by Günter Grass
A prisoner of the dark, he learns another lesson in fear: he feels it sitting on his back, and tries to recall the prayers he said as a child – ‘Please, dear God, stand by my side, that I may in heav’n abide’ – and maybe even calls out ‘Mama, Mama’ and hears his mother’s warning voice, luring him home from far away – ‘Come back, my boy! I’ll give you egg yolk mixed with sugar in a glass!’ – but he stays where he is, alone as can be, and then something happens.
I heard steps or something that could be construed as steps. Twigs crackling underfoot. An animal of some kind? A boar? Maybe even a unicorn.
I stood stock-still and made not a sound; he or it – the animal, man, or imaginary beast that had been stepping through the wood – followed suit.
Then a figure appeared, drew nearer, withdrew, only to come near again. Too near.
Careful! Don’t swallow too loud. Take cover behind the tree trunks. Lessons from military training. Release the weapon’s safety catch as the other man’s safety catch is almost certainly being released.
Two men assuming each other to be enemies. Conceivably, many years down the line, an idea for a ballet or movie scene. Like the scene that sets up the climax in every classic Western: the ritual dance before the final shoot-out.
Whistling is said to help dispel fear in a dark wood. I did not whistle. Something, perhaps the thought of my far-off mother, made me sing instead. I did not seek out a melody from among the marches we had been taught, like ‘Erika’, or current film hits, like Marika Rökk’s ‘No One Likes to Be Alone at Night’. No, it was a nursery rhyme relevant to my situation that came unbidden to my lips, and I sang the first line over and over – ‘Hans left home, on his own’ – until I finally heard its mate: ‘Went into the world alone.’
I can’t say how long this antiphonal singing continued. Most likely until the message behind the words – two native speakers of German are wandering through the pitch-dark woods – was clear enough to allow both sides to drop their cover, address each other in German soldierspeak, lower their weapons, and move within arm’s length, then even closer.
My singing partner was equipped with a rifle, several more years, and several fewer centimetres than me. What I saw under the field cap – he had no helmet – was a puny little man, and what I heard was a Berlin drawl you could cut with a knife. The scare was over the moment he lit up: a cigarette in a sullen face that said nothing.
Later I learned that in the course of the war, starting with the Polish campaign, moving on to France and Greece, and getting as far as the Crimean peninsula, he made it to the rank of lance corporal. He had no desire to advance any further. Nothing could throw him, a characteristic that in our precarious situation was not long in proving its worth. He became my guardian angel, the soulmate I had seen at work in Grimmelshausen, my Heartbrother: he led me out of the woods and over the fields and across the Russian front line.
Since, unlike me, the lance corporal had been to the edge of the woods and had several opportunities to observe the bivouac fires in the open field beyond, which he judged to be enemy territory, we looked for a place that was not lit by fire. That is: he looked, I remained two paces behind him.
During a halt he lathered his face by the light of the lingering moon and shaved off a three-day growth. I held my superior’s pocket mirror for him.
Not until a field with a furrow leading westwards into the darkness bolstered our courage did we abandon the protection afforded by the trees. The field looked freshly ploughed and came to an end behind a swell in the soil, after which we followed a bush-lined country road that bridged a stream. The bridge was unguarded. We filled our canteens, drank, and filled them again. He had a smoke.
Two bridges down – could these have been tributaries of the Spree? – we saw the flicker of a fire in the distance. Laughter, snippets of words floated in our direction; shadow figures flitted back and forth in the glow.
No, the Ivans weren’t singing, nor did they appear to be a pile of hopeless drunks. Half of them were probably still asleep; the other half …
After crossing the bridge, we heard a ‘Stoi!’ and then another.
At the third ‘Stoi!’ – the bridge was quite far behind us – my lance corporal issued his directive: ‘Run, and as fast as you can!’
And so we ran, but we ran the sluggish run I ran through many a post-war dream: across a field, its clumps and clods clinging to our boot soles, falling off, sticking back on, making us look as if we were running in slow motion – though we were now under sub-machine-gun fire and a sky exploding with signal rockets – through an extended film sequence that finally came to an end in the cover of a ditch at the far end of the field.
The Russians, or, as we called them, the Ivans, made no effort to flush us out. The shooting ebbed, the rockets stopped. The moon took back the sky. A rabbit hobbled past leisurely, as if we were not to be feared.
So on we trudged through the fields, crossing no more bridges, and just as the sun came up we saw a village the enemy had apparently not yet occupied. It lay tranquil in the morning mist, huddled up to the church, peaceful, as if fallen out of time.
STRANGE THAT I can still picture the impassive or rather grouchy cavalry captain of Austrian descent who met us at the entry to the village behind a poorly guarded roadblock, and can therefore either draw or describe him complete with eye pouches and toothbrush moustache, even though we were exposed to him and his Home Front men for only a minute. He seemed anxious by nature and interrupted our detailed report with a nonchalant ‘Just show me your marching orders’, as if that were a mere catchphrase.
Since without official papers we were virtual outlaws and court-martial fodder, he had us taken away by three old men armed with hunting rifles and bazookas, one of whom made a great show of being mayor and head of the local farmers’ organization. They locked us up in the cellar of a farmhouse.
Oddly enough, though, they failed to disarm us. The cavalry officer had a little dog with a pearl-studded collar he carried in his arms and spoke to so lovingly as if nothing in this world, outside the mangy cur, was worthy of his sympathy. One of the hobbling Home Front men – to show where his own sympathy lay – slipped my lance corporal an open packet of cigarettes, I don’t know what brand.
Nor do I know the name of the village where, hale though hungry, we had reached German lines and would immediately, if not sooner, be summarily court-martialled. Could it have been Peterlein? Or did that sweet diminutive of a name belong to a village we passed through later?
In any case, the cellar where they kept us was lined with shelves full of bottled preserves, their labels in grandmotherly Sütterlin script: asparagus, pickled gherkins with mustard seed, pumpkin, and green peas, as well as a blood-and-vinegar ragout and goose giblets. The jars weren’t even dusty. There were also bottles of cloudy apple and elderberry juice and, in a corner, a pile of potatoes with sprouts the size of a little finger.
We spooned lard with pork chunks straight from the jar and munched on the gherkins, washing it all down with the juice and stopping only when we were on the point of vomiting. Then my lance corporal smoked a cigarette. He did so rarely, but when he did he did it with reverence. And like my far-off mother he was a master at blowing smoke rings. I took my gas mask out of its case and filled the case with strawberry or cherry jam. I would live to regret it.
HAVING WAITED TWO hours to be summoned to our court martial, the likely verdict of which we refrained from discussing – we had probably slipped into an after-dinner doze because I do not recall the interval as a period of apprehension – the lance corporal tried the cellar door. It was unlocked. The key was hanging from the outside keyhole. No one was guarding us. Did we scare a cat or, if cat there was, disturb its sleep?
Through the kitchen window above the cellar we could see the roadblock. There was no Home Front man smoking his last pipe. Gone was the officer along with his dog. The village must have been evacuated in the meantime. Or its inhabitants were making b
elieve that it didn’t exist, had never existed.
The officer had either forgotten us or in a fit of melancholy had delivered us into the hands of a capricious fate. The sparrows were doing their calisthenics on the roadblock’s freshly chopped pine logs. The sun was warm. You felt like bursting into song.
On one side of the block we had an unobstructed view of the fields: the enemy, the Russian infantry, was advancing in protective ranks. It all looked harmless from a distance – a bunch of figurines – but it was my second encounter with the Red Army. I couldn’t make out any faces, the distance was closing step by step. Still no shot rang out. Some of the slowly advancing figures under their caps, fur hats, and helmets could have been my age. Earth-coloured uniforms, baby faces. You could count them from left to right. Each a target.
Yet I did not aim my sub-machine gun, nor did my lance corporal attempt to defend the village of Peterlein with his rifle. We made tracks, noiseless tracks. Not even if the Ivans had shot on command or out of habit would we have shot back.
We did not act out of brotherly love and deserve no credit. What kept us from aiming and pulling the trigger was more like reason, or the absence of necessity. That is why the claim I have so often made – namely, that during the week in which the war had me firmly in its grasp I never looked through a sight, never felt for a trigger, and thus never fired a shot – is at best a way of alleviating in retrospect the shame that remains. Yet something else remains: the fact that we did not shoot. What is less certain is when I exchanged my uniform jacket for one less onerous. Did I do so of my own accord?
It was more likely the lance corporal who, his eye on the runes on my collar, had recommended and made possible the change of jacket. He could not have been pleased about my markings: through me, though he never put it in those terms, he had got into bad company.
What he did say at some point, either in the larder of a cellar or while lathering, or shaving, or puffing on his cigarette, was: ‘Listen, boy, if those Ivans nab us, you’re in for it. They see those ornaments on your collar, they’ll shoot you in the neck. No questions asked …’
How he did it I don’t know, but he managed to ‘organize’ – as the soldiers used to say – an ordinary Wehrmacht jacket somewhere. One without bullet holes or bloodstains. It even fitted. That way, minus the double rune, he liked me a lot better. I came to like me better, too.
So considerate he was, my guardian angel. Just as Simplicius had a soulmate at his side whenever he was in danger, so I and my newly retouched self-image could rely on my lance corporal.
AFTER IS ALWAYS before. What we call the present, this fleeting nownownow, is constantly overshadowed by a past now in such a way that the escape route known as the future can be marched to only in lead-soled shoes.
Thus encumbered and at a distance of sixty years, I see a seventeen-year-old with an indecently bulging gas-mask case no longer serving its original function, and a like-new tailored uniform jacket doing everything possible to join up with the units flooding back through Germany side by side with a tough sly-boots of a lance corporal who has seen it all and whom you’d never guess to be a barber by trade. The two of them repeatedly make their way around the ‘bloodhounds’. There are always holes to be found. The front is not easy to recognize. But they are only two among thousands of soldiers who have lost their regiments. And what unit is so desperate that it will take them in without papers?
Then, on the road from Senftenberg to Spremberg, which is packed with horses and carts full of refugees, the two of them in the same field-grey battle dress, yet so ill-matched, take advantage of the crush to negotiate purchase of an official document, the life-giving marching orders, at an improvised assembly point, which is out in the open at the side of the road and consists of a table and a stool. There is some printed paper on the table. The war-weary master sergeant on the stool asks no questions, writes quickly, slams down his stamp. I regurgitate the tale my lance corporal has drummed into me.
Now we are protected: we belong to a newly assembled combat group. True, for the time being it exists only on paper, as a vague promise, but we can see a perfectly concrete mobile field kitchen – the ‘goulash cannon’ of soldiers’ slang – set up in the meadow behind the table, its kettle steaming and sending out a soupy aroma.
We join the queue. All together. Not even officers may pull rank. Come the end, fate dishes out moments of rank-free anarchy.
We have potato soup with bits of meat floating in it. The mess boy ladles each of us a scoop from the bottom, then a half-scoop from the top. The mess tin we each have buckled onto our haversacks is just the right size. The mood is neither down nor up. Typical April weather. The sun is out.
Now we are facing each other, our spoons moving in rhythm. ‘Hey,’ says somebody a few steps away, without breaking the rhythm of his spoon, ‘isn’t today Adolf’s birthday? So where’s the extra ration? And the chocolate, the cigarettes, a shot of brandy for the toast! Heil, mein Führer!’
Now somebody tries to tell a joke, but gets all mixed up. Infectious laughter. A few more jokes take off. A peaceful scene. All it needs is an accordion player.
‘What do they call this place?’
‘Lusatia!’
That rings a bell with someone. ‘The brown-coal place.’
In spring of 1990 I had occasion to visit some towns and villages in the area of Cottbus and Spremberg, not far from Berlin. Eager as I was to get down on paper everything that happened there recently, I couldn’t keep my thoughts away from the past.
At the time it looked as though unification could, if not overcome, then during the gradual rapprochement at least compensate for one of the consequences of war, the forty-year split of Germany into two countries. The possibility, miracle that it seemed, at least presented itself. And since people thought this was no time for long-term operations, the poor East was to be brought level with the rich West, and quickly too.
I made two trips to the area, the first time staying for several days in Cottbus, where a swarm of business representatives, the harbingers of capital investment, had laid siege to the hotel, the second time, just as summer was coming in – in Altdöbern, where I found a bed-and-breakfast with a widow and her daughter. The town boasted a castle and grounds, a factory no longer in operation, a cooperative store, a women’s clinic, and a cemetery in the church square for Soviet soldiers, its graves set out in neat rows. One restaurant still served Russian solyanka, but you could now wash it down with beer brought in from Bavaria. The currency reform was still to come, but the sale of the peacefully captured country was already under way: Western companies were flying their pennants everywhere.
But it was the environment I cared about. Wherever I looked, I saw the ravages of decades of brown-coal mining. Where the coal had been deep in the ground, as it was behind the castle, there was now a lunar landscape: otherworldly, conical hills of overburden among pools of stagnant groundwater. Not a bird in sight.
The quarry behind the women’s clinic afforded a good overview, and I covered page after page with pencil and charcoal drawings. From Altdöbern I moved on to what remained of the village of Pritzen and later to the rows of chimneys and cooling towers belonging to the doomed Black Pump industrial complex.
My drawing pad – twenty sheets of Ingres paper strong – was soon full. I drew conveyor belts so deeply worked into the ground that they looked like tripe. Coal scrapers near and far, perched on pit edges like insects, provided motif after motif.
This glance into the abysses wrought by human hands showed me more than meets the eye and set words free that later, in the novel Too Far Afield, outlined the prospect of the easternization of the West and other dark thoughts out of the depths. At the time, however, between drawings, the film started running backwards, and I was, as I am now, back on my own trail.
On the road from Senftenberg to Spremberg we must locate a time-travelling tank gunner standing next to a lance corporal with a Berlin drawl you can cut with a knife, sta
ring open-mouthed at his surroundings and grimacing. I can’t place the mess boy doling out the potato soup, but the private and the lance corporal are facing each other with half-full mess tins.
I am now being warmed by the June sun as I was then warmed by its April counterpart. I now see us spooning our soup in unison. We are standing near a street on which a column of tanks trying to advance and counter-attack is being obstructed by a column of refugees advancing in the opposite direction. There is no room to manoeuvre on one side of the road. The earth’s crust is cracking.
Down below, the brown-coal mining region stretches all the way to the quarry opposite, black gold waiting to be pressed into briquettes and fed to power stations. In war as in peace, Lusatia was a stronghold of opencast mining and remained so until the year the Wall came down and I went there and saw more than met the eye.
Then, stillness reigned over the cones of overburden and the pools of groundwater. It was quiet enough, while I sat drawing the opencast landscape in the most present of presents, for me to turn my ear back to the howling of the tank commanders, the roaring of the Maybach engines, the screaming of the refugees in their carts, the neighing of their horses, and the crying of their children, but also to the slam of the sergeant’s rubber stamp and the clatter of the tin spoons – we were scraping the last bits out of our mess tins – and finally to the first explosions of the Soviet tank grenades.
Between one spoonful and another my lance corporal said, ‘Those are T-34s.’
‘T-34s,’ said his echo. Me.
On the opposite side of the road a number of tanks had emerged from the woods and begun climbing the deep quarry. Small as toys, they stopped and fired. The traffic on the street had come to a halt, presenting the enemy fire with an easy target. The shots came closer. Because of their fixed barrels our Jagdpanther tanks had to turn before they could respond. Commands vying with screams, our tanks pushing jam-packed carts and their passengers and horses over the edge of the road into the quarry pit. They tipped over like trinkets.
