by Peter Weiss
Near the farm stables on the way to the school, in the spruce woodlands, Ossietzky’s daughter was sitting by the edge of the path on a tall wooden table used for loading and unloading milk buckets. On the left, behind a ditch and a fence, pastures sprawled, with the freshly plowed furrows of the field running off to the right. She had come to Viggbyholm in nineteen thirty-six, through the foresight of the Swedish committee founded to support her father. Prior to that, as the first political refugee child from Germany, she had spent three years at the Dartington Hall boarding school in the south of England. Even before I found out who she was, I had been struck by her air of total isolation. I didn’t follow Hodann and his wife—who had been picked up from the train by Kautsky and his family—to the school building, but lingered on the unplowed strip beside the field. After a long silence, she asked whether I wanted to join the institution as a student, but then she quickly surmised that I too had probably also already left school. She told me that she was still living here but worked during the week as a housemaid in the city, in Enebyberg. Do you ever get the urge to just smash some glass, she asked abruptly. When she’s holding one of those glasses that she has taken out of the vitrine, she continued, she can’t resist the urge to drop it, despite knowing that the woman of the house, the wife of a bookkeeper, would deduct the value from her wage. And on top of that the ranting and raving about it being a particularly rare piece, even though it’s only part of a cheap set. The laugh around her broad, slender mouth was childish, but also bore a hint of rebellion. Her black hair hung long and smooth over her shoulders. The shape of her brownish hands, which she held in front of her on her knees, betrayed a particular strength. On her mother’s side she descended from an Indian princess, she explained; on her father’s side from a Polish knight, who during Metternich’s time had fought for the freedom of his country. As I leaned onto the edge of the wooden frame next to her, as if getting into position to listen to a fairy tale, her voice took on a bitter, jagged tone, and her greenish-gray eyes inspected me with mistrust; I sensed that the tiniest sign of disbelief would have scared her off. In England, she said, she first lived at Russell’s house, and was then sent to Devon to join his and Huxley’s children at the experimental school near Exeter. Gusts of wind blew her hair into her face. Her mix of Swedish and English filtering through the strands. She said she’d been brought up among the elite who were supposed to tend to the survival of the British Empire, that she had grown up under the impression that she was destined for great things. Toller, an outsider, had been among her protectors in this endeavor, had fostered her interest in dance and theater, and, before she even graduated from high school, arranged for her to sit the test for the acting school at the Old Vic, which she passed at the age of sixteen and after which she was summoned to Sweden. It was at this point that she mentioned her father’s name for the first time. When, in November of thirty-six, he had been awarded the Peace Prize by the Nobel Committee, and she had been taken in as the daughter of one of the most prominent prisoners in Germany and invited by Sundberg, the rector, to visit the boarding school, she was still expecting, in accordance with her father’s wishes, to receive a portion of the prize money of one hundred thousand marks to put toward her theatrical education. She said she didn’t want to go into the details of the embezzlement that was committed by the Gestapo. Eighty marks a month were apportioned to her father’s care, and, while her mother had received one mark a day during the final months of his life, the rest ended up in the hands of the fraudsters. Gravely ill after years of torture, her father was transferred—as a result of the pressure of international opinion—from the camp in the swamp near Esterwegen to Berlin and was put up in a small clinic run by a doctor by the name of Dosquet, who had a close relationship with the Reichsmarschall. One year ago, she said, propping herself up with her hands on the edge of the plank of wood, sitting up and talking with her face looking skyward, shortly after Easter of thirty-eight, I found out how he had died through a letter that had been smuggled out. They’d said he had suffered from tuberculosis, heart failure. But he never had respiratory problems; he had a strong physical constitution, she said. With appropriate care he could have been saved; but the bloated con man in the white general’s uniform, the number-two man in the state, had ordered his murder. His stay at the Nordend sanitorium in Niederschönhausen was covered by sixty francs a month that were sent from Paris by the League of Human Rights. The patient lay in a shed-like building in the garden, in a small room divided by a chest-high wooden partition. A suitcase, a few cardboard boxes, a plank of wood with a few books arranged on it, that was all that he owned. His pulmonary condition, she said, had been injected into him in small doses during his years in the camp. The gradual destruction of his body was intended to drive him, officially in protective custody, to put an end to his life himself. Yet because he continued to hold firm, and because a dead prisoner, as experience had shown, swayed international opinion less than one that was still breathing, his elimination was ordered. Her informant, she said, had told her how the condition of the prisoner had visibly deteriorated shortly after a visit from the marshal; he was certain that the patient had received an overdose of tuberculosis bacteria, which, given his general physical infirmity, was certain to bring about his death. The word dispatched had been uttered. During the final days, the nurse refused him the blanket he had asked for in the damp and drafty room. And once he could no longer be helped, she said, and the protests of the global community had petered out, the attention she had received had also diminished; though she remained a guest of the school foundation, she was told with increasing frequency, especially by Kronheimer, the headmistress, that she should get the idea of being destined to be an actor or dancer out of her head, and that she needed first of all to learn to work. Back when her father had received the Nobel Prize, she had been paraded around as a celebrity, swarmed by photographers and journalists; she had even secured permission to join Håkonsson’s theatrical school in Stockholm, with the committee putting up the costs. However, in the fall of thirty-eight, when Toller—in Stockholm for a few days—recommended her to Brunius, the director of the theater, she was gruffly turned away with the explanation that firstly, as a foreigner, she could not be admitted to a state school; and secondly, that with her accent, she would never be able to learn stage elocution. She jumped down from her seat. For a second I thought she would rush off, but then she walked with me to the school grounds. I had to consider, she said, that staying in boarding schools had been the normal state of affairs for her since her early adolescence, the fascists had not been the first to stick her father in prison, the government of the Weimar Republic had put him behind bars for his struggle against the Junkers and militarists; while he was in Tegel, she had attended the gymnasium at the Gray Abbey, Bismarck’s old school in Breite Strasse, where as the daughter of someone found guilty of high treason she was bullied and, because she refused to perform the national salute, expelled. It wasn’t until October of thirty-eight, when I was eighteen, she said, that Toller outlined to me the consequences of the events of the ensuing years. Just as, a year earlier, even though I had known how my father was being treated in the prisons and camps, his loving letters, which he was able to get to me through my mother, and all the articles, campaigns, and activities to support him had nourished the belief within me that he would one day be released; after his death, I likewise thought there had to be some form of expiation, redemption. I had left Germany as a thirteen-year-old, had lived a sheltered life despite the drifting about, had never belonged to a nation, was a citizen of the world, and only now, as Toller showed me the defamation that was being marshaled against him, did I understand the reach of the lust for destruction. Toller, the pacifist, had replaced a part of my father for me; shortly before he continued on to Oslo, this gentle, warm human being was called a mass murderer by the Norwegian newspaper Fritt Folk [Free People]; he, the wandering Jew, they wrote, flutters about from land to land, a hater of Germanic cultu
re, in the pay of Communism, to sow the seeds of depredation and war. If you would speak German, I said, I’d understand you better. She stopped still, stared at me with a look of horror under which her facial features threatened to collapse. So who are you then, she said, suddenly lisping, I thought you were Swedish. She stood before me in her thin, ratty dress, which must have been a hand-me-down and which she had long since grown out of, her hands now hanging lifelessly. I can’t speak that language any more, she said. My parents, I said, are workers, they were driven from their home by the occupation of the Sudetenland, where they were now I didn’t know, I myself work in the separator plant as a tinner, for an hourly wage of one krona, the rent for my room on Fleminggatan is forty kronor a month. I didn’t know why I was explaining all of this to her; perhaps it was nervousness. She grabbed my hand, pulled me backward, away from the school buildings in front of us. We could go to Hodann’s place, she said, I’ve visited him once before, he is a mentor, a helper, but let’s not go to the others. His wife, she just wants to fuss over me, and the Kautskys, those dignified, cultivated people, and Sundberg, my host, regardless of how proper, how compassionate and open-minded he can be within the confines of his religious humanism, I can’t look any of them in the eyes, I’m all betrayal in the face of their benevolence, I can’t handle that they view me as their charge. Here at the school they want to teach me to experience nature, she said, that’ll put my mind at ease, they say, and I have tried to feel something looking out at the fields with their cowpats, at the wires charged with low voltage current between the posts, at the swampy creek, at the piles of stones that the farmer has picked from his field. I stared at the sky, the clouds, and the only thing I felt was that I don’t belong here. I reminded her about Brecht, but she didn’t want to hear anything about Brecht either; he was only interested in meeting influential people, she said. We had arrived back at the road; she was walking at a rapid pace toward the hill with the villas. It is now seven years, she said, since I last saw my father, before his, what’s it called, transfer to the Tegel penitentiary; then he was still well-fed, wearing a coat and hat, collar and tie, and since then, it was like in a film, I could only see images cross-fading into one another, they became more and more uncanny, mask-like, from the camp in Sonnenburg, where he wore that big patch sewn over his heart with the number five hundred sixty-two, then, lined up in rank and file, his clothes hanging off him, eyes sunken, nose enormous, mouth clenched together, barely able to keep himself up with his spade, in the east wing, station five, then in Papenburg Esterwegen, near the Dutch border on the Ems, hunched over, peeling potatoes, then, in late thirty-four, now emaciated to a skeleton, lying on a cot, then hanging between two figures in black uniforms, pale as a sheet, one swollen eye, teeth beaten in, a broken leg, poorly healed and dragging behind him at an angle, then that double photo, his skull across from the pompous face of Hamsun, who taunted, berated the inmate, who was one of the leaders in the months-long battle against him being awarded the prize; I vomited, threw up, she said, his books, which I once loved, Hunger, Pan, Victoria, I tore up, then, in February thirty-eight, the cadaver dressed up as a civilian one last time before a jury in Berlin Mitte, in profile, straining to hold his head upright, then nothing but the vision of him lying in the filthy corner of the shed, the nurse keeping guard behind the wooden partition, in the hospital garden the blackthorn blossoming, on the fourth of May, thirty-eight, at three o’clock in the afternoon, as the Catholic sister was reciting pray for us pray for us over him, through to the final plaster husk that an unknown sculptor, sneaking into the death room by night, took of his face and managed to smuggle out of the country; an utterly alien mask, cold, resembling those of Schiller and Blake. We walked up the street, and now, she said, because nobody knew what to do with her anymore, the Jewish headmistress of our school pours out on me everything that in my childhood in Germany was most insidious, the authoritarianism, the terrorizing shackles of discipline; she, herself a refugee from that disgraceful country, scowls that if I don’t work then I don’t eat either, and these respectable people stand around agreeing, confirm that I, as a nothing, a beggar, should be content with the alms that I receive. We had reached the railway station. She wanted to travel with me into the city, she said. When I pointed out that Hodann was expecting us, she simply responded that we could let him know by telephone. It was the first time someone had walked through the doorway of my apartment with me and accompanied me into my room. My fellow lodgers were sitting in the kitchen having dinner, it was getting raucous, they had produced brandy with their own distilling device, the drinking songs were reverberating through the wall. I saw my accommodation through the eyes of a guest. It resembled a cell. Slender bed, table, chair, chest of drawers, tiled stove. Not one book, just a few papers on the tabletop. I had nothing to offer her, I didn’t want to go into the kitchen. I should put out the lamp, she said. Just the wan pre-summer sky, the lights from the street were illuminating walls and ceiling, reflections from the headlights of passing cars sliding across the room every now and then. At least you have a view of the park, she said. And it was also the first time that I spoke about my time in Spain in this country. It grew darker. My visitor had stretched herself out on the bed; I sat by the window. Gradually things grew silent in the kitchen and the adjacent room; a workday was to come, with an early morning. For a fraction of a second I saw myself sticking my card into the slot of the time clock at four o’clock in the morning and pulling down the lever. How had I managed to adapt here, she asked. She has been in this country for almost three years, and until now had acquainted herself only with the effort it takes to survive. After her aborted attempt to make it in the theater, she had given up hopes of further education, was just vegetating. It’s not the emigration, she said, that gave her the feeling of not belonging, she had always emigrated, immigrated, moved on, impermanence was in her family’s blood. My father’s grandparents, she said, still spoke Polish, my mother was born in India, brought up in England, my father’s parents moved from Upper Silesia to Hamburg, where, before the war, my father met my mother, who was an adherent of Pankhurst, a suffragette. They married in a village in Essex in nineteen thirteen, then traveled back to Germany, lived in Hamburg, Berlin, were often on the road for their magazine, for the antiwar movement. The problem was that there was always a pettiness and narrow-mindedness that cropped up to counter the internationalism in which she had grown up. In Berlin she had been called a foreigner, a Jew, because of her dark skin, her dark hair; in the Viggbyholm school the kids called her Indian, American Indian. In England, for a while, she had entertained the dream of having an origin. I wanted something to imagine, surrounded by all these scions of the upper class. I dug up my great-grandfather, Palmer, the general in the Queen’s Guard, who married the daughter of a maharaja in Hyderabad after entering the fray during some massacre to protect the Indian dynasty. I surrounded myself with the images of his possessions, his estates, the bank he founded; behind him stood the East India Company, the might of colonialism. And my mother, I didn’t see her as a suffragette who held agitating speeches in Hyde Park, who went on a hunger strike in prison, but in a past replete with marble palaces flanked by palm trees, with mausoleums, with servants, slaves, fakirs, one of whom—and this seemed particularly romantic to me—stood for years leaning on a wall, his arm crippled, having become like the branch of a tree. I could connect this legendary world with the nobles, lords, and soldiers from my father’s lineage; this is how I pretended to have a family history beneath which I could conceal my insecurity. Perhaps it would have been better, she said, if instead of being taken in abroad for the sake of my father, I’d been forced to start out in the poverty that was actually my reality. I could see her mouth moving, hear her words, but was unable to respond to her with my experiences of exclusion; it would only have sounded hollow to her, or moralizing, had I brought up my own privations. I also knew that this was her day, that she was in no way ready to listen to me, to provide me wit
h understanding; I just said that I had managed to find my way here because I had been presented with a job opportunity; everything else, I said, I had put on hold. But then she did respond, saying, the fact that you have forged a political path has helped you; nobody invited me into any youth group, I was always a kind of exception, I was always brought here or taken there to one shelter after another. I could have learned from my mother, she said, but my mother was never there, for her I was a Sunday guest; and I idealized my father in every way, I made a hero out of him, a man it was impossible to talk to, impossible to embrace, one who could only be deified. All of this has only now become apparent to me, since fall, since Toller’s departure to America. At heart, I think I’m a practical person, a materialist. I wanted to see myself as European, cosmopolitan. But I didn’t know how to make use of my circumstances for my development, I allowed the role of the emigrant to be foisted upon me, and on top of that the other role as well, the role of woman. She sat up straight. Being an emigrant and being a woman, she said, that is a double reduction. An emigrant is not a human being, just a shadow trying to resemble one. A woman is a thing that has no right to make demands. To put up with both at the same time, that was too much to bear. I know that when I hurl glasses on the floor I end up in pieces myself. In Viggbyholm nobody has any sympathy for that: the slightest attempt to hint at my difficulties just leads to stares, first of bewilderment and then of annoyance. How can I forget, they say, that people have helped me, that they stood up for my father. And that criticism is fair enough, but, at the same time, the things that drove us to flee, that annihilated my father and countless others, do not exist here. This Europe that we come from is formless. I’m still the odd one out. If I ever try to show something of my independence, people close up, as if they were facing a terrible, unbearable conflict. Get a job as a maid, say my benefactors, learn stenography, then you can find employment in an office. She lay down. I have tried to fit in, she said, you have to belong somewhere, I tell myself. And then this Sweden engulfs me. Sweden is an island, with enormous forests, with fields and lakes, hills and mountains, here and there, huts painted red. Europe is miles away and exotic. Can you still picture what it looks like there, she asked, when you want to think your way out, do those long, long stretches of coast not close in around you. She fell silent; I thought she had fallen asleep. Then I heard her laugh all of a sudden. You know, she said, now I have truly sunk from the highest caste to the untouchables.
