by Heinz Rein
‘Even if there was room,’ the air-raid warden cuts in, ‘that cellar’s not for you. Do you think I’d risk going down for facilitating an escape and so on?’
‘And there you have the shit,’ the tank gunner says to Lassehn. ‘It’s obvious, it stinks for seven miles with the wind in the other direction.’
‘Listen, my dear man,’ Private Ruppert says, and walks right up to the air-raid warden, ‘the SS and the Gestapo have chirped their last, you shouldn’t rely on those fellows, or you’re stuffed.’
‘But …’ the air-raid warden wants to object.
‘There’s no but,’ Ruppert says in a superior and condescending voice, ‘and you should throw that badge of yours somewhere where no one can find it.’
‘You can leave that up to me,’ the air-raid warden says stubbornly.
‘Fine, we will,’ Schröter says.
‘Christ,’ says Private Hinzpeter, ‘don’t be so obstinate, the Third Reich is over, a blind man can see that. Here you’ve got an excellent opportunity to give yourself an alibi.’
‘An alibi? How do you mean?’
‘Look, if you find room for us,’ Private Hinzpeter says eagerly, ‘then you’ll have done something … Just the thing that …’ He falls awkwardly silent and remembers his own Party membership.
‘Come on, out with it,’ the air-raid warden says impatiently.
‘Well, among us there are a few …’ He looks shyly at Wiegand, Dr Böttcher and Schröter. ‘Well, a few people who might be able to do something for you later on, I mean.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the air-raid warden says.
‘Just shut up for a bit,’ Schröter says. ‘If you’re reluctant, you great air-raid Nazi, there are a few tried and tested methods.’ He aims his rifle at the air-raid warden. ‘Hands up!’
The air-raid warden immediately throws his arms in the air. ‘For God’s sake …’ he pants.
Schröter laughs briefly and lowers his rifle again. ‘Do you know what I mean now, Party Comrade air-raid warden?’
Dr Wiedemann rests a hand on the air-raid warden’s shoulder. ‘I’m sure there’s room here somewhere, Herr Zimmer,’ he says, ‘where you could put up the men. It’ll probably only be for one or two days, perhaps even just a few hours.’
The air-raid warden has brought his arms slowly back down again. ‘Well, there might be a room,’ he says, ‘the boiler room.’
‘Up to the boiler room,’ says Dr Böttcher. ‘Right then, show us the boiler room.’
The air-raid warden looks doggedly at the floor and doesn’t move from the spot.
‘Along the corridor,’ he says, pointing to the corridor, which leads past a number of rooms fenced off with lathes. ‘You can’t miss it, the boiler room.’
‘One of you stay by the door,’ Dr Böttcher says, ‘so that the air-raid warden here doesn’t get the idea of … Will you go first, Lassehn?’
The boiler room is not very spacious, with a big stove and two water-boilers, but it is almost directly below street level, the skylights are blocked with sandboxes, and even the electric light is on.
Dr Wiedemann has followed the troop to the boiler room. ‘The Russians will be here by tomorrow at the latest,’ he says, ‘perhaps even tonight.’
‘We don’t know very much about what’s going on,’ Wiegand says. ‘Do you know more?’
‘Only vaguely,’ Dr Wiedemann replies. ‘The Russians are already at Belle-Alliance-Platz, they are even supposed to have got as far as lower Friedrichstrasse and Wilhelmstrasse, on the other side they are already behind Anhalt Station and close to Potsdamer Platz.’
‘So we’re right in the middle,’ says Private Ruppert. ‘Damn, if only we’d stayed on Stralauer Strasse it would all be over already.’
‘Of course,’ Dr Wiedemann says, ‘the army report is already mentioning Alexanderplatz.’
‘You’ve got an army report?’ Schröter asks quickly. ‘Radio or newspaper?’
‘Newspaper,’ says Dr Wiedemann, ‘here’s today’s Panzerbär.’
Schröter takes the paper.
‘Those miserable hacks,’ he says contemptuously.
‘Heroic Struggle.
Strike Forces Brought in
Day and Night.
The Battle for the Heart of the City Rages.
Diversionary Attacks Under Way.
From the Führer’s headquarters, 28 April
Wehrmacht High Command wishes it to be known:
In the heroic battle for the city of Berlin the fateful battle of the German people against Bolshevism is once more being played out in front of the whole world.
While the city is being defended in a struggle on a unique historical scale, our troops have turned our backs on the Americans at the Elbe to relieve the defenders of Berlin by attacking from without.
In the inner defence ring the enemy has penetrated Charlottenburg from the north and the Tempelhofer Feld from the south. At the Hallesches Tor and Alexanderplatz the fight for the heart of the city has begun. The east-west axis is under heavy fire.
Airborne units are supporting the fighting, with great self-sacrifice on the part of their crews. In spite of heavy fire from anti-aircraft guns and fighter planes, reserve strike forces have been landed day and night and ammunition dropped. Over the past four days our fighter pilots and ground-attack pilots have destroyed 143 aeroplanes, 58 tanks and over 300 vehicles. In the zone south of Königs Wusterhausen, divisions of the 9th Army have continued their attacks to the north-west and fought off concentric attacks from the Soviets against their flanks throughout the whole day. The divisions deployed from the west have thrown back the enemy amidst fierce fighting on a wide front, and have reached Ferch.’
‘Bloody hell,’ the tank gunner says anxiously. ‘That looks awful. If the Russians are really beaten back, we’re up to our necks in shit.’
‘Yes,’ says Private Behrend, rocking his head back and forth. ‘Shouldn’t we report to a troop? What do you think?’
‘I think,’ Schröter snaps, ‘that you’re a bunch of spineless wets. But if you want to, clear off!’
‘You’re a hardliner,’ says Private Kebschull, ‘I suppose you’re a communist, a museum piece from before thirty-three?’
‘Shut your trap,’ Schröter rages at him. ‘If I’m a museum piece, then I’ll tell you where you’ve sprung from.’
‘Which is? Let’s have it!’
‘The Nazi bumper book of criminals, if you want to know.’
‘Gentlemen, calm down,’ Dr Wiedemann says pacifyingly, ‘the war will be over very soon. What the Propaganda Department says is nothing but an old fraud, they just write it to perk you up a bit.’
‘But there would be absolutely no point to that,’ tank gunner Reithofer says dubiously.
‘There is a point to it,’ Dr Böttcher says, ‘namely that of dragging an entire people with them into their own disaster.’
‘That’s impossible,’ says Private Behrend, shaking his head. He picks up the newspaper, scans the front page and then turns it over.
‘There are more articles in it about the deployment,’ says the tank gunner, who is looking over his shoulder. ‘This one, for example:
“Where the Führer is, There is Victory!
Clarification of the State of Battle Due Shortly
The German strike forces penetrating the greater Berlin area from outside are already dangerously close to the enemy. They are doing severe damage to enemy reinforcements and putting ever-greater pressure on the rear of the enemy with their inexorable advance.
It is clear that the Soviets are trying with all their strength in the final hour to attain their goal, the occupation of Berlin, so as not to be fired on from both sides. So the enemy is pushing with all his strength against the inner defence ring. He is trying to find weak spots in our defences where he can break through, because he does not have sufficient forces to turn an encirclement into an attack in all directions.
In
these circumstances various focuses have emerged in the battle, with the temporary consequence of complex and critical situations which have been eased thanks to the solid deployment of the defenders and partly through counter-thrusts.
If fighting continues with the same courage, the picture around the battlefield of Berlin will soon be fundamentally transformed. The resoluteness with which the Berliners defend their city springs from the fact that yesterday over 40 tanks and during the last five days a total of 300 tanks have been destroyed. The Luftwaffe has once again backed up the battle on the ground with a heavy deployment of fighter and ground-attack planes.
Our task is clear. We are staying where we are. The Führer is with us. Where the Führer is, there is victory!”’
‘Did you expect the other articles to say the opposite?’ Schröter asks. ‘Where is the Führer’s victory? Since the Führer has been there, there has been nothing but defeat after defeat!’
‘Liars are liars,’ says Dr Böttcher.
‘What do you think our chances actually are?’ Wiegand asks, and picks up the newspaper. ‘Read the second part of the army report. Deep incursions near Prenzlau, Regensburg and Ingolstadt lost, southwards advance between Dillingen and Ulm, which is to say towards Augsburg and Munich, withdrawals beyond the Ticino, which means from the Po Valley into the Alps …’
‘This is the most devastating defeat ever suffered by a German army,’ Gregor says, ‘and you want to prolong the madness by another few seconds?’
‘We don’t want that, we’re not that stupid,’ says Private Behrend, ‘but we don’t want to perish during those last few seconds either.’
Dr Wiedemann looks around a few more times, starts to speak, falls silent, but then speaks after all. ‘There is one other interesting thing,’ he says, ‘it isn’t in the paper, but I’ve heard it on the radio. Mussolini was arrested by Italian partisans while escaping near Dongo on the twenty-seventh, and shot by firing squad yesterday afternoon.’
‘Bravo!’ shouts Schröter. ‘And where are the German partisans?’
‘We’ve got heroic women instead,’ Dr Wiedemann says. ‘I’ll read you a little cutting from an article.
“Women at the Front Line
In Neukölln an elderly woman with a packed rucksack reported to a police station. In the end she went to the distribution office housed in the same building and said, ‘I would like to join the Volkssturm, if you’ll give me a rocket launcher. I’ve got to fight the Bolsheviks.’”
‘Touching,’ says Schröter, ‘I suppose that means we’re saved.’
‘It would have to be Neukölln,’ murmurs Private Ruppert.
‘So to cut a long story short, are we going or are we staying here?’ asks Private Kebschull.
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter either way,’ says tank gunner Reithofer, sitting down on a bench, ‘whether we get it in the neck in here or out there, you can only die once.’
‘You’re right, lad,’ says Private Kebschull, sitting down beside him. ‘So let’s stay.’
‘Unstable pair,’ Dr Wiedemann says to Dr Böttcher.
‘What else can you expect from these people?’ says Dr Böttcher. ‘They’re always looking indecisively and anxiously upward, waiting for orders, uncertain when there aren’t any, always ready to carry out every order, but never thinking or acting independently, as they are unacquainted with the compulsion of conscience and the force of reason.’
Dr Wiedemann nods. ‘Anything else is a rare exception. I was recently involved in a case that is not only harrowing from a human point of view as well as being medically interesting, but also demonstrates how people, peaceful, gentle, calm, quiet people, can be drawn into a tragic sequence of events. It is a destiny of our times.’
‘Tell me,’ says Dr Böttcher.
XIX
The Story of the Tram Conductor Max Eckert
‘But all that yet remains we find,
Embodied in the strength of those who stay behind.’
Frank Wedekind, from the Brettl Songs
A day dawns, as countless days have broken before it, with the sun hauling itself up to the horizon and climbing over it. Its rays send their light to the earth, and give no hint about what will happen in the interval between the rising of the sun and its setting below the horizon. In those hours, when the light flows down upon the earth or seeps through dense curtains of cloud, the internal clocks of two billion people run unstoppably on. For many that clock will stop and for some it will be rewound, everything is still in darkness. The morning that welcomes them once night is over is like any other morning, no clue to the catastrophe hurtling towards mankind warns their souls.
On 3 February 1945 the tram conductor Max Eckert left his flat in Berlin-Reinickendorf, 144 Residenzallee, to go on his early shift. He is a conductor with the Berlin public transport service and travels on line 141, the first one setting off just after five o’clock from the tram station in Pakower Allee. Shortly after four in the afternoon Eckert, after clocking off, goes back to his flat. So far the day has passed like every other, he has done his duty, he has fussed around the passengers and tried to stick to the timetable even though there was quite a long air-raid warning, but there’s certainly nothing unusual about that. Much more unusual is the fact that his wife and sixteen-year-old daughter aren’t at home. That never happens, in fact, and if it ever has happened there has always been a note on the kitchen table, in which his wife has told him in a few lines that she has gone to the cinema or to visit friends, and he just needs to heat up his dinner. But today Eckert finds nothing there, neither his wife nor his daughter, neither a note nor his dinner. The flat has been spotlessly cleaned, because Frau Eckert is an excellent housewife, the beds in the bedroom are carefully made as ever, even the quilts are smoothed over them, but in the kitchen nothing has been prepared for dinner. The flat has clearly been abandoned by his wife that morning, and now, in the afternoon, she hasn’t yet returned. It’s completely incomprehensible, so an unsettling feeling wells up in Eckert, before it occurs to him that there was a daytime raid by the Americans around midday which, as far as he was informed at the end of his working day, was concentrated on the city centre, and there again Eckert has the explanation for his wife’s absence. Twice a week she goes with their daughter to consult a doctor in Ritterstrasse, their daughter suffers from stubborn eczema which so far has resisted every kind of treatment, and the doctor in Ritterstrasse has been recommended to them as particularly good. And in fact the girl, since she has been in treatment with this Dr Wiedemann, has made a considerable recovery.
So at first Eckert is reassured. He knows that the underground D line from Neukölln to Gesundbrunnen, which his wife usually takes, has been disrupted, and that the tramlines that connect the south and the centre with the north have been halted because of the air raid, so his wife and daughter will have to make the journey from Ritterstrasse to Reinickendorf on foot, and would probably have to take significant detours as well, since from experience there are always numerous road closures and diversions after air raids.
Eckert heats up a dreg of coffee that he finds in the pot and prepares himself a sausage sandwich, then he reads the midday paper, but soon notices that none of it means anything to him, at least not in his present state of mind, because as his eyes glide over the pages and grasp the occasional headline like ‘Today the German Nation Is More United Than Ever Before’, ‘718th and 719th Knight’s Crosses Awarded’ and ‘Volkssturm Proves Itself Once Again’, his senses are entirely focused on the sounds coming up from the stairwell. As soon as a footstep is heard, his whole body tenses, he is ready to leap to the door as soon as a key is placed in the lock, but the footsteps always fade away before they reach the second floor, or else they go past his door and carry on up the stairs, once they pause on the second-floor landing, but then the doorbell rings at the neighbours’ flat. Eckert paces back and forth, hands clasped behind his back, he glances occasionally out of the window, but even that does not distract from
the heavy silence of the flat and the agonizing wait. The street is, as usual, busy with bustling, scurrying people, crowded trams and clattering lorries. Fear of the coming night, the wail of sirens and the doom hurtling towards them, is already making people shiver.
Two hours pass, twilight falls and flows through the windowpanes into the kitchen. Eckert turns on the radio, but the speaker remains mute, and when he turns on the light switch the bulb doesn’t come on. A curfew has been imposed upon the district again. So once more he is once again deprived of the consolation of light and the distraction of music. Eckert taps his way back to the wicker armchair and slumps into it. The minutes creep along even more slowly, because the torment of waiting has now been joined by the shroud of darkness. Eckert sits motionless in the kitchen and waits, his hands rest on his knees and he looks at the wall that retreats further and further the denser the darkness becomes. He has only one thought inside him, it fills him entirely and threatens to blow him up. His wife should have come home long ago, it doesn’t take more than an hour and a half, two hours at most, to get from Moritzplatz to Residenzstrasse, the alarm went off at about 14.00 hours – as a transport worker he thinks only in the twenty-four hour clock – so his wife, even if she had to make a few detours, should have been home by about 17.00 hours, but it’s now 18.30, and she still hasn’t arrived.
Eckert is a matter-of-fact, sober man, he doesn’t care for high-flown words, he is neither sentimental nor romantic, he would be amazed if anyone tried to identify the emotion he feels for his wife as ‘love’. It’s more a solid affection, an unqualified fondness, a habit tried and tested and found to be good, but these three components, affection, fondness and habit, are a solid bond, more lasting and sustainable than the rosary of eternal love and fidelity. So during these hours, brushed by a dark apprehension, he is not moved, it is more the fear of having lost a valuable possession that is a part of himself. It is the last possession left him, his wife and daughter, since his two sons have been lost, as one might imagine one has lost a watch before working out that it has been magicked away by a conjuror. The younger son, who served with the Luftwaffe, was taken from him even before the war, after his letters, which seemed to be assuming a secretive turn, began coming at ever-greater intervals and finally stopped altogether, until one day a communication arrived saying that he had crashed during an exercise, and that he had been fatally injured and buried with full military honours. Only much later, when the veil of secrecy concerning the ‘Condor Legion’ had been lifted, did Eckert learn that his son had died in the Spanish Civil War, the great dress rehearsal for the Nazi Luftwaffe. His older son, a model maker with Borsig Rheinmetall in Tegel, a calm, clever young man with a slight artistic inclination towards wood-carving, was swallowed up by the war: he came back from the Kazakh steppes with frozen hands and feet, a helpless, amputated bundle of humanity with black stumps for limbs which, when given its first opportunity to move independently, fell from the fourth floor into the street and smashed to pieces on the cobbles. So, from an apparently firmly established cycle of life, two pieces were broken, like two good teeth from a healthy set, and each time it was like a deliberate strike to the heart, which stirred in him not so much pain as rage, since the death of his sons was accompanied by the raw bawling of marching songs.