The Woman from Hamburg

by Hanna Krall

  8

  The director of the reformatory was a pastor, a tall man with a puffy face and strong fists.

  The pastor gave his charges three grades every week: for work, for studying, and for behavior. The lowest grade was six and the highest, one. If someone got even one six, he spent the weekend in an isolation room. There were two boards in it. You could sit on the lower board; on the upper board, you could rest your arms and head.

  From time to time the boys in the reformatory would try to escape, but they soon returned, brought back by the police. After their return they would talk about what was happening on the outside. One of the youths, who had run away to Frankfurt, told them that university students were protesting against the corrective methods employed in reformatories. A girl had written a film script about this, and some people wanted to establish a juvenile home with entirely different methods.

  The screenplay girl was named Ulrike Meinhof, and the girl with the entirely different methods was named Gudrun Ensslin.

  9

  After Stani’s death Gizela petitioned the authorities: Her husband had died as a result of kidney disease; the illness was the result of his stay in a concentration camp. Stani W.’s four children, Gizela wrote, deserved compensation.

  Gizela W.’s attorney was informed that he should apply to the Office for Compensation Requests in Baden-Württemberg.

  The Office requested the records of Stanisław W.’s illness from the clinic.

  The clinic was unable to confirm that Stanisław W.’s illness was a consequence of his time in the camp. In particular, the back of Stanisław W.’s eye yielded no conclusive evidence. The clinic requested an opinion from the Institute of Pathology.

  The Institute of Pathology was unable to confirm anything.

  The attorney appealed the negative decision.

  Gizela W. wrote a letter: “Does the German state believe that my children should drop dead? I am not a beggar; I am fighting for what is owed me.”

  The attorney regretted that Mrs. Gizela W. had written such an inappropriate letter.

  The Office for Compensation Requests rejected the request because the deceased did not meet the conditions of §1.2, but suggested that she could petition for compensation under §167.

  Eight years after Stanisław W.’s death the mayor of Cologne informed Mrs. Gizela W. that: The government of the Federal Republic of Germany had signed an agreement with the High Commissioner of the United Nations to the effect that persecutions based on ethnicity would be subject to new legal regulations.

  The mayor of Cologne informed Mrs. Gizela W.: “There is no proof that the deceased was persecuted for political reasons, for reasons of race, belief, or ideology. If he was persecuted, it was for reasons of ethnicity. This compensation is not transferrable to the heirs.”

  10

  During her first prison visits Gizela used to say to the bullet-proof glass with the openings on both sides: “If your father were alive, he would certainly not praise you for this. When the Americans liberated the camp they put a stick in your father’s hands and said, ‘Take revenge.’ And do you know what your father told them? ‘Thank you, gentlemen, but I am not suited for such things.’ ”

  After his visits with his mother Stefan got into the habit of carrying on lengthy conversations with his father.

  “They gave you a stick, not a machine pistol,” Stefan would begin. “It was only a stick. Why didn’t you want to take it from them?”

  He wasn’t sure of his father’s answer. “I am not suited …” is not a sufficient answer, so he would start over: “No doubt you thought that the world had to change after Dachau. All right then, take a look at this world. Look at the fists of the director of the reformatory. Look at the two boards in the isolation cell. Look at me, sitting on one board and resting my head on the other. And remember, too, my mother’s face whenever she came back from the bureaucrats in charge of compensation. OK, so you didn’t want a stick, but I beg you, take a good look at my mother’s face.”

  He addressed his father with growing indignation. As if there existed a connection between the director’s fists and the stick his father didn’t take, the bureaucrats dealing with compensation requests and the isolation cell in the Maximum Security Section.

  11

  From the life history included in the case records: He worked on a ship for a few months. For two weeks he was a machinist. He established contact with left-wing radicals. He took part in a demonstration against the Minister of Justice. He contributed his unemployment compensation to a fund for the defense of prisoners. He was connected with persons who were preparing a terrorist attack on the German Embassy in Stockholm. He joined the underground of the RAF—the Röte Armee Faktion or Red Army Faction.

  From the case files: Members of the RAF rented several apartments in the area. They stole a yellow Mercedes and bought a white minibus. They prepared two Heckler & Koch carbines, one Polish-made WZ 63 machine pistol that took Makarov cartridges, one Colt revolver …

  At 5:30 p.m. a blue Mercedes carrying Dr. Hanns Martin Schleyer and his driver drove up, followed by a white Mercedes with three policemen. They turned right, and then a yellow Mercedes drove off the sidewalk and into the roadway. Dr. Schleyer’s driver braked. Men leaped out of the minibus and opened fire on the driver and policemen; they dragged out Dr. Schleyer, who was not wounded, and drove off in a westerly direction. The attack lasted two minutes. The driver and the three policemen died on the spot. The driver took five bullets, one of which was fatal; the first policeman was shot twenty-three times, two shots causing fatal wounds; the second policeman was shot twenty-four times, three of them fatal; the third, twenty times, three of them fatal—in all, a total of one hundred bullets. All the fatal shots were administered with 9-mm Makarov cartridges. This happened in Cologne, on September 5, 1977.

  Hanns Martin Schleyer was the president of the Employers’ Association of the Federal Republic of Germany. In exchange for his freedom, the hostage-takers demanded the release from prison of ten RAF terrorists, among them Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin.

  On October 13 four Arab terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa airplane; they landed in Mogadishu and repeated the demands of the RAF.

  On October 17 German commandos freed the passengers and killed three of the hijackers. The pilot died, shot by the terrorists.

  Several hours later, prison guards in Stammheim found the corpses of RAF members Baader and Raspe, who were dead from bullet wounds. Gudrun Ensslin was hanging in a window. It was determined that she had committed suicide.

  Two days later, Dr. Schleyer’s corpse was found in the trunk of an abandoned Audi 100.

  Seven months later, in 1978, Stefan W. was arrested at Orly Airport and charged with the abduction and murder of Hanns Martin Schleyer.

  The trial took place in 1980. Stefan W. refused to testify about the abduction and murder, but he gladly expressed his opinions about the actual aims of the German bourgeoisie, the tentacles of neocolonialism in the Third World, and the Vietnam War, which revealed the true face of American imperialism. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

  12

  The terrorists were surrounded with hatred and fear. It was feared that they were producing an atom bomb and would want to use it. Polls showed a rapid rise in proponents of the death penalty. Gudrun Ensslin’s ten-year-old son was splashed with muriatic acid. It happened during his school vacation. The boy was playing; it was adults who threw the bottle. His face was burned. He was taken to the United States. American doctors performed three skin transplants. They were successful; the doctors were experienced because they had operated on soldiers who were burned by napalm in the Vietnam War. Not one cemetery would bury the trio of terrorists from Stammheim. People demanded that the bodies be cremated and the ashes scattered, or else that the remains be thrown into a landfill. In the end, they were buried in a cemetery in Stuttgart, at the mayor’s request. The mayor was Manfred Rommel, the son of Field Marshal Rommel,
the Desert Fox from the North African campaign and participant in a plot against Hitler. The mayor appealed to mercy. Because he was a Christian. Because among the dead was Gudrun, his neighbors’ daughter. Because long ago, in Ulm, Gudrun Ensslin’s parents lived two houses away from Manfred Rommel’s parents.

  Mr. Ensslin was a pastor. After the war his daughters, Christiana and Gudrun, had asked the same question that Stani asked Gizela W.: “DID YOU KNOW?”

  Unlike Gizela, the pastor knew. He knew the Stauffenberg conspirators; they belonged to his parish. He knew the circumstances of Rommel’s death in the nearby stone quarries.

  His daughters were angry at him for not having denounced the crimes. He should have denounced them publicly, from the pulpit, during services.

  The pastor explained that the Gestapo were present at services.

  “That’s no reason to have kept silent,” his daughters replied.

  13

  Christiana Ensslin, her hair clipped short, with sunken black eyes and wearing a stretched-out sweater, lives with a terrorist who served sixteen years in prison and then was pardoned by the president. She is friends with a woman terrorist who is still in prison, but is already partially pardoned: she spends the nights in prison, while during the day she sews costumes for La Traviata at the city opera. When she receives her complete pardon she will go on vacation to visit a Swedish princess known as the Angel of Prisoners. Christiana Ensslin is an activist in the Union of Film Workers. She fights for greater funding for women directors. She would love to finance a film about Rosa Luxemburg’s first day of freedom. It is 1918; Rosa leaves the Breslau prison, boards a train, travels to Berlin, enters the editorial office, greets Liebknecht, sits down at her desk, and starts writing. She is writing an article about the situation in Germany. That’s all very well, but who will go to see such a film? “I will,” says the terrorist who was in prison for sixteen years. “I will,” says the terrorist who sews costumes for La Traviata. “I will,” says Christiana, whose father did not condemn the crimes. “I will,” says Dr. Ronge, who translates for our Polish-German conversations. “I will,” I say, although I have no intention of going to see a film about Rosa Luxemburg’s first day of freedom. I say this out of sympathy for skinny, neurotic Christiana Ensslin. And that would have been the entire audience.

  14

  The Maximum Security Section was built especially for Stefan W. and his friends from the RAF. It is located in the depths of the prison, in Ossendorf, in the northern part of Cologne. No daylight enters the cells. The walls are made of sound- and odor-absorbing materials. Keys don’t jangle, the combination locks don’t creak, and the coffee that Stefan W. brews has no aroma. Stefan has brought a thermos with boiling water and little jars to the visitation cell. He shakes out some Nescafe and sugar from the jars, stirs them for a long time, gradually pours in boiling water from the thermos, and makes cappuccino. The visitation cell is a concrete container, decorated with several pictures. They portray Peter the Great on his stone horse, a review of the troops on Senate Square, and a bridge on the Moika in winter garb. The pictures were put up by Stefan’s warden, a fellow by the name of Hemmers, who nurses a fondness for Petersburg.

  Stefan was mild-mannered; he had gray-green eyes and a trusting smile like his father. He greeted me with “Dzień dobry, pani” and then switched to German, having exhausted his fund of Polish words. He said that he was in Poland only once, at the airport, changing planes. When he and his friend entered the transit lounge, they noticed a most wanted list on the wall with a photo gallery of terrorists whom the police were searching for. They had no trouble finding their own photographs. Luckily, no one paid any attention either to the photos or to them; they were told to board their plane half an hour later. His second contact with Poland was via the intermediary of that Polish WZ 63 machine pistol. It was purchased abroad. It was a very nice gun, because it was small, not that much larger than a revolver. His colleagues loved it because it was easy to conceal. Unfortunately, it has a serious drawback: its cartridges are too short. He wouldn’t have a chance in an exchange of bullets with a NATO pistol. Makarov cartridges can be used only in a Polish gun. The policemen and Schleyer’s driver were shot with Makarov cartridges. Stefan W. said that the driver was definitely not supposed to die. That was a mistake. The policemen also were not supposed to die, but no one knew that there would be policemen. Previously, Schleyer had not had a police detail; they had begun guarding him shortly before the kidnapping after another attack, on a bank director. In short, a botched job. Although, on the other hand, said Stefan W., when a person takes a gun into his hands he has to accept the fact that he will kill.

  There were more than a dozen victims of the actions that began with the abduction of Schleyer: his driver, the three policemen, the three airplane hijackers, the plane’s captain, the Stammheim prisoners … Yes, Stefan W. agreed, many victims. But it had never occurred to any of them that the government would not accede to their demands. It simply never entered anyone’s mind. They had long since known that imperialism is bloodthirsty, but they didn’t think it was that bloodthirsty.

  15

  For the first time in sixteen years, Stefan W. left the Maximum Security Section and came to the general prison visiting hall. It was a fairly large room with two doors. One door opened to allow the prisoners to enter; their guests were ushered in through the other door. Each prisoner was accompanied by a guard. The guard held a card that he placed on a table. At the table, facing the hall, sat a woman supervisor. She was a corpulent brunette wearing gold earrings and a low-cut top edged with black lace. She wore a skirt that buttoned down the front. The bottom buttons were undone so that the skirt revealed her thighs, which were so heavy that the supervisor couldn’t bring her knees together. She sat there with her legs, encased in black patterned tights, spread apart.

  In addition to the supervisor’s desk there were six tables and chairs in the hall. The prisoners were led in first. They were predominantly young men. They entered slowly, looking around, holding plastic bags with their dirty things in their hands. The visitors were admitted afterward. They were women. They entered more quickly, running actually, pushing chairs out of the way and throwing themselves into the men’s embraces. They wore long, loose skirts. They sat with their backs to the hall and immediately began talking. They would listen for a moment to the men’s responses, burst out laughing, and continue telling them about whatever it was.

  Stefan W. began by explaining the sources of RAF ideology. It is derived from guerrilla movements, from urban partisan struggle in South America. Nowadays, imperialism feeds on exploitation of the Third World. The people of the RAF are those in Western Europe, in the very center of imperialism, who act in support of the Third World and its liberation movements.

  “We attack the bastions of imperialism,” said Stefan W. “Military bases, banks …”

  The women were moving from the chairs onto the men’s knees; now their long skirts flowed to the ground and shielded them like screens. Their laughter changed into fitful, muffled giggling.

  “Mao taught that the working class in imperialist countries is no longer a revolutionary class,” Stefan W. continued. “And it profits from the exploitation of the Third World. The revolutionary subject of society …”

  The women were unfastening the men’s buttons; the giggling slowly subsided.

  “… became the people of the social margins. The homeless, the unemployed, former prisoners, youth from reformatories. We have to rely on them in our struggle.”

  The women began rocking on the men’s knees, gently, like boats on calm water; in the visiting hall of the prison in Ossendorf only Stefan W.’s voice could be heard:

  “The marginalized must organize!

  “We demand the factories!

  “When the capitalist summons the police we will respond with force!

  “Marx said that violence is the midwife of a new world. Freedom is only a question of time!”

  The w
oman supervisor began making signs. The visit was over. The women slowly fastened their own and their men’s buttons, arranged their blouses and their hair.

  “Eastern Europe?” Stefan W. now spoke more softly, lost in thought. “Why does Europe matter? One failed experiment. The idea is alive. Millions of people in the whole world still suffer from poverty. The idea is alive …”

  The guards came to collect the prisoners. The hall emptied out.

  16

  His conversations with his father, conducted in his maximum security cell, ended in a silence behind which Stefan W. could feel a stubborn, unreconciled disapproval. At first this had rankled. In time he realized that it made no sense to keep on arguing with him. One cannot persuade a person who survived Dachau without fighting back and who then sought justice in a slim book with the title We Sing to the Lord. He turned to another person. To Czesława, his father’s mother, his grandmother. She had worked like a dog. She was poor. She was exploited by factory owners. She was a person whom Stefan W. and his friends wanted to defend against the exploitation of capitalism. She had to be an ally in his struggle. She had to understand him. He could feel her sympathy and turned to her with unlimited trust. He missed her. He didn’t know how old she was. He could not know that, dying, she was younger than he was, sitting here on his prison bunk. Had he known the story told by Stanisław W.’s younger brother about the room in the garret and the basin with the burning alcohol, he would certainly have addressed the woman seated in the chair. The frozen woman, wrapped in a blanket, with a blue flame at her feet like an eternal flame.

  17

  One day, Stefan W. received a letter from an unknown correspondent. She wrote that she was twenty-three years old, was fighting for women’s rights, sympathized with him and would like to visit him. He invited her to come. She was tall, slender, dressed in a black sweater and black leather pants. They conversed through the bullet-proof glass about women’s rights, world imperialism, and love. Since then she had visited him once a month and wrote him letters and postcards several times a week. There was never a beginning or an ending in these letters. She would begin in midsentence, even in the middle of a word, and end in midsentence. They could guess each other’s mood from the handwriting. They had an agreement that they would not pretend. When she was sad she did not attempt to smile, and when she looked ugly she did not put on makeup. They were afraid that they thought better of each other than they should; that they were creating idealized images of each other. That was their constant worry and an unvarying theme in their conversations.