Berlin Finale (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Heinz Rein

  The railwayman nods. ‘That’s obvious,’ he says, and looks thoughtfully at the ceiling. ‘But my train isn’t the only one …’

  ‘What does that matter?’ Schröter says, and exchanges a glance with Klose.

  ‘When there’s sooo much sand!’

  ‘You make it sound easy …’ the railwayman says, still reluctant.

  ‘Easy? No, but if we only wanted to do what was easy …’ Schröter replies straight away.

  The railwayman puts on his cap without a word and sets down some money on the table, then he gets up and walks slowly towards the door. ‘Goodbye,’ he says and puts two fingers to the peak of his cap. He turns round again in the doorway. ‘Not a bad idea, that thing about the sand, let’s see how it goes.’

  ‘Great job,’ says the young worker sitting next to Lassehn. ‘Nicely done.’

  Schröter waves his hand dismissively.

  ‘Many a slip,’ he says.

  Klose turns the radio on again, having turned it off after Goebbels’ speech. ‘Let’s see if the Mosquitoes are on their way already.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they be on their way, today of all days?’ exclaims Dr Böttcher.

  ‘No one likes to be alone at night, because making love by moonlight is the loveliest thing, you know what I mean, on the one hand and on the other and besides …’

  ‘Switch off that nonsense,’ Schröter shouts irritably.

  ‘But why?’ Klose asks. ‘It’s nice if someone comes in. Otherwise you’re sitting there like a funeral party.’

  ‘No one likes to be alone at night, because making love …’

  The music goes out like a candle, the singer’s voice fades away into the distance, suddenly it isn’t there, the sound of electricity predominates.

  ‘Attention, attention, this is an air situation report. Small unit of fast fighter planes over Hanover-Braunschweig heading for the Brandenburg Marches. I repeat …’

  ‘Well then,’ Klose says, ‘all according to plan, as it should be.’

  ‘… it doesn’t matter to me.

  No one likes to be alone at night …’

  The singer’s voice is there again, an emotional, pronouncedly erotic voice, but for all its beauty and bell-like purity it still echoes with the shrill tone of the evening dance of death.

  ‘Woman of my Dreams,’ says the young worker beside Lassehn. ‘That’s the name of the film, colourful and trashy, practically dripping with the propaganda of the people’s state.’

  ‘Why do you watch such nonsense?’ Schröter asks, and taps his index finger against his forehead. ‘Don’t you have anything else to do?’

  ‘Slow down, there, Comrade,’ the worker says. ‘Cinema is a wonderful thing, so wonderfully gloomy …’

  ‘You’re thinking about things like that right now?’ Schröter asks furiously.

  The young worker smiles. ‘Take care, let me tell you something, you might even learn something.’ He winks at the blonde girl. ‘Lotte and I go to the cinema as an affectionate loving couple, but we change seats a few times during the performance, and every time we get up, we leave something on our seats, a flyer, neatly stuck to the armrest. When the seat flips up you can’t see anything, it’s a normal seat like any other, neutral on the outside, but on the inside …’ He whistles through his teeth.

  Schröter nods appreciatively. ‘I get it, and when someone flips the seat down at the next showing, the ordinary seat has turned into a very special seat, an enemy of the state, so to speak, and reveals its true face.’ He laughs briefly. ‘Good, son, very good. Has it caused you any problems?’

  The young worker shakes his head. ‘Not yet,’ he replies, ‘but we always leave the cinema before the end of the screening. Better safe than sorry.’

  ‘Yes,’ the blonde girl cuts in with a comically sad expression, ‘and it means we always miss the happy-ending kiss. Isn’t that terrible?’

  Schröter chuckles and looks from the young worker to the blonde girl. ‘Well, I assume you then act it out for real, the two of you.’

  The young worker shakes his head.

  The blonde girl’s face, which seemed cheerful and carefree a moment before, is now full of shadows, it is as if the sun, which had been shining on her face a moment before, had suddenly been obscured by a cloud.

  ‘Please don’t,’ she says quietly and turns her head away, to hide the fact that her eyes are filled with tears.

  Schröter, startled, looks at her and rests his rough and callused hand on her arm. ‘What is it, girl?’ he asks. ‘What have I said?’ His eyes wander from the blonde girl to Wiegand and from there to Dr Böttcher.

  Wiegand shakes his head. ‘Our Lotte isn’t a young girl any more, even if that’s what she looks like,’ he says quietly. ‘She is a young woman and has a nine-year-old daughter. Her husband … I’ll tell you later.’

  Lotte Poeschke shakes her head and tries to dry her tears with the back of her hand. ‘You can tell Comrade Rumpelstiltskin all about it,’ she says, ‘it’s in the past.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I touched a nerve,’ Schröter says. ‘Are you angry with me, Lotte?’

  ‘No,’ she says, and smiles through the last of her tears.

  Schröter smiles back, even though he doesn’t know why. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Our Lotte may be the bravest woman in Berlin,’ Wiegand says gravely, ‘but it’s not a good idea to touch on it.’

  Lotte Poeschke lowers her blonde head, her bright-blonde hair gleams in the light of the gloomy hanging lamp that has been lowered from the ceiling, and now Schröter sees that there are threads of grey here and there amidst the blonde.

  Lucie Wiegand has stood up and walked behind her, she strokes her hair gently and presses her face against her cheek. ‘Men can be a bit clumsy,’ she says, ‘and nosy as well.’

  The blonde woman straightens her head. ‘If you want to tell Comrade Rumpelstiltskin about it,’ she says firmly, ‘I don’t mind, but I can’t do it.’

  Then Wiegand speaks, he speaks slowly, with careful, cautious words, because he doesn’t want to run the risk of being over-dramatic or sentimental, and what he describes is this.

  ‘Lotte Poeschke came from a well-to-do Jewish family, she was brought up in that traditional way typical of German Jews, that curious mixture of eccentric isolation and willing assimilation, open to German customs but still with its face turned towards Jewishness, not fully a part of the bourgeois world about which it had certain reservations, but not a part of the proletariat, with whom it shared the fate of the oppressed. Lotte Poeschke, still Lotte Joachimsohn in those days, found her way from the Jewish Wandervogel movement to the Young Workers’ Movement, not to escape the monotony of bourgeois life, not as a snobbish little game, but driven by the social impulse of her heart. In the Young Workers’ Movement she met the mechanic Poeschke and married him, to the horror of her bourgeois family, who were forced to acknowledge that her social attitude was not some kind of youthful aberration but had become the purpose of her life. After 1933 she immediately started doing underground work. There was hardly anything she didn’t do, distributing flyers, working as a courier, sabotage, whispering campaigns, stealing guns, and for years everything was fine, fortune looked kindly on her, her innocent, girlish face, her wonderful smile, her bright blonde hair shielded her against suspicion and persecution. But one day the wings of death, which had only cast their shadow over her from time to time, suddenly hurled her to the ground. After the arson attack on the anti-Russian exhibition ‘Soviet Paradise’ in the Berlin Pleasure Garden, the whole group was arrested, including Lotte Poeschke and her husband. They were brought before the People’s Court in Leipzig, the usual proceedings were rolled out over them, the indictment also delivered the sentence, the official defence counsels squirmed industriously before the judges’ benches, the inevitable death sentences were announced and executed. Twenty-one times in a single day the prosecutor general read out the death sentence in a monotonous voice, twenty-one times yo
ung activists who had done nothing but fight for the cause of their oppressed people were tied to the block, twenty-one times the executioner’s axe came down, twenty-one heads were severed in that one day, twenty-one times a stream of warm blood poured into the ground, twenty-one corpses twitched one last time. Only Lotte Poeschke was left, she had fallen ill on the day of execution, and since the law decrees that a sick person cannot be executed, the day of her execution was postponed, for a day, two days, a week, many weeks, by which time she had fully recovered. But the execution was not carried out, a new court decision would have been required and it could not go through because the files had been lost in the meantime. Whether they had been accidentally mislaid with the files of the other twenty-one, whether they had been destroyed in an air raid or whether they had been removed by well-intentioned court officials is unknown.

  ‘The fact remains, however, that Lotte Poeschke, sentenced to death, was forgotten. She wandered from prison to prison but none of them wanted to take her. The legal machinery had fallen into chaos, Lotte Poeschke was not on remand, but neither had she been given a prison sentence, she had been sentenced to death for high treason, and the files containing her death sentence had been lost. But since the files also contained the evidence against her, the trial against her could not continue. The case of Lotte Poeschke threatened to fall into oblivion, in the end it almost lost the status of being a legal case at all, and all that remained was the legally neutral Lotte Poschke, who had no right of residence in any kind of penitentiary, who fell under no known rubric. As everyone knows, order must prevail, even among the millstones of the legal procedure. Just as the apparatus of the state legal machinery places the head of a mass murderer or a freedom fighter on the block and brings the axe down on his bared, clean-shaven neck, when all legal formalities have been completed, just as the court desk issues the relatives of the executed individual with a bill for the execution costs (precisely specified in terms of expenses according to §§ 49 and 52 of the Court Fees Act for the death penalty, postal charges according to § 721 of the CFA, costs according to § 726 of the CFA for the public defender, imprisonment expenses at RM 1.50 per day, costs for the execution of the sentence, postage costs for the dispatch of the bill of charges) and instructs them to pay it, so its crushing wheels could not intermesh if a single tooth was missing.

  ‘Then some conscientious court employee discovered that the prisoner Poeschke was Jewish. To a certain extent it was a rediscovery, because the legally imposed first name Sara had also been lost, and this immediately took the Poeschke case to a quite different level, it swept away all difficulties concerning the allocation of powers. As the normal courts and penal authorities no longer applied to Jews, the Poeschke case and the individual at its centre were passed to the Reich Security Head Office of the Secret State Police, the Gestapo.

  ‘Lotte Poeschke now found herself in the claws of another legal bureaucracy, and a new cycle began. She was put in the Jewish internment camp affiliated with the Jewish hospital in the north of Berlin. There were three kinds of prisoners there, the ones who were to be transported to the east and used as heating material for the incineration plants, the ones who were to be transported to Theresienstadt, a path to hell via the intermediate stage of purgatory, and those who fell under the heading of “N.r.”, or “Not registered”. Lotte Poeschke was not scheduled to be transported as she had to remain at the disposal of the Gestapo, so she was placed in the third category, and here there was a choice between the exercise grounds of Lichterfeld and Ravensbrück, one meaning a quick death in front of four rifles, the other a slow end through hunger, beatings, vivisection and illness.

  ‘As the Gestapo camps were largely self-administered, Lotte Poeschke, a trained nurse, became a camp nurse. In spite of all her inner torments she set about her new work, because here once again she immediately had the opportunity to allow her warm heart, her cheerful nature, her humane temperament to flow freely. She always had a smile on her lips, and always a friendly word of support, and all at once she was the helpful angel of the camp. As a nurse she enjoyed a certain liberty, and even though there were occasional opportunities to escape she did not do so, because she did not want to put the stewards who had been pressurized into guarding the camp under pressure by fleeing. But one day she did disappear. No one knew how it could have happened, no one could be held to account for it. She exploited the confusion around an air attack and escaped along an underground passage which connected the camp to the hospital, and which was opened for the air raid.

  ‘After four years in prison Lotte Poeschke was free again, but she did not remain afraid and in hiding. She resumed her clandestine activity, she began where she had stopped before her arrest, and she did so as naturally as if there were not four long and difficult years of suffering in between.’

  Wiegand pauses for a moment and clears his throat. He was speaking at first in a matter-of-fact reporting voice, almost a monotone, but then his voice rose in volume from sentence to sentence. ‘It all sounds so … so matter-of-fact,’ he continues. ‘We open a file, and it contains the words: Lotte Sara Poeschke née Joachimsohn, born on such and such, German national, no religion, recently resident in this place and that, height one metre sixty, hair blonde, eyes blue, distinguishing features none, prisoner number two-zero-one-hundred-and-sixteen, the dates of her arrest, preliminary investigation, main trial, death sentence, imprisonment, transfer, escape, but prisoner two-zero-one-hundred-and-sixteen is not only a piece of data in a file, two-zero-one-hundred-and-sixteen is a woman who breathes and feels, who has red blood flowing in her veins, who thinks a lot, she is a woman whose husband lost his head on the scaffold, who has her own head still on her shoulders purely by chance, two-zero-one-hundred-and-sixteen is a woman who thinks, about her husband and the other twenty comrades, who cannot banish the terrible memories or defend herself against the terrible images, in whose ears the footsteps of the condemned men still ring as they were led to the block, a woman who thinks, about her child, which is being dragged from pillar to post, without its father’s protection, without its mother’s love, exposed to humiliations and hunger, cursed and despised as a Mischling, a Jewish bastard, as subhuman. Four years between four narrow walls, with the rush of the falling axe constantly in her ears, grief for her husband in her heart, concern for her child at her back, a woman who believes, above and beyond her own fate in the greatness and power of the idea …’ Wiegand moves as if struggling against his own words. ‘Enough of this!’

  ‘So this is our comrade Lotte Poeschke,’ Schröter says, and clutches her hand. ‘If all women were like you …’ The door to the restaurant opens, and a man in the brown uniform of the Party’s political leaders comes in.

  ‘Heil … Heil Hitler!’

  Klose returns the greeting with a few indistinct words muttered between his teeth.

  ‘Your greeting doesn’t sound … doesn’t sound very enthusiastic,’ the brown-uniformed man says, and sits down at the bar.

  ‘I’m tired,’ Klose mutters. ‘You can’t sleep a whole night through. We’ve had about enough of these airborne gangsters.’

  ‘It’s … it’s coming,’ the Nazi says uncertainly, ‘just another few days … patience, a few days’ patience, then we’ll give the Bo … Bolsheviks and plu … plutocrats a … a … Cannae with our new weapons …’ He brings the flat of his hand down on the bar, making the glasses rattle.

  ‘What do you mean?’, asks Klose.

  ‘A Cannae, it’s a kind of … just read the Völk … the Völkischer Beobachter, it’s in there, the thing about … about the Cannae. A pint, please!’

  Klose pours it and hands him the glass.

  The man drinks half of the beer and shivers. ‘Brr, that tastes like horse … like horse piss, hahaha.’ He pushes back his cap and fans himself. ‘I’ve got a question for you, National … National Comrade, a question.’

  Klose gives him a questioning look. ‘Go ahead!’

  ‘I’m looking f
or block ward … block warden Otto Sasse,’ the Nazi says. ‘Ot-to Sas-se.’

  ‘He lives here in the block overlooking the street, three staircases on the left,’ Klose replies, and feels his heart suddenly thumping.

  ‘I know,’ the man says, ‘I know, but there’s been … there’s been no sign of him for a few days, no one’s open … no one’s opening the door.’

  Klose shrugs. ‘His wife is in the Sudetengau, she’s been evacuated,’ he replies.

  The Nazi drains his beer and pushes the glass over to Klose. ‘Another one,’ he demands. ‘On Sunday he was still with the local … the local group, you know, the local group shut up shop, and since then he’s disappeared, he’s simply disappeared, gone, gone away, he wasn’t even there at the rocket … rocket-launcher training practice in Küst … Küstriner Platz. And Sasse is one of the most dedicated … dedicated men, yes, that’s what he is. I was up at … up at Hühnerstiege, but there’s not a not a soul … not a soul up there. And three days’ worth of the VB untouched in his mail … in his mailbox, yes, three days’.’

  ‘Hm, yes …’, Klose drawls, ‘can’t help you there, I’m afraid.’

  The man frowns and takes a small sip. ‘When did you … when did you … last see him?’

  ‘Maybe three or four days ago,’ Klose replies, ‘he didn’t come and see me very often.’

  The Nazi says nothing and finishes his beer in very small sips. ‘You haven’t got a schnapps there by any chance, a schnapps? This is horse … horse piss.’

  Klose shakes his head. ‘Nothing to be done, O valiant chieftain, bare ruined choirs where once the sweet birds sang …’

  The Nazi wags a finger at him. ‘You old … you old con artist. What sort of … of people are these?’ he asks, nodding his head backward.

  ‘I don’t know these people,’ Klose replies. ‘Something to do with an engagement, I think.’