Berlin Finale (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Heinz Rein

  Dr Wiedemann has been listening to him quietly without interrupting him. ‘Yes, your wife was here at my surgery with your daughter this morning, Mr Eckert,’ he says when Eckert says nothing. ‘I had your daughter under the sun-ray lamp and gave her an injection of Detoxin. Your wife was in a great hurry, because the arrival of the bombing units had already been announced, she left here at about a quarter past eleven, and she probably didn’t make it home because the sirens were already going off about ten minutes later. She might have sought refuge in a bunker somewhere, or in the underground.’

  Dr Wiedemann studiously avoids mentioning the fact that a bomb has crashed through the roof of Moritzplatz underground station and killed an as yet unknown number of people who were standing inside the station, neither does he mention that after the first wave of bombers the whole district between Moritzplatz and Köpenick Bridge, Hallesches Tor and Friedrichstrasse Station was in flames, and that during the very minutes when people were escaping from the basements of the burning houses and factories and into the streets the second and third wave were flying in and once again dropping enormous explosive and incendiary payloads on the same target area.

  ‘At about sixteen-thirty hours my wife and my daughter were not yet home, Doctor,’ Eckert says, agitated. ‘Something has happened, I can sense it like a certainty in my blood.’

  ‘Calm down, Mr Eckert,’ Dr Wiedemann reassures him. ‘Perhaps your wife was so upset by the raid that she stayed with friends.’

  ‘We don’t know anyone around here,’ Eckert remarks curtly.

  ‘Or perhaps she couldn’t face the long walk,’ Dr Wiedemann says, trying to diminish his fears.

  Eckert won’t have any of that, either. ‘Think about it, Doctor, four and a half hours after the alarm they still weren’t home,’ he says urgently. ‘Four and a half hours!’

  ‘There is little point engaging in speculation,’ Dr Wiedemann observes. ‘But while you have been out and about, your wife may have come home, it’s after half past nine. So you have been out for more than three hours. While you are talking to me here, she may be sitting at home worrying about you.’

  Eckert sits up stiffly. That possibility hasn’t even occurred to him, he has roused himself into too great an anticipation of disaster. ‘That may be so,’ he says quickly, takes his legs off the sofa and stands up.

  ‘Where are you going now?’ Dr Weidemann asks.

  ‘Home,’ Eckert replies. ‘That should be obvious.’

  ‘Out of the question,’ Dr Wiedemann contradicts him forcefully. ‘In this state, in the middle of the night? Haven’t you had enough trouble getting here?’

  The battle between going and staying lasts for several minutes, in the end Dr Wiedemann wins, after promising to take Eckert to Reinickendorf in his car early in the morning. He secretly stirs a powerful dose of bromide into the coffee, and it isn’t long before Eckert is sound asleep. Dr Wiedemann is a doctor whose job is also a deep calling, and for whom suffering human beings are not divided into private patients and members of the public health scheme. Of course it is not only his humanity that is the crucial factor, there is also his special medical interest, as he graduated with a dissertation about dermatitis with particular reference to fluxus salinus, weeping eczema, but he can hardly be blamed for that, it is only active in his unconscious, because he has realized that Eckert has entered a severe mental and psychical depressive state, that an almost manic compulsion is threatening to explode from within, and he has made up his mind to treat the man quite delicately.

  At seven o’clock the next morning, while Eckert is still fast asleep, Dr Wiedemann gets his car from the garage, which has remained miraculously unscathed in the middle of all the destruction, and then, as promised, drives Eckert to Reinickendorf. To reach Residenzstrasse he has to take an enormous detour, via Schöneberg, Friedenau, Charlottenburg and Moabit, as the previous day’s attack has caused unimaginable damage and deviations keep sending the car further and further west. They don’t reach Residenzstrasse until about nine o’clock. Dr Wiedemann goes up to the flat with Eckert, now feeling uneasy himself. Even if Ursula Eckert is only one of his many patients, she and her mother, who has always come with her, are after all people that he knows personally, and a personal fate always speaks to one more directly than the most terrible misfortune on a mass scale.

  Eckert’s hands are trembling so badly that he can’t open the door to the flat. Dr Wiedemann takes the key from his hand, unlocks the door and pushes it violently open. With a few glances he can tell that the flat is empty: Frau Eckert and her daughter have still not come back. He knows what that means, and it is quite clear from Eckert’s face that he does too. Still he tries to offer him some words of comfort, but Eckert doesn’t even listen to him, he takes a few quick steps through the flat, stands reflecting for a moment in the kitchen, mechanically straightens a chair and then resolutely leaves the room.

  He doesn’t say a word as they go down the stairs side by side. He doesn’t rush down the stairs, his hands are plunged deeply into his coat pockets, and he carefully takes one step at a time, but that slowness is itself stranger than raving and shouting. Only when Dr Wiedemann opens the car door does Eckert voice the request to be driven back again. Dr Wiedemann doesn’t dare refuse him, he also thinks it right not to leave the petrified-looking man on his own for now. On the way back to Ritterstrasse Dr Wiedemann tries several times to engage Eckert in conversation, but it doesn’t work, so in the end he lets it be. When the doctor stops on the corner of Ritterstrasse and Prinzenstrasse to allow a procession of firemen to pass, Eckert quickly opens the door, gets out, nods fleetingly at the doctor and flings the door shut behind him. It happens with such swift and skilled movements, of which Dr Wiedemann would not have thought this rather awkward and measured man capable, that he is taken by surprise and unable to hold him back. He just catches sight of Eckert resolutely heading straight for the field of rubble.

  And now begins the odyssey of tram conductor Max Eckert, on 4 February 1945, the day after the most annihilating air raid by the Americans on Berlin. Admittedly the ruined district has been closed off within a wide radius, but Eckert is still able to penetrate the devastated streets, his conductor’s uniform stands him in good stead. He is clear that there is only one possibility now of his wife and his daughter being alive, which is that they are locked in some basement somewhere. In Schmidstrasse, near the intersection with Neanderstrasse, a bulldozer is at work because there are thought to be living people under the rubble. Eckert crosses the area between Köpenicker Strasse and Moritzplatz, but again and again he returns to the bulldozer and watches as the sharp jaws of the grabber eat their way into the mountains of rock, swing round and spew out their bites to the side again. He pursues the progress of the work very closely, he is often in Schmidstrasse, and normally travelling. What he only vaguely perceived during the night, what could only be guessed at in the darkness, is now, with bright daylight falling down upon it, revealed as an inferno of unparalleled horror. Among the collapsed and still-burning houses are shattered trams, cars and lorries, dead humans and horses lie on the ground, body parts, mortal remains, heads without bodies, bodies without heads, trunks without legs, legs without trunks, undefinable piles of burnt, charred, shredded human flesh, desperate, wailing, half-crazed people are wandering around, many of them staring with uncomprehending eyes and pointing feebly at the smoking, crushed, devastated buildings which barely twenty-four hours ago still provided shelter and warmth and a pitiful remnant of independent life, some dash through smoke-filled doors and climb on unsteady walls to secure the wretched remains of their possessions from the piles of rubble.

  When it becomes clear that no one can still be alive in the basement in Schmidstrasse because it is full to the ceiling with water, the digger stops work and is withdrawn. When it is dragged away by a tractor, Eckert undergoes a sudden transformation. Until now he has still fed the faint flame of his hope, but now he is certain that his wife and his daught
er have died here, somewhere in these streets. If until now Eckert has been agitated, but still relatively calm and level-headed, now he has been gripped by an idea that won’t let him go, that spurs him on: he must find his wife and his daughter, regardless of where and how. He looks each body in the face, turns over every corpse lying on its belly and studies its ravaged features, he checks the clothing on the severed trunks and picks up skulls in his hands, he climbs among the still-smoking and smouldering ruins, he clambers into collapsed basements, forces his way down half-buried passageways. Again and again he crosses the field of rubble from Köpenick Bridge to Schmidstrasse, from Moritzplatz to Alexandrinenstasse, from Michaelkirchplatz to Neanderstrasse, he clears lumps of rock aside with his bare hands as if he thinks he might be able to reveal the entrance to a basement, he digs through buried basement windows, he has already seen hundreds of corpses and helped recover corpses from Moritzplatz underground station, he has gazed into the faces of charred and blackened human beings and not even been able to establish whether they were men or women, but it has all been in vain. He has not been able to find his wife and his daughter.

  He is utterly discouraged and starving, his hands are smeared with ptomaine, he is close to complete collapse, but he is still wandering around the field of rubble. He knows that his wife and his daughter have died, but he also wants to know how they perished and where their bodies are. If they had died of tuberculosis or cancer or some revolting illness, it would have been a death that he would have experienced along with them, that would have been established in the people themselves, that would have corresponded to traditional views of dying. Then he would have walked behind a corpse and thrown three handfuls of earth into the open grave, he would have known where a mound would be heaped and later a marble headstone raised, but like this he doesn’t know anything. He can’t grasp that the two of them are simply no longer there, vanished, trampled, scattered, simply no longer there. The imagination of this simple man is then sparked by the gruesome, terrible images that he has seen that day and which are still before his eyes. He sees his wife and daughter sitting on a bench as they always sat in the shelter of their building, with their shoulders hunched and their arms pressed tight against their bodies, knees together, with quivering jaws and darting eyes, clutching damp cloths, ready to press them to their mouths at any second, goggles pushed up on their foreheads, prepared to bring them down over their eyes, he sees them sitting there, every fibre of their bodies attuned to the slightest noise from outside, the singing of the engines, the thunderous roar of the anti-aircraft guns, the whirring, droning and whistling of the bombs plummeting towards them. He sees them sitting there for only a second, even before they can conceive a thought, before the event hurtling towards them can spark a reflex in their brains and enter their consciousness, in that second the basement ceiling coming down on them like an elemental fist. It happened without them seeing, hearing, feeling anything, even though hundreds of alarms had prepared them for it.

  It could have happened like that, but it could also … Eckert can no longer halt his imagination, again and again it feeds on the molten streams from the corpse-scattered field around him. He is, like everyone else, trapped in the world of empirical thought, and lacks the experience of those whose mouths are sealed for ever because they are already beyond Lethe, but the imagination distorts outlines and darkens the colours of the images.

  Might it not also be that when everything was burning, heat, anxiety and breathlessness assailed them when the way out of the basement was blocked by scorching flames, when the hole in the wall suddenly opened up and the fire in the next-door basement blocked that escape route too? Might it not be that the flames leaped at them with greedy, clutching fingers, darted glowing tongues into their flesh and turned them into ashes or arm-length stumps of charcoal, or that smoke and fumes hurled them to the ground and slowly choked them to death? Might it not be that they had time to think lots of thoughts and feel terrible emotions, sudden fear, oppressive anxiety, deadly terror, ungraspable dread, paralysing horror?

  Might it not also be that they were buried in an avalanche of rubble, trapped in a dark grave, and that the water began to spout from a burst pipe, ran and ran, unstoppable as a waterfall, spilled over the basement floor, rose, slowly but steadily, climbed up the people, held them in its wet clutches, blood rose to the brain and paralysed it, flooded the lungs and halted the breath? Or perhaps a pipe was bent and the gas started flowing, an invisible, deadly cloud began to spread over the basement, first floated to the ceiling and then fell back down on the people, made their eyes flicker and struck up an unbearable roaring noise in their ears, enfolded them in a stupor and gently led them into a state of torpor, sealed their tissue and drove their breath away, turned their blood bright red and discoloured their mucous membranes?

  Might a lump of rock not have pulled them down and fixed them to the floor as a wrestler holds his defeated opponent on the mat, perhaps the burden pressed down on body or legs, but did no more to them, it only held them tightly, let them breathe, think, feel and even speak, but held them in a stony grip and made the place where the block of stone had struck them the last and unalterable site of their lives, so that only a great miracle could have swept it away and freed them, so that their lives under the stone clamp in the dark vault of the caved-in basement gasped their last and their bodies ceased to function with tortuous slowness?

  Or perhaps nothing happened to them except that they were trapped in a subterranean vault, that they were still walking around in it, conferring and knocking against ceiling and wall, but no one heard their knocking because huge mountains of rubble were spread above them, that now, while he, Eckert, climbs over scree slopes, they are still alive and hoping to be freed, but that hope is becoming ever thinner and more fleeting, despair and madness are inflamed in their brains, the more hunger and thirst and darkness take hold of them, the more unlikely it becomes that someone will find their stony grave and free them from it?

  The tram conductor Eckert stands on the threshold of that world to which there is no access, which no human eye has looked upon, whose wall can be penetrated only by the mind, and of which there is no likeness, only a cold, grim uncertainty.

  He knows the word ‘missing’, but so far it has meant nothing to him, he has read it and spoken it, but associated nothing more with it. In his life he has used many words thoughtlessly and superficially, without filling them with a concept. One of those is the word ‘missing’, it has slipped smoothly from his tongue in the past, but now it stands before him as if in physical form, a monster, gigantic, with gaping jaws and crushing teeth, with scornfully grinning, bloodshot eyes and long, rapacious arms: missing. Now he knows what it means to bump into the void, to let thoughts, hopes and longings circle around a deadly uncertainty: missing. Never having complete certainty, sending your thoughts time and again to the basements and tunnels, caves and craters, time and again hypothesizing that they might have been crushed by boulders, drenched in water, numbed by gas, slung into the air by exploding shells, gnawed by rats, whether their cries slowly faded gasping away, or whether the life fled quickly from them: missing.

  Even in those days of utter chaos a man like Eckert must stand out. A police patrol picks him up at last and tries to persuade him to leave the disaster area first by calling out to him and then by grabbing him with a practised grip. Eckert desperately defends himself, but the police are stronger than him, so in the end he gives in and allows himself to be led away with a policeman on either side.

  One of the officers, a young man with a smooth, vacant face, claps him approvingly on the shoulder and says quite casually: ‘It’s bad, old man, but take comfort from the fact that you can only die one death.’

  Eckert doesn’t listen at first, but then the words trickle into his consciousness. What did the cop just say? You can only die one … Eckert stops in front of the policeman and looks him in the face, at once desperate and menacing.

  His threatening
gaze makes the policeman uncomfortable, he pushes Eckert away with a dismissive gesture and asks, ‘What’s up? Why are you staring at me?’

  Eckert doesn’t avert his eyes, he goes on looking at the policeman. ‘You can only die one death, you say?’ he mumbles. ‘Yes, of course, only one death.’ His voice gets louder and finally rises to an animal roar. ‘Yes, only one death, but it matters what kind of death it is, whether you die, just die, because syphilis slowly eats you up, or because one day your heart gives out, but this is not dying, burning, charring, choking, drowning, cut down or crushed, shredded or pulverized by the blast …’

  ‘Fine,’ the policeman says, and takes a step back. ‘Could all be, but come with us for now.’

  ‘You’ve got to understand,’ says the other policeman, an older man with a coarse face, gesturing with his eyes to the other man, ‘that you can’t go on creeping around the disaster area. Who are you looking for?’

  ‘My wife,’ Eckert replies, ‘my wife and my daughter, they must be here somewhere.’ He points to the ruins with his right hand. ‘Here or there or over there, somewhere. Perhaps they’re dead already, but perhaps they’re still alive and we’re standing on their sarcophagus right now.’

  ‘It’s ridiculous looking here, you won’t find them alive,’ says the older policeman. ‘And that’s enough looking now. We don’t want to take you along. Go!’

  ‘Where to?’ Eckert asks. ‘Can you tell me that?’

  ‘Home, of course,’ the younger policeman says. ‘Where else? Or have you been bombed out?’

  Home? The word stings Eckert’s consciousness like a goad. Home? Into the dead, empty flat, where every item reminds him that his wife and daughter were still living there two or three days ago? Being there is almost worse than searching in this field of corpses.