by Heinz Rein
‘A very interesting report,’ Wiegand replies.
“Berlin, 26 April
New Commander of the Luftwaffe.
Reich Marshal Hermann Goering Falls Ill.
Reich Marshal Hermann Göring has fallen ill with a chronic heart condition that has persisted for some time, and which has now entered a more acute stage. He himself has therefore asked to be released during this time, which requires the deployment of all available energy, from the leadership of the Luftwaffe and the tasks connected to it.
The Führer has granted this request.
As the new Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, the Führer has appointed General von Greim, at the same time promoting him to Field Marshal.”
‘He fell ill at the right time,’ Private Poppe says. ‘A shame you can’t get yourself written off sick as an ordinary grunt.’
‘Extremely interesting,’ says Dr Böttcher, ‘above all because it doesn’t say whether he is holding on to his other offices. It’s clear that the thing stinks. The Führer’s deputy suddenly goes mad, and the Reich Marshal has a chronic heart condition.’
‘Where does it say that about Göring?’ Corporal Schumann asks, his voice now uncertain, having almost entirely lost its harsh edge.
‘You don’t believe it?’ Wiegand asks him. ‘Here, read for yourself, on page three. And here, you can check, this is Panzerbär and not Pravda.’
The corporal takes the paper and reads.
‘Surely you’re going to believe your own newspaper?’ Schröter asks.
‘The paper might just be some sort of forgery,’ the corporal says, but his voice sounds flat and unconvinced.
‘Who published it?’
He turns the paper round and reads under his voice: ‘Der Panzerbär, Publisher Fp.-No. 67,700.’
‘You only believe what fits with your preconceptions,’ Schröter says. ‘Christ, will you finally open your eyes?’
The corporal turns round and crumples the newspaper.
‘Is that checkmate, Corporal Schumann?’ Ruppert asks.
‘If it all goes to hell, I’m going down with it!’ Schumann says furiously. ‘Or do you think I’m going to stay here in this stinking hole to drown in my own swill, or be taken prisoner by the Bolsheviks?’
‘But?’ Dr Böttcher asks.
The corporal is stubbornly silent. ‘I’ve got a plan …’ he says after a while.
Lucie Wiegand gets up and rests a hand on his arm. ‘You’re practically still a boy,’ she says quietly. ‘Why do you want to throw your life away?’
Schumann looks her in the eye with a dark, crooked smile. ‘You wouldn’t understand, young woman,’ he says.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s men’s business.’
Schröter is about to object, but Lucie Wiegand dismisses him with a quick wave of her hand. ‘I have four children, young Corporal, I carried each of them in my body for nine months, I shielded them with my body, I fed them with my blood, I bore them with so much pain that every time I thought I was going to die, so violent were the pains that raged in me and the spasms that shook me. And the same happened to my mother.’
‘Why are you telling me that?’ the corporal asks, still displeased.
‘How can it be worthless, a life created in love, a life awaited in hope and longing and brought into the world in blissful pain?’ Lucie Wiegand says insistently.
‘Those are fine words, nothing more,’ the corporal says, and turns round abruptly, then he walks to the basement exit and stares into the faint, fluid light of day.
‘You have never yet loved, young man,’ Lucie Wiegand says softly.
The corporal doesn’t reply, he stands motionless in the doorway, a frail young figure in a worn, field-grey coat, hands deep in his pockets, with long and stringy fair hair that reaches down to the back of his neck.
‘Can’t you see by now …’ Private Ruppert begins.
Corporal Schumann swings violently round, pulls his hands from his coat pockets and puts his steel helmet on his head with a practised movement.
‘Leave me in peace, all of you!’ he shouts. ‘I can’t see a thing!’
‘You’re not quite right,’ Private Ruppert says, tapping his forehead with his index finger.
‘Shut up!’ Schumann roars again. ‘Stand to attention, you hopeless old fool! Right, on your feet, that’s enough dozing!’
‘When a person goes mad, he does so from the head first,’ a soldier says from his mattress.
‘Get up, you lousy bastards, fall in!’
‘The corporal is escaping into his ordering tone of voice,’ Dr Böttcher says ironically. ‘Repressed feelings of anxiety lead to an over-intensification of the sense of self.’
‘Stop talking such nonsense!’ the corporal roars at him. ‘You’re to keep your trap shut just as much as everybody else! Right, on your feet!’
‘You can kiss me where I’m prettiest,’ a private soldier says without moving from the mattress.
‘That’s a refusal to obey orders, that’s mutiny!’ Schumann yells. ‘You know what’s at stake.’
‘What you need is a cold bath,’ Schröter says.
The corporal raises his sub-machine gun.
‘The lieutenant has transferred command to me during his absence,’ he shouts. ‘I’ll use this gun.’
Two soldiers get heavily to their feet. ‘He’s got NCO rage,’ one of them says as he straightens his belt. ‘Nothing to be done.’
‘I’ll wait one more minute,’ Schumann says in a slightly quieter voice. ‘If the platoon isn’t in ranks by then I’m reporting you.’
‘Best thing would be to go straight to the Führer,’ Poppe says comfortably, and sits down slowly and awkwardly. ‘This time, unusually, he’s not living far from the front.’
‘I forbid you …’ the corporal says furiously and raises his sub-machine gun.
Schröter jumps over to him and knocks the weapon out of his hand. ‘You’ve really lost your mind,’ he says furiously.
The corporal doesn’t defend himself, he stands there with his hands clenched, his shoulders twitch, his cheeks tremble, the corners of his mouth droop, his face collapses in on itself, then he bends his arm in front of his face and leans against the wall, a dry sob shaking his body.
‘His nerves are shot,’ Schröter says, and picks up the sub-machine gun.
The corporal lifts his head from the hollow of his arm for a few seconds. ‘I wouldn’t have fired at you, Poppe,’ he says, ‘you’ve got to believe that, the sub-machine gun still had its safety catch on.’ A few tears run down his cheeks.
Lucie Wiegand runs her hand gently down his back. ‘It’ll all be fine again, son,’ she says tenderly.
The corporal wipes the tears from his face with the sleeve of his jacket. ‘Leave me in peace!’ he says harshly, his lips twitching.
No one says a word. The collapse of the young corporal, his tears and his last attempt to resist an incomprehensible fate that dragged him from the heights of fame into this cellar in the shattered capital, have silenced everyone. The one standing there now, arms dangling, in the cellar doorway, staring into the flowing grey daylight, is a symbol of a lost, abandoned, betrayed youth.
Suddenly a spasm runs through the young corporal, he pulls himself up to attention, steps aside to leave the doorway free and shouts loudly, ‘Attention!’ Footsteps ring out, two grey shadows fall through the door, two large men bend down and come into the cellar. Lieutenant Tolksdorff and Hauptsturmführer Wiegand.
‘Tolksdorff squad with fifteen men!’ Corporal Schumann announces.
The Hauptsturmführer thanks him and peers into the dark cellar, in which the faintly flickering light of the Hindenburg candle and the thin grey daylight mingle into a gloomy twilight.
‘Bloody dark down here,’ says the Hauptsturmführer.
Lieutenant Tolksdorff peers tensely into the semi-darkness, his eyes seeking the two Wiegands. They have withdrawn unnoticed into the furthest corner of the cellar, which
is totally plunged in deep shadow.
‘Comrades!’ the Hauptsturmführer says, his voice sharp and treading a thin line between joviality and command. ‘The battle for the capital is being fought with great ferocity, but it is by no means decided, as our enemies imagine. This morning I was ordered to the Führer’s headquarters, and stood face to face with the Führer, I received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross from his very hand, and my promotion to Sturmbannführer.’
There was something that struck me, Lassehn thinks, standing in the second row with Ruppert, Schröter and the young tank gunner, he’s got the Knight’s Cross around his neck, and he’s even had time to add the fourth star to his epaulettes and collar.
‘Comrades!’ Sturmbannführer Wiegand continues. ‘I regard this decoration and promotion as a decoration for the whole battalion, of which you too are now members, Comrades! Our situation is serious, but it isn’t hopeless. The Führer is among us, and he confidently told those who were gathered around him today that the reserve armies are advancing on Berlin from all sides. It can’t be long before the containment ring is broken through. But that will be the first step along the path on which we repel the Bolsheviks. We must rally closely around the Führer in Teutonic loyalty and form a solid kernel of resistance.’
He pauses briefly and lets his eyes wander over their faces.
‘Comrades! I am depending on you. Remember your oath. Heil to our Führer!’
XVII
28 April
Time drips, heavy as lead, one minute is like another, one hour as monotonous as the next. The armed attacks become violent and ease again, they stretch out into a long, deafening barrage or come down briefly like a shower of rain, the artillery rumbles in the distance like an approaching storm or crashes like nearby thunder.
One ruined house is like another, one perhaps robbed of all its innards and only preserving its outward face, the other stonily collapsed in on itself. One cellar is like another, low-ceilinged, damp, filled with the smell of mildew and populated by rats, one perhaps rectangular, the other all crooked angles. There are cellars that are like crushed skulls, but between and below the ruins there are also cellars whose skull-ceilings have held and survived the pressure of the collapsing masonry.
In the first kind of cellar the skeletons of the dead still crouch, with limbs that are cramped, twisted, staved in and crushed, the rats dart quickly and greedily around, in these days of death they have eaten their fill, because there is a wide selection of human and animal corpses in cellars and tunnels, in courtyards and streets.
The second kind of cellar is inhabited by creatures which science identifies as Homo sapiens. In their way of life, however, they deviate considerably from the familiar pattern for this species; with the increasing duration of their cellar and cave existence they reveal the qualities that distinguish their habits from those of animals, and are evolving back to the species of primitive man which has just crossed the threshold of the age of human consciousness.
The Tolksdorff group of the SS battalion moved on from Stralauer Strasse to the city centre, as it was threatened with containment from Molkenmarkt, in the shelter of night they retreated down many streets and across many squares, climbed over piles of rubble and debris, stumbled over wrecked cars and tanks, fell into shell craters, forced their way across courtyards and through holes in walls, ran down burning streets and in the end lost their bearings. The dark of night flickers with the muzzle flashes of the volley guns, phosphorescing with a green glow over the jagged silhouettes of the ruins, and is illuminated completely for seconds at a time by the slowly falling parachute flares from the planes, which bathe everything in a repellently harsh light and violently hurl the destruction into the field of vision.
At last the Tolksdorff group found an empty cellar whose ceiling is only burst in a few places. In this cellar, they don’t even know which street it is on, whether it is in the defence zone or already in the occupied territory or in the strip of rubble known in military terminology as no-man’s-land, in this cellar the group spends the rest of the night. The cellars on the right and left are occupied by the other units of the battalion, which stay in contact by courier.
Not until the first waves of morning light break through the layer of haze and clouds of smoke that lie wide and heavy over the torsos of the houses and lighten the darkness a little is it possible for them to get their bearings. A toppled street sign shows that the cellar belongs to a house on Anhalter Strasse, and soon it also turns out that the retreat to this area was by no means random, because the battalion has been more or less selected to raise a blockade in the south of Friedrichstadt, to hold off the Russians advancing from Tempelhof down Belle-Alliance-Strasse towards the Hallesches Tor. The battalion has also been assigned the honourable task of taking over the immediate protection of the government district.
Only the faintest hint of the dawning day forces its way into the Tolksdorff group’s cellar. Lassehn and the young tank gunner stand as a double sentry post in the gateway, whose arch is shattered and whose weighty pillars bear the traces of exploding shells. The ruins of this area date from some time ago, grass sprouts among the rubble and in the cracks in the burst asphalt, in the gutter and between the rust-red tram tracks, the grass the only colour in this grey, gashed, stony landscape.
‘These were all once blocks,’ Lassehn says thoughtfully, ‘blocks of flats, flats with rooms, rooms with furniture, furniture with crockery and clothing …’
‘… and in the flats and among the furniture, people moved,’ the tank gunner concludes.
Lassehn looks at the young soldiers in their black uniforms. He has been a little noisy and boastful, and in fact the only one to take the side of Corporal Schumann. Since the collapse of the corporal he too has become meek and has held back, the superior irony with which he and Schumann had enjoyed irritating the older privates and Volkssturm men has made way for bafflement and insecurity.
‘Yes,’ Lassehn says after a while, and steps out from behind the protecting pillar, ‘and once upon a time people lived there.’
‘Once upon a time sounds as if it’s an eternity ago,’ the tank gunner says. ‘If you stand at the edge of the city of Pompeii, now sunk in lava and ashes, you can talk about once upon a time, but here …’
‘Yes, the ruins are still almost warm with the breath and bodies of the people who populated it,’ Lassehn adds, ‘and yet – if the people who lived six months ago or three months ago in that house over there’ – he points at the house whose walls still loom high, yet enclose only a burnt-out cave – ‘were now standing in front of them and letting their eyes wander into the corners and niches, it seems to them unimaginably long ago that they once sat in this corner in the soft chair under the warm light of a standard lamp and held a book in their hands, or embraced the body of a woman in the bed by that wall, or that in those four walls, which once perhaps enclosed a kitchen, a woman walked around, turning on a brass tap so that water gushed forth, she turned a knob on an apparatus and gas hissed, she turned a switch and light blazed, a bell rang, she lifted a moulded casing and an ingenious concatenation of microphone, cable and electric current allowed her to hold a telephone conversation. All of these outward signs of former happiness, of things formerly taken for granted, have been rubbed away and crushed, they have dissolved, the life that they once led within these walls has become as unattainable as a distant horizon, they try in vain to approach it, and even if they seem to be getting closer to it, it moves away from them, they can never catch up with it, all that is left behind is bare walls and a smell of burning.’
The tank gunner stares fixedly into the empty walls. ‘Isn’t our whole life like that, Comrade?’ he asks, without averting his eye from the house. ‘A façade without content?’
‘Our life is like the other houses on this street,’ Lassehn replies, ‘even the façades have collapsed.’
‘And what is left?’
‘Only the raw, destroyed material and our han
ds, to shape something new from it.’
The young tank gunner takes his hands out of his pockets and holds them out in front of him. ‘Our hands?’ he says, and laughs for a moment. ‘What can they do? They forgot long ago what they used to be able to do, and what they have learned in the last six years they will probably never be able to use.’
‘Things turn up,’ Lassehn says, ‘as long as you want them to.’
‘I don’t know if I do want them to,’ the tank gunner replies. ‘I’m just tired, I don’t want to hear anything more, no promises or anything, I don’t want to be addressed by any speeches or any posters any more, I don’t want to.’
‘That isn’t even despair coming out of you,’ Lassehn says.
The tank gunner nods listlessly. ‘It’s true, there’s no despair in me now, nothing but apathy and resignation, whether I’m standing here or walking around somewhere, whether I’m eating or sitting on the latrine, I always feel as if I’m lying down, unbelievably stiff, as if in a plaster, in a sickbed, staring into impenetrable darkness. That’s how I feel.’
Lassehn steps back behind the pillar and lights a cigarette. He has felt the very things that the young tank gunner just mentioned, but he couldn’t admit it, he has tried to suppress the questions in order not to have to provide answers. What the young soldier said the previous night also came dangerously close to touching him. We are like driftwood, he said. Hasn’t there always been a whirlpool around us, which we couldn’t escape? Wiegand, the doctor, Schröter, Gregor, even Ruppert, they know what they want, they are impelled by their own will towards a particular goal, but we have only ever been moved, and now that those who have previously moved us are no longer there, we drift aimlessly onward, we have become driftwood.
The gloom is turning more and more into day. Somewhere in the east, beyond the looming ruins, above the seething clouds of smoke, the sun must have risen long since, somewhere it shines clearly in a cloudless spring sky, warming the earth with its rays, only here it is overcast and sombre, on the horizon burning torches form a black, burnt-out wall of cloud which towers heavy and gloomy into the spring sky.