ignores their warning cries. If you walk at a fast pace you can’t think, and thinking is precisely what he has to do now. He has to think clearly about certain things, that is much more important than avoiding an air raid or mulling over the question of which air-raid shelter is safest or whether there’s enough time to reach a bunker. The danger that threatens him from the air doesn’t scare him, there’s another danger, not yet discernible, not yet tangible, but it is there, it is in the air, the atmosphere is saturated with it. Wiegand does not lull himself into a false sense of security for a moment, he can never quite abandon caution, it has become a habit to him, and it weighs each word, guides each gesture, it governs his relationship with his surroundings and determines his actions. But it is not a petty fear for his life, it is his concern about the task he has set himself, this task that requires the greatest devotion and earns no applause, no acknowledgement, one that is its own reward.
The destruction or temporary disabling of locomotives, the cutting of signal wires, the decommissioning of major points, the burning of coal bunkers and not least the bringing of flyers and proclamations to many places in the depot is the work that Wiegand has
been doing for a long time. It requires a high level of manoeuvrability, because he always has to be where he is least expected, he must always concentrate the whole of his attention to act at the right moment without arousing suspicion or being caught. He relies entirely on himself, it is a constant battle for the opportunity, the favourable moment, against chance and the pack of hounds on his heels. He has the advantage of knowing the huntsmen, the men from the plant and rail security service, which received reinforcements some months ago and which guards the grounds day and night, but the guards act with the stubborn thoroughness of functionaries, they go on their rounds loyally and dutifully, they always appear at particular points at the same time each day, so that you could almost set your watch by them. Every few days they search the workers and the office employees, now in the locomotive workshop, then again in the rail depot, another time by the cranes or by the exits, but the only things that come to light are contraband cigarettes or alcohol or a rucksack full of coal or wood with which the thief planned to improve his coal rations. No, Wiegand isn’t afraid of huntsmen like these, they are too stupid and unimaginative, as criminal investigators they work as monotonously as if they were working a piece of iron on a lathe or selling train tickets. More dangerous are those colleagues who would like to earn a promotion through espionage and bragging, or the ones who are in the Party or the SA and now sense the menacing calamity that threatens their whole existence, their property and their lives, who would like to strangle everyone who isn’t 100 per cent in favour of National Socialism, who would like to force everyone to fight and even die with them, who will allow no one to survive the catastrophe by which they are already mesmerized, which is advancing towards them on giant strides and already casting its shadows over them. But these people are not Wiegand’s equals. Over the last few years he has learned to tame and train his tongue, to allow his face to fall into hypocritical wrinkles, and hypocrisy and the habit of telling people what they want to hear are the prime requirements of the Third Reich.