Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

Johann Burianek sabotaged a bridge with explosives supplied to him by the American imperialists; we made him memorize his confession before we sent him where he belonged. Don’t worry; he won’t come back.

  That fall a West German journalist issued the following verdict: Who has ever once experienced this woman when she pulls out all the stops of her ice-cold intellect won’t soon forget her. She alone is the law.

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  In 1953, in ungrateful discord with A. Pohl’s landmark film “The Invincible Ones,” whose protagonist is the German working class, certain enemies of democracy resisted the imposition of labor-norms. For her own part, the Red Guillotine took every rational measure to prevent the forthcoming uprising. For instance, she rendered harmless the electrician Kurt König, who’d carried out military espionage against the Soviet Union on the territory of our own German Democratic Republic! Would Kriemhild ever have forgiven her husband’s murderer even had he bent the knee? Not likely, and he knew it. Defiance therefore would have cost this König no portion of his already foredoomed safety, and saved his pride. But now he was exhausted. He begged and pleaded before we guillotined him.

  All the same, they dared to carry this banner against us: WE DEMAND A REDUCTION IN THE NORMS. The Red Guillotine saw that for what it was: a Fascist provocation. Indeed, within a few instants they’d also begun misleading the masses with the so-called “human rights question.” Half the workers were striking at the Bergmann-Borsig Engineering Works! The “Progress” clothing combine also became infected. Soon there were five hundred thousand criminals! The Red Guillotine shook her head in a fury when the telephone informed her of flames and broken windows at the Potsdamer Platz! The telephone commanded: Declare martial law in a hundred and sixty-seven districts.

  Fortunately for people’s power, we still had nineteen Red Army divisions. The stonethrowers at the Potsdamer Platz had no better success against our T-34s now than in 1945.

  Our Minister of Justice, Fechner, who’d been foolish enough to support the workers’ right to strike against their own regime, was removed on 16.7.53. In his place we appointed the Red Guillotine. And now her legend truly begins.

  As the Great Soviet Encyclopedia explains it: The General Prosecuting Authority, headed by the prosecutor general of the GDR, exercises supervision over the observance of socialist legality. The General Prosecuting Authority now found full and natural expression in the Red Guillotine.

  On the Invalidenstrasse, just east of where the Wall would soon rise, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Akademie für die Ausbildung von Militärärzten, completed in 1905, Nazified in 1933, was now Hilde Benjamin’s courthouse, and every morning she arrived at 0800 hours precisely; at 0750 she was joking with the two Rubblefrauen she saw every day on the other side of the street; one of them wore goggles and kept her white-dusted hair up in a bun; the other, who was younger, wore a dark skirt which went not far below the knee; at the recess, the Red Guillotine frequently saw them sitting on bricks, resting their backs against the brickheap they’d built; the Rubblefrau in goggles stared off into space and the Rubblefrau in the skirt read the newspaper. But that was only for a year. Then the rubble near the courthouse had all been cleared. The Red Guillotine missed those two women a little. Sometimes in summer she wandered to the window and gazed westward. She could see the way that the foliage of the Tiergarten paints the summer clouds green. Her most important trials are known, runs the legend, and need not be mentioned further.

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  We arrested six thousand criminals, Fascists and foreign agents. Soviet military tribunals began shooting the ringleaders in August; we’d already liquidated several others. The Red Guillotine is said to have taken pleasure in being present at these affairs; she particularly enjoyed inspecting the coffin beforehand. In her Stasi file, an evaluation from this period reports that Comrade BENJAMIN is from the professional and political standpoint an extremely qualified comrade. She works scientifically. She’d long since added to our penal code the crimes of offense against work discipline, offense against Plan discipline. Scornfully she addressed the defendants: You have the right to strike, yes, but a Fascist putsch is not a strike! In the name of the people, I find you guilty; you are sentenced to death!—and she drank a glass of water.

  As we would expect, she never failed to distinguish carefully in her verdicts between misguided workers and provocateurs.

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  What about Fechner? This question remained on the lips of the working class until 1955, when our darling Red Guillotine arrested him. She gave him an opportunity to clarify his attitude, not for his own sake but for the sake of our people who had yet to learn the meaning of vigilance. Then she sentenced him to eight years.

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  She assembled new brigades of instructors in the courts, to command the judges, and further transform them from dupes of bourgeois “objectivity” into uncompromising fighters—a task all the more compelling since she’d now begun to worry that many of her own colleagues might be unsteady, insubstantial in the work. She instructed her minions: We can show neither softness nor weakness in the confrontation against the adversary of our order. Therefore, hard punishments are correct punishments.

  Marveling at her accomplishments during this period, Comrade Gotthold Bley implicitly compares her to a factory proletarian when he writes that socialist law and socialist legislation were tools, motors and levers she used.

  She withdrew the new proposed Criminal Code, which wasn’t strict enough. (Believe it or not, in many subcategories of law we continued to rely on the Criminal Code of 1871.) Justice now became as neat as the salvaged bricks stacked on carts in Dresden. With a bitter smile, she laced her fingers like scissors, her eyes glittering almost happily as she unraveled another plot. (Comrade Büttner: She solidified the dialectical interrelation between law and society in the general consciousness.)

  In September she condemned Werner Hoffmann, who’d wormed his way all the way up to the Ministry of the Interior. I’ll never forget the way her lips parted like a beak as she clenched the lectern, demanding death.

  In October, since the purpose of our justice system is to smash the resistance of expropriated monopolists for all time and defend the achievements of the workers against external enemies, we liquidated the engineer Christian Lange-Werner, whose Nazi connections can be proved. I was there when the Red Guillotine cried out: Only here in the German Democratic Republic have we learned the lessons of the past.

  This wretched Lange-Werner tried to justify himself.—Lies! laughed the Red Guillotine, and the whole world laughed with her.

  She proved to all of us that he had attempted betrayal of the Fatherland to the West German agent codenamed SYLVIA, who no doubt worked for British intelligence, the American imperialists, Department K-5 and the Gehlen Organization. While his trial was still in progress, the Red Guillotine commanded: The sentence is to be carried out immediately after a reprieve has been turned down.

  By the time we had elevated her to full Zentralkomitee status, she was the terror of imperialists everywhere, and her Stasi file accordingly reports that on 28.1.54 it came to our attention that the American Secret Service planted an accomplice to carry out terrorist acts against Frau Dr. Hilde BENJAMIN. But we caught him; we guillotined him in secret.

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  The forces of revanchism paid her other compliments. One winter night, unknown persons erected a mock gallows on the roof of her dacha in Brieselang; they even hanged a straw doll from it—an outrageous provocation. We were the ones who informed her; we noticed it at dawn, when she was still sleeping. When the black telephone advised her of the situation, she turned pale, but quickly laughed it off. To soothe her, we arrested four suspicious individuals at once, and it’s certainly possible that one of them might have been the culprit.

  Ever since we’d taken note of a strange rumor, reported several times by our informants, that she had fled to Switzerland en route to Israel, because she was a Jew. This simply shows how crucial it remains to exterminate the
Fascist criminals without mercy. For instance, two workers were drinking at an inn, and one said to the other: There are three kinds of people here: those who have been arrested, those who are arrested and those who will be arrested. The black telephone overheard, which meant that so did the Red Guillotine. Leaning forward in her pale grey suit, the light ricocheting off her dark grey hair, she gazed across the thicket of microphones with the same rapt sincerity as a child begging for candy, and her moist little lips parted as she demanded death, death, death.

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  She began to say that to achieve the future we needed to study the lessons of the past still more closely. She had herself chauffeured to Dresden to attend another lecture given by the former German Fascist Field-Marshal Paulus, who blamed Hitler, von Manstein and the monopolists for everything—which is the correct line, after all. His glaring white old man’s face gaped in what might have been meant to be firmness, his eyes huge as if panicked behind the heavy black spectacles as he stood at the lectern, a glass of water never far away. The Red Guillotine sat in the back row, smiling. On her lap she held a Stasi folder. From time to time, she opened it and peeked humorously at the topmost item, which was a photograph of Paulus in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice eight years before, when Germany remained undivided; he’d resembled a scarecrow in the witness stand; a white helmeted military policeman stood beside him; wires ran from Paulus’s earphones; he stared queasily ahead; only the MP was looking back at him. For some reason she could not explain, this image gave her pleasure.

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  In 7.54, thanks to steadily increasing cooperation between the courts and our people’s representatives, we guillotined the former Nazi Wilhelm Wolff for causing epidemics in farm animals on our collective farms, and for other equally depraved crimes. I attended his trial; I remember Hilde Benjamin standing at the lectern, digging her fingers into it as she leaned toward the microphone, shouting: No freedom for the enemies of democracy!

  Called on to defend himself, the Fascist reptile Wolff pointed out that he would have had no motive to cause an epidemic.

  Replied the Red Guillotine: Here is your motive—to spread unrest.

  And she condemned him to death, death, death.

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  By 1955 she was squat and shapeless like a frog; I saw her flashing her crazy teeth at the Albanians. On 8.3.55, not quite a week before we sentenced Paul Köppe to death, the Politbüro confirmed his condemnation (the bourgeois get the order backwards). On the same day, in the Rudloff trial, when the General State Prosecutor proposed leniency, the Red Guillotine stepped in to save society from this four-time murderer.

  I’ve seen her in a short pale trenchcoat, with her head and knees both bare and her hands in her pockets, striding grimly just behind Comrade Ulbricht, whose trenchcoat is much longer and who wears a tophat almost like a capitalist; his right arm is locked in a salute, the knife-edge of his hand is wedged against the brim of his hat as he and the Red Guillotine march down the rain-shiny tarmac of Potsdam, not quite treading on the reflected heads of the rifle-bearing soldiers who face them in a long, long wall; everybody is saluting except for the Red Guillotine.

  In 5.55, when we guillotined Karl-Ernst Hahn and Alfred Rzepio for their failed murder of a taxi driver, a crime which had been suggested to them by American gangster movies, the Red Guillotine cried out: As Comrade Mielke has noted, they have expelled themselves from the working class! and our democratic jurists, in close cooperation with the security organs of reborn Germany, concurred. With her fingers spread and pointing upward, her lips earnestly parted, she stood before the microphone, utterly sincere as she called for another death, another death.

  There was a sleepy aspect to her now, as if she were a well-fed sacred crocodile which could always count on receiving the next human sacrifice. Sometimes she only half-opened her eyes. She yawned at times (poor Comrade Benjamin is getting old after all her sufferings!), cutting off the defendant with an upraised finger instead of an angry word-assault. But if he dared to plead his case instead of confessing, or, worse yet, sought to contradict her, then the Red Guillotine could still snap! On 14.9.55, when we liquidated the former Stasi agents Susanne and Bruno Krieger for espionage against our state, the masses cheered like Arctic workers raising their gloved fists in salute in a Roman Karmen movie. All the same, some were disappointed; for the Red Guillotine didn’t give them much of a show. Possibly that was because the Kriegers failed to stick up for themselves. (Susanne Krieger had believed that she wouldn’t be guillotined if she incriminated others. There’s no reason to keep our agreements with such people.)

  That same month, when we disposed of Director Nellis of the J. W. Stalin Electrical Works for sabotage, the technical manageress of the factory stationed herself in the courtroom to bring back reports to all his former colleagues. She was there when the Red Guillotine’s round, coarse face grew cheerful, split into smiles, and denounced Director Nellis to pieces. She demanded death, death, death. How could we deny her that treat?

  In 1.56, we guillotined the Fascist agents of the United States Werner Rudert and Max Held. When the Politburo confirmed their sentences, her smile grew as full of fat and sugar as one of our intelligentsia parcels. Then she took a nap at her desk, snoring and grinning.

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  On 4.11.56 she arrived at the courthouse at 0755 hours for the Hagen trial. Nikolai from Stalingrad smiled at her in a sparkle of steel teeth; his greeting always temporarily undid that heavy, pale, somehow distinguished sadness in her head which dragged it down; the dark heaviness of her suit grew bright because his Kalashnikov was shining.

  Well, well, Comrade Benjamin, so will another head roll today?

  Count on it! laughed the Red Guillotine.

  She imagined that he liked her, but he was terrified of her.

  And up she went to her office, where a picture-gallery of deceased saints gazed down at her: the pioneer prosecutor E. Melsheimer, the constitutionalist K. Polak, brave G. Dmitroff, who’d defied a Hitlerite court and won, and of course that representative of the international workers’ movement, Felix Dzherzhinsky, whose “organs” have liquidated millions of human beings in our beloved Soviet Union.

  They brought in the defendant, whose desperate face reminded her of the white-cratered blackness of our opera house’s scorched facade. The Red Guillotine was already there; she preferred to have her victims find everything already in place. They’d be marched in, and there sat the Red Guillotine at the center of her long high desk, with a bust of Comrade Ulbricht on her left and a bust of Comrade Stalin on her right. In her signature dark suit, white blouse and black cravat, she surveyed the world, her head held high and her arms folded while she gazed complacently down at our socialist reporters and photojournalists, then slowly, slowly turned her head right to inspect her latest prey, who as he was led to his seat in the dock, hemmed in by secret police and the so-called “defense” attorneys, could scarcely help feeling like a pupil late for school. And that was merely the beginning of what he felt; because it’s now time to turn our attention to the dread which her presence somehow injected into people, paralyzing them as if with a spider’s poison, so that they grew confused, submissive, silent. Later on, when they were being led to the whitewashed execution chamber, they spent the last instants of their lives seeking in vain to understand how she had entrapped them; the truth is that her mouth was not eloquent (it didn’t need to be; it licked its lips with a grey and gleeful tongue); her logic could never be recapitulated—how could it be? For the condemned were innocent, by those “objective” human standards which are now obsolete.

  Now, who was this one? It seems that when a team of Rubblefrauen were raising up the remains of the gravestones in the Jewish cemetery they heard a noise, so three of them stood round the hole with shovels raised to strike, while the fourth ran for the People’s Police. The Fascist war criminal Hagen had ensconced himself there. What a provocation! The Anglo-Americans had pretended to hang him at Nuremberg, and here he was
! He had a tunnel and even a crystal set so that he could receive orders from the enemies of our new Germany. It was the Anglo-Fascist Operation Gold all over again. Our brave People’s Police, led by Oberst H. Scholz, ran to give their aid; Red Army men came speeding down Leninallee in their Vopo-Jeeps. And so we captured the imperialist snake Hagen.

  First pursing her fat grey lips, then showing her crooked teeth, the Red Guillotine narrowed her eyes at the defendant, who gazed insolently back at her. Oh, she felt a rage coming on! Meanwhile, in the name of East Germany’s smiling chemists and laughing athletes, our Young Pioneers (ages six to ten) were already shrieking out Down with the traitor! while our Thälmann Pioneers (eleven to fourteen) waved beautifully lettered placards in support of our inevitably just sentence, whatever it might be.

  Esteemed comrades and friends! began the Red Guillotine in the name of the people; and her wide little eyes and parted little lips definitely stood ready to do justice. Vigilance against the reptiles! Spies beware! We’ve caught another one!

  And still, no matter how she glowered and glared, the Fascist traitor refused to lower his eyes, and thereby revealed his negative attitude. How pale he was! He must have been a long time underground.

  All the preparations were ready. His sentence had already been confirmed. She felt that she could hardly rest until he was in the grave, with his head severed from his shoulders.

  Confesss your criminal activities, began the Red Guillotine.

  Which ones? laughed Hagen.

  When Hagen not only refuses to rise for Siegfried’s widow, but lays across his lap the jasper-jeweled sword of the man he’s murdered, the bard who’s made him grows gleeful; what’s more manly than open defiance, especially in the presence of a superior host? Hagen knows he’s doomed, and shows off his hostility in that sword’s beauty and insulting nakedness.