by Heinz Rein
‘They’ve got strangely … strangely tense expressions,’ the Nazi slurs, and turns his whole chair round, ‘it must be one hell of a serious … serious engagement, yes, deadly serious. Strange that they’re … sitting around, when there could be an … an alarm at any moment.’
‘That’s exactly why they’re sitting here,’ Klose replies, ‘because the bunker is only a few minutes away.’
The Nazi raises his hand and waves it around. ‘Klose, there’s something about your pub that … that doesn’t feel quite right,’ the man says, and looks sharply at Klose. ‘Sasse comp … complained about you a few times at the local group, you fat pig. A few times, he did.’
‘Wasn’t aware of it,’ Klose defends himself. ‘My pub is clean, but of course I can’t look under everybody’s waistcoat and examine their heart and kidneys. And incidentally the Gestapo turned my place upside down only two days ago.’
‘Your place?’ the man says in amazement, and opens his eyes wide. ‘Over in Mad … Madaistrasse there was a … a raid, in the hotels and pubs on Madaistrasse.’
‘And on that occasion the gentlemen did me the honour too,’ Klose says firmly. Total lies, but an outstanding performance, he adds to himself.
‘I … I didn’t know that,’ the Nazi says, reassured. ‘Well, all the better for you. Isn’t that the … the siren?’
Klose shakes his head. ‘No, that was a train in the station, but it’s bound to be soon. It’s already past nine.’ He claps his hands. ‘Ladies and gents, please get your things together, I’m about to close.’
The Nazi staggers to his feet and snorts violently, then he moves his hands like an orator who wants people to listen to him. ‘One … one moment,’ he says loudly and totters towards the table where the group is sitting. ‘All … allow me to introduce myself, my honoured National … National Comrades, cell admin … cell administrator Emil Hoffmeister.’ He clicks his heels together and extends his right arm. ‘Heil to our Füh … Führer!’
The people around the table sit in silence. Dr Böttcher raises his hand slightly in a gesture towards a salute.
‘Why are you sitting there like … like tailors’ dummies?’ the Nazi shouts, and props his hands on the table. ‘Is this an eng … engagement? A funer … a funeral party is what you are, oh yes, a fu-ner-al par-ty. Haven’t you got someone to tinkle the ivories or something?’
No one answers, they all stare angrily at the man in the hated brown uniform, only Dr Böttcher tries to lighten the silence with a joke.
‘Open your … your mouths and say something, you, you … scoundrels!’ the Nazi roars. ‘I’m cell administrator Emil Hoff-meister. One of you go to the … to the piano!’
‘There’s about to be an air raid,’ Wiegand says and gets to his feet, ‘we’re off now.’
‘Sit down, you screwball!’ the Nazi bellows. ‘One of you … one of you go to the piano. Will you get a move on?’ He leans down and studies the faces. ‘I’m sure … I’m sure … you can play the piano,’ he says, and points a finger at Lassehn. ‘I’m sure you can.’
Dr Böttcher waves a hand at Lassehn. Lassehn reluctantly gets to his feet and goes to the piano. He hasn’t played for a year and a half, often he has stretched his hands out in yearning for the ivory keys and played scales and chords, arpeggios and chromatic scales in the air, but now he resists being forced, ordered to sit at the piano. But he can’t make a stand, there’s no point irritating the Nazi by resisting, he opens the lid and lets his hands rest uncertainly on the keys.
‘Come on!’ the Nazi yells. ‘Play!’
Lassehn closes his eyes for a few seconds, then begins the first phrase of ‘Les Adieux’, but only manages a few bars.
The Nazi gives him a shove in the back. ‘What … what sort of rubbish is that?’
‘Beethoven,’ Lassehn replies, ‘Ludwig van Beethoven.’
‘Not up to date, old Beethoven isn’t,’ the Nazi says. ‘Play the Horst Wes … the Horst Wessel Song.’ He draws a semicircle in the air with his hand and then raises it in the Hitler salute. ‘And you all sing along, everyone, you hear? One, two, three!
Raise high the flag
The ranks are tightly closed
The SA marches
With calm and …
Why aren’t you singing, you … you swine?’
‘There’s an air raid, pal,’ says Klose, and rests a hand on his shoulder. ‘Can’t you hear it? The Mosquitoes are here!’
IV
20 April
It’s one of the most astonishing facts that abnormal circumstances can become a daily habit if they occur in series. It isn’t just that people’s senses are quickly dulled, whether by suffering or joy, by acts of kindness and acts of cruelty; even their habits adapt to particular situations as soon as those become the standard. The original habits and sensations quickly weaken under the pressure of a new way of life. Weighed down by these unusual circumstances, they are obscured and soon become nothing but a vague memory. It is in the nature of modern man to invent a kind of system for his way of life that is far from any hitherto familiar norm, and to come to terms with things even in the desert of privation, his nerve system also reacts reliably to unusual things as long as they recur with a certain regularity. Habit is the full sister of intellectual sluggishness: it wraps mankind in a soft shell that hugs each fold and each twist of the brain, conducting the effector cells and influencing the receptor cells, in the end subjugating them entirely. Eventually it inverts concepts, the norm becomes the exception, the exception the norm, fear is no longer fear, torment no longer torment, danger no longer danger, an acute illness becomes a chronic state of suffering which is accepted as immutable. What appears physically as indifference and psychically as apathy is nothing but a mimicry of the brain. In the course of the war that becomes obvious. People get used to living in darkened rooms, to switching or reducing their food intake to a particular quantity of calories and a different level of vitamins content, to their male relatives who have been called up for military service constantly being exposed to deadly danger, and when the war reaches far behind the front lines and the air becomes a theatre of war as well, the strength of habit can be seen most clearly: the danse macabre accompanied by the orchestra of sirens, anti-aircraft guns, aeroplane engines and bomb explosions becomes a daily round-dance and a natural event in the course of everyday life.
Only seven days have passed since Lassehn has been back in Berlin; they have been filled with all kinds of events, numerous meetings and with an activity that he hasn’t even heard of before. This life, which at first lay before him like a deep, dark wood through whose shade no paths took shape, and in which thick and hostile undergrowth hampered his every step, assumed an almost methodical form with surprising speed, only now and again is Lassehn surprised by anything, and then only by himself. Everything has already become second nature: that he is on the move by day, collecting flyers and leaving them somewhere, in the underground or the S-Bahn, in public conveniences or mailboxes in apartment blocks, that his footsteps take him to Strasse Am Schlesischen Bahnhof in the evening, that he feels quite at home in Klose’s restaurant, that Klose supplies him with food, and that even without asking particularly for permission, he throws himself down for the night on the sofa in the back room, and even that has become second nature, that he has papers in his pocket made out in the name of Horst Winter, who lost his life in an air raid and who is now saving lives from beyond the grave, that he has a loaded gun with him at all times and is ruthlessly willing to use it (as he has done twice).
Now Lassehn sits in tram 64, bound for Hohenschönhausen. At first he tried to look out of the window, but that is not possible, the few trams that are still travelling along the streets of Berlin in April 1945 no longer offer this possibility, because the windows are either painted blue, if they still have glass in their frames, and allow only a blurred vision of the streets, or else they are covered over with cardboard or wood.
On his seat he found the
DAZ for 19 April and gave it a quick look. He is particularly repelled by the frantic optimism of this newspaper, which even prides itself on its independence. Every soldier knows that the peak of an attack is not reached on the first day, and that a provisional assessment of its success or failure is impossible after only three or four days, but the military commentator of DAZ is unaware of this, because he writes the following:
We can already make one crucial observation with certainty: the hopes that our enemies have of suddenly overrunning the sections of the eastern front which they are attacking have not been fulfilled. Admittedly it is only to be expected that the enemy will pump additional fighting reserves into the focal points of its attack, the development of the first three days already allows us to assume that these reserves will be deployed less as additional forces and more as a substitute for the very high losses of these first three days of battle. In those places, after a brief flush of victory, they are now clear that one can no longer talk in terms of an ‘Allied tank race to Berlin’.
When he had skimmed through the newspaper and then left it casually aside, particularly since reading in a violently lurching tram with the light from outside blacked out is a torment in any case, he has no distraction but his own thoughts.
He is on his way to Hohenschönhausen, to see that lady Elisabeth Mattner with whom he marched a few days after the daytime raid by the Americans from Wittenbergerplatz to Alexanderplatz, and who freed him in the ‘Bayernhof’ restaurant from the unpleasant company of the red-faced man. Lassehn received an invitation when he said goodbye to her at Alexanderplatz. Admittedly Elisabeth Mattner said only, ‘Come and visit me some time, Herr Lassehn!’, but it was more than a phrase, an almost rhetorical invitation. Her voice contained a promise, in her eyes there was a glint of flattering, unbridled wooing, her soft, warm hand rested in his for an unusually long time and pressed firmly against it. As Lassehn has always underestimated his effect on women, the friendliness of Elisabeth Mattner at first struck him as a kind of typically feminine politeness or sympathy, and he was almost ashamed of himself for undressing her and caressing her with his eyes and his thoughts as she climbed the steps in front of him in the ‘Bayernhof’.
Later, when they had to stumble over mountains of rubble on Friedrichstrasse, he was helpful to her and supported her to keep her from falling, and when he took her arm he came into contact with her breast, which swelled full and firm from her suit jacket. Lassehn flinched with alarm, immediately loosened his grip and almost stammered an apology, but it soon turned out that it had not been a matter of chance. The next time they had to make their way over a pile of rubble, which was not particularly high and not very hard to climb over, Elisabeth Mattner asked for his support, and when he carefully took her arm, brought her breast into contact with his hand by turning her body quickly. In the end they walked on arm in arm, not like a married couple, with their arms loosely linked, but not like lovers either, with their forearms touching and their fingers entwined, to absorb a lot of warmth from the other person, no, Lassehn and Elisabeth Mattner walked together in quite a particular way. It happened as a man holds the arm of a woman whom he needs to support because she is unsteady on her feet or feeling faint, by putting his hand around her upper arm. But the fact that she kept her upper arm pressed tightly against her body meant that Lassehn’s hand was caught between the warmth of her arm and the warmth of her breast.
Of course Lassehn’s blood was suddenly stirred, but it didn’t condense into a wild and impetuous longing. He had forbidden himself all desires, particularly since the woman’s face had been entirely unselfconscious. In the end Lassehn gratefully accepted as a precious gift the womanly warmth that trickled from her breast into his body, and even temporarily forgot it via an interesting conversation about a musical subject.
When they said goodbye beneath the city-railway viaduct at Alexanderplatz Station, that invitation with the unspoken promise helped him understand something that had previously seemed unclear or a matter of chance as an intention or a test, a rehearsal or an examination, but had not yet fanned his blood into a flame of desire. Two things stood in the way of that, one the thought of Irmgard, with whom he had not yet had the chance to speak, and respect for the unknown Herr Mattner, the husband of Elisabeth Mattner, who is at the front in Italy and, as a paymaster, his comrade, even if he is his superior.
Lassehn is one of those young men who does not see the woman who smiles at him, or who is willing to transform sympathy into complete abandonment, simply as booty or as an object of pleasure, without introducing some kind of obligation or sense of responsibility, he always considers women and girls as the helpless, weak creatures in need of his protection that they ceased to be long ago. He has failed to notice that the long war years have made women hard and independent, that their emotional attitude has crucially altered, and traditional concepts have finally been overcome. Never before have women’s lives been so geared towards the present moment, has the past disappeared into a grave without a trace, has the future been so opaquely veiled, never before has the impulse of the moment, the diktat of chance, so determined the rhythm of their emotions and so weakened their reservations. The wave of danger that crashes around them every day and every hour has burst the dyke of inhibitions, transforming the longing for tenderness into an eagerness for intense sensations. On the narrow threshold between life and death, when all around them material objects are burnt away and psychical supports are breaking away, the body alone remains as the vessel of a brief moment of happiness, which must be caught mid-flight like a butterfly, and which, like the butterfly, quickly loses its colour when you touch it. Happiness is now no longer a tenderly flowing adagio, since the sirens are wailing day and night, it is no longer a mildly fanning breeze beneath trees in the evening, since fire storms are raging across the city, no longer a word inspired by the classics, since a satanic desire for destruction is screaming down all reason, happiness has declined to become the fulfilment of physical needs, it is fodder and copulation, happiness can only be found in the hysterical hunt for cigarettes, real coffee and alcohol, for embraces and orgasms. The sexual act has become nothing more than a physical performance.
And now Lassehn is on his way to Hohenschönhausen, to pay Elisabeth Mattner that visit that was promised so casually and as if in passing. He is not going with the firm intention of embracing her, but neither is it his plan to escape such an embrace if the opportunity arose and he recognized her willingness. After his meeting with that strange and mysterious woman whose name is Irmgard Lassehn and who was his wife for eight days, Lassehn has undergone a transformation which may not be fundamental (since a character cannot fundamentally change), but the mystery of sex has revealed itself to him, and the only things that remain are calculation, deception and lust. But since no one can jump over his own shadow and Lassehn is used to justifying himself even to himself, he has convinced himself that he is connected to Irmgard by a formal legal bond but nothing else, and that Elisabeth Mattner can make up her own mind about how to behave with him. It is an attempt to free himself in advance of all responsibility, and assure himself of absolution, but also to expose himself to that unknown component of our lives that is called faith and is in fact only chance.
Lassehn gives a start when the conductor announces the Weissenseer Weg stop, he pushes his way to the exit, enduring some harsh words about himself, and jumps from the carriage, which has already set off again.
Now he stands in the encroaching darkness, and at first it seems as if he is in open countryside. For a moment he suspects that Elisabeth Mattner has duped him, but when his eyes have become used to the darkness he recognizes his surroundings. Where the tram pulled in there is a row of houses, some of which seem to have been partly destroyed, as if something has gnawed at them. A wide street passes in front of it, loomed over by the Eiffel Towers of high-tension power lines. This street is the Weissenseer Weg, it doesn’t belong to any pattern because it isn’t a city street, but neithe
r is it an avenue, it isn’t an arterial road, but more of a cross-country road, a wide road with two tram tracks running along its length, partly in the middle of the carriageway along a kind of promenade, partly off to the eastern side. To the right and left isolated houses appear, and open fields, the road surface is cobbled and tarmacked, but for long stretches the pavements are nothing but dirt paths. There is nothing more depressing than an unfamiliar area in the gloom of evening. Lassehn has never been here before, he doesn’t know where he is, he memorized Elisabeth Mattner’s address a few days before and remembers that he has to take line 63 to Berliner Strasse on the corner of Weissenseer Weg and then continue in the same direction, but nothing more than that. Lassehn stands there uncertainly, darkness and abandonment shiver over his skin. He can’t make up his mind to take so much as a step along the course of the road, the question of the point of this visit is appearing too insistently in his mind. But then he shakes off his doubts, setting off with great determination, he walks past a ruined filling station and some dilapidated buildings, a few people slip away like fleeting shadows, and the bell of the tram penetrates the darkness from a long way off. Getting his bearings seems impossible, but in the end he finds the building he is looking for, climbs the two flights of stairs in the light of his torch because the light on the stairs doesn’t work, and knocks firmly on the door bearing the brass plaque ‘W. Mattner’.
A few seconds pass without anything happening in the flat. Irresolute characters tend to make their decision on the basis of accidental phenomena, and settle for explanations as to why things had to happen exactly like that. Lassehn is filled with a strange mixture of disappointment and satisfaction, but while he is still trying to work out whether it is disappointment over a failed adventure or satisfaction that it might be better that way, he hears a footstep.
Elisabeth Mattner is standing in the doorway, holding a candle in her hand and lighting Lassehn’s face.