I tried to stay calm, reminding her that only three and a half years ago the idyllic town of Mölln had experienced a terrible fire: two apartment houses where Turks were living had been torched. All the papers had been panting to cover it. Even yours truly had concocted reports for the wire services. Alarm bells had gone off abroad, because it seemed to be starting up again in Germany… There had been three casualties, after all. Several kids were caught, and two were hit with long jail sentences, but perhaps a successor organization, some of these rabid skins, had sought out our Konny. Here in Mölln, or possibly in Schwerin…
She laughed in my face: “Can you picture Konrad with those loudmouths? Be serious! A loner like him in a pack? That's ridiculous. But accusations like yours are typical of the kind of journalism you've always engaged in, no matter who you happened to be working for.”
Gabi could not resist reminding me in detail of the time I wrote for the Springer conglomerate, even though thirty years had passed since then. She recalled my “paranoid ravings against leftists”: “And by the way, if anyone has secret leanings to the right, its you; you haven't changed…”
I suppose. I know my own abysses, know how hard it is to keep the lid on. Do my best to remain noncommittal. Generally present myself as neutral. When I have an assignment, regardless of who gave it, I just establish the facts, report what I find, but don't back down…
So because I wanted to find out what was going on — and from Konny himself — I settled into a room not far from my ex, in a hotel overlooking the lake. I kept phoning Gabi, asking to speak with my son. On Sunday evening he finally turned up, having come from Schwerin by bus. At least he wasn't wearing combat boots, only normal suede ankle boots, with jeans and a colorful Norwegian sweater. He actually looked nice, and hadn't shaved off his naturally curly hair. His glasses gave him a know-it-all appearance. He paid no attention to me, had little to say altogether, only a few words to his mother. For supper she served salad and openfaced sandwiches, with apple juice.
But before Konny could disappear into his room after we'd eaten, I waylaid him in the hall. I kept my questions casual: how things were going in school, whether he had friends, maybe a girlfriend, what sports he played, how he liked the birthday present his grandmother had given him — I could guess how much it cost — whether the modern means of communication, like the Internet, for instance, opened up new areas of knowledge for him, what sort of thing he found particularly interesting — if he was into surfing the Net.
He seemed to be listening as I ran through my litany. I thought I could detect a faint smile on his noticeably small mouth. Yes, he was smiling! Then he took off his glasses, put them on again, and looked straight through me, just as he had at the supper table. He answered softly, “Since when do you care what I'm up to?” After a pause — my son was already standing in the doorway to his room — he delivered the knockout punch: “I'm doing historical research. Does that answer your question?”
The door was closed now. I should have called out, “Me too, Konny, me too!” The same old stories. It's about a ship. In May '39 it brought a good thousand volunteers from the victorious Condor Legion home. But who's interested in that nowadays? You, Konny?
* * *
At one of the meetings he sets up for us, calling them working sessions, he said the following: Properly speaking, any strand of the plot having to do directly or loosely with the city of Danzig and its environs should be his concern. For that reason, he, and no one else, should have been the one to narrate, whether briefly or at length, everything involving the ship: the circumstances of its naming, the purpose it fulfilled after the war began, and hence also its end off the Stolpe Bank. Soon after the publication of that mighty tome, Dog Years, this material had been dumped at his feet. He — who else? — should have been the one to dig through it, layer by layer. There had been no shortage of references to the fate of the Pokriefkes, chief among them Tulla. It was safe to assume that what was left of the family — Tulla s two older brothers had been killed in action — were among the thousands and thousands of refugees who managed to squeeze onto the overloaded Gustloff in the last minute, and with them the pregnant Tulla.
Unfortunately, he said, he hadn't been able to pull it off. A regrettable omission, or, to be quite frank, failure on his part. But he wasn't trying to make excuses, only to admit that around the mid-sixties he'd had it with the past, that the voracious present with its incessant nownownow had kept him from producing the mere two hundred pages… Now it was too late for him. He hadn't invented me as a surrogate, rather he had discovered me, after a long search, on the list of survivors, like a piece of lost property. Although I had a rather meager profile, I was predestined: born as the ship was sinking.
He went on to say that he was sorry about the business with my son, but how could he have known that Tulla's grandson was hiding behind the ominous home page www.blutzeuge.de, though it should probably come as no surprise that Tulla Pokriefke ended up with such a grandson. She'd always gone to extremes, and besides, as was obvious, she was not a person you could keep down. But now, he said encouragingly to his assistant, it was my turn again; I had to report on what happened with the ship after it transported some of the troops of the Condor Legion from a Spanish harbor to Hamburg.
To make a long story short, one might say: And now the war began. But we're not there yet. First the KDF ship had a lovely, leisurely summer during which it was allowed to return to the familiar Norway route for half a dozen cruises. Still without shore excursions. The majority of the passengers were workers and salaried employees from the Ruhr District and Berlin, from Hanover and Bremen. Also small groups of Germans residing abroad. The ship sailed into the Byfjord and afforded the vacationers, standing at the rail with their cameras, a view of the city of Bergen. The schedule also included the Hardangerfjord, and finally the Sognefjord, where people snapped an especially large number of pictures for their albums. Into July the midnight sun was provided as an extra, to be gaped at and stored as an experience. The cost of the five-day trip, up slightly, now came to forty-five reichsmarks.
Still the war did not begin; instead the Gustloff was pressed into the service of physical culture. For two weeks a peaceful gymnastics meet took place in Stockholm, the Lingiad, named after Pehr Henrik Ling, the Swedish equivalent of our Gymnastics Father Jahn, I assume. The recreation vessel became the residence for over a thousand German gymnasts, male and female, all dressed alike, among them maidens from the Labor Service, the national horizontal-bar team, but also old gentlemen who still worked out on the parallel bars, as well as gymnasts from the BDM's Faith and Beauty division, and many children drilled for mass gymnastics demonstrations.
Captain Bertram did not tie up in the harbor, but dropped anchor within view of the city. The gymnasts, male and female, were shuttled to the events in motorized lifeboats. Thus the physical culturists remained under close supervision. No incidents occurred. The documents at my disposal allow one to conclude that this special operation proved successful, furthering the cause of German-Swedish friendship. The coaches of all the branches of gymnastics received special plaques, courtesy of the King of Sweden. On 6 August 1939 the Wilhelm Gustloff steamed into Hamburg Harbor. The KDF cruise program resumed at once.
But then the war really did begin. That is to say, while the ship was on its last peacetime cruise to the coast of Norway, during the night from 24 to 25 August, the captain was handed a radio transmission whose text, when decoded, directed him to open a sealed envelope stored in his cabin, whereupon Captain Bertram, in accordance with Order QWA 7, had the crew abort the cruise and — without alarming the passengers with explanations — steer for the ship's home port. Four days after its arrival, the Second World War began.
That was the end of Strengdi through Joy. The end of holidays at sea. The end of photos and lazy chats on the sundeck. The end of good times and the end of a classless society on board. As a unit of the German Labor Front, the KDF organization devoted itse
lf from now on to providing entertainment for all Wehrmacht units and the growing number, at first slowly, of wounded. KDF theaters became front theaters. The ships of the KDF fleet came under the command of the navy, and that included the Wilhelm Gustloff, outfitted as a hospital ship with five hundred beds. In place of some of the discharged peacetime crew, medics came aboard. A green stripe all around and red crosses on either side of the funnel gave the ship a new look.
Thus made recognizable in accordance with interna-f tionai conventions, the Gustloff set sail on 27 September tfor the Baltic, passed the islands of Sjaelland and Bornholm, and after an uneventful trip tied up in Danzig-Neufahrwasser, across from the Westerplatte, recently die scene of fierce fighting. Immediately several hundred wounded Poles were brought on board, as well as ten wounded crew members from the German minesweeper M-85, which had run over a Polish mine in the Bay of Danzig and sunk; this, for the time being, was the sum total of German casualties.
And how did news of the beginning of the war reach the prisoner David Frankfurter, incarcerated on neutral Swiss ground, the man whose well-aimed shots had involuntarily given his victims name to a vessel that was now a hospital ship? It can be assumed that in the daily routine of 1 September in Sennhof Prison no special events were taken note of; but from then on the behavior of the other inmates toward David Frankfurter apparently reflected fluctuations in the military situation — the stigma the Jew Frankfurter bore or the respect he enjoyed. The percentage of anti-Semites in the prison must have been approximately the same as outside its walls: a balanced proportion, taking the Helvetian Confederation as a whole.
And what was Captain Marinesko doing when first German troops marched into Poland, but then Russian soldiers as well, on the basis of the Hitler-Stalin pact? He was still commander of the 250-metric-ton M-96, and since he had received no orders for deployment, continued to practice rapid submersion in the eastern Baltic with his crew of eighteen. With undiminished thirst, he remained the dry-land boozer he had always been, also got involved with several women, but had not yet been subject to any disciplinary action and may well have been dreaming of a larger U-boat, equipped with more than two torpedo tubes.
Hindsight, they say, is always 20–20. In the meantime I've learned that my son did have casual contact with skinheads. Mölln had some of these types. Because of the local incident that resulted in several deaths, they were probably under surveillance, and chose other venues for opening their big mouths, such as Wismar or the sites of larger gatherings in the state of Brandenburg. In Mölln, Konny probably kept his distance, but he gave a speech in Schwerin, where he spent not only weekends but also part of his school holidays with his grandmother. The good-sized horde of skinheads, which included groups from the surrounding area in Mecklenburg, must have found his speech long-winded, for he was obliged to shorten it as he was speaking. The written text was devoted to the martyr and heroic son of Schwerin.
Yet Konny must have succeeded in winning friends for his topic among some of the local young Nazis, fixated — as usual — on hate slogans and harassing foreigners, for there was a brief period during which a local gang called itself the Wilhelm Gustloff Comrades. As I was able to ascertain later, the gathering took place in the back room of a restaurant on Schweriner Strasse.
The audience of about fifty included members of a right-wing radical party as well as interested middle-class citizens. Mother was not among them.
I am trying to picture my son, tall and spindly, with glasses and curly hair, standing there in his Norwegian sweater among those bald-headed brutes. He, the fruit juice drinker, surrounded by big bruisers armed with beer bottles. He, with his soft adolescent voice, which kept breaking, drowned out by those braggarts. He, the loner, with sweat-drenched stale air wafting around him.
No, he did not try to adapt, remained an anomaly in the midst of a crowd that normally rejected any foreign body. Hatred of Turks, beating up foreigners for fun, hurling insults at anyone not from around here — these things could not be expected of him. His speech contained no call to violent action. When he described the murder in Davos, proceeding to analyze every detail soberly, like a detective tracking down possible motives, he did allude, as on his Web site, to the murderers presumed backers, referring to the “world Jewish conspiracy” and the Jewish-controlled plutocracy, but his manuscript did not contain abusive terms like “filthy Jew” or the exclamation “Death to the Jews!” Even his demand for a commemorative stone on the southern bank of Lake Schwerin, “in the very place where the mighty granite boulder honoring the martyr stood after 1937,” was worded politely in the form of an appeal, drawing on customary democratic practice. Yet when he proposed to the audience that a citizens' petition to that effect be submitted to the Mecklenburg legislature, the response, I am told, was derisive guffaws. A pity Mother wasn't there.
Konny swallowed the rebuff and went on at once to describe the launching of the ship. He dwelt too long on the meaning and purpose of the Strength through Joy organization. On the other hand, his account of the deployment of the reoutfitted hospital ship during the occupation of Norway and Denmark by units of the Wehrmacht and navy commanded some attention among the beer drinkers, especially because several “heroes of Narvik” were among the wounded brought aboard. But then, when after the victorious campaign against France the planned invasion of England, Operation Seal, failed to come off, and instead of being deployed as a troop transport the Gustlojf ended up boringly anchored in Gotenhafen, the boredom communicated itself to the audience.
My son found it impossible to finish his speech. Shouts of “Knock it off!” and “Cut the crap!” as well as the noise of beer bottles being banged on tables caused him to abridge his version of the ship's fateful progress toward disaster; he got only as far as the torpedoes. Konny bore this development with composure. What a good thing Mother wasn't there. The almost-sixteen-year-old probably consoled himself with the thought that he always had access to the Internet. No further contacts with skinheads are documented.
He didn't fit in with the baldies. Soon after that, Konny began to work on a report that he wanted to present orally to the teachers and students at his school in Mölln. But before he reaches that point and is refused permission to make his presentation, I need to stay on track and first give an account of the Gustloff in wartime: as a hospital ship it was not sufficiently in demand, and had to be converted again.
The ship was gutted. At the end of November '40 the X-ray machines disappeared. The operating rooms and the outpatient clinic were dismantled. No more nurses bustled around, no hospital beds stood in neat rows. Along with most of the civilian crew, the doctors and medics were discharged or reassigned to other ships. Of the engine-room operators, only those who serviced the engines remained. In place of the head doctor, a U-boat officer at the rank of lieutenant commander was now in charge; as commander of the Second Submarine Training Division he oversaw the functions of the “floating barracks,” where sailors lived while they underwent training. Captain Bertram remained on board, but there was no course for him to plot. On the photographs at my disposal he certainly looks impressive, but he was a captain subject to recall, a second-in-command. This experienced captain from the merchant marine had a hard time adhering to military instructions, the more so since now everything on board changed. The portraits of Robert Ley were replaced by photos of the admiral of the fleet. The smoking parlor on the lower promenade deck became the officers' mess. The large dining rooms were turned into troughs for the noncommissioned officers and enlisted men. In the forecastle, dining rooms and lounges were set up for the remaining civilian crew. No longer classless, the Wilhelm Gustlqff'lay tied up at one of the piers of what had been the Polish port of Gdynia but since the beginning of the war had to be called Gotenhafen. For years the ship didn't budge from there.
Four training-division companies were billeted on board. In the papers at my disposal — which, by the way, were quoted verbatim on the Internet and disseminated with the a
dded ingredient of visual material; my son had access to a source that is now mine — assurances are offered that as an experienced submarine commander Lieutenant Commander Wilhelm Zahn provided rigorous training for the volunteers. The U-boat sailors, younger and younger as the war progressed — toward the end seventeen-year-olds were being taken — spent four months on board. After that many of them faced certain death, whether in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, or, later, along the northernmost route to Murmansk, where they were sent to hunt down American convoys loaded with armaments destined for the Soviet Union.
The years 1940, 1941, and 1942 came and went, producing victories tailor-made for special bulletins. While to the east whole armies were encircled, and in the Libyan desert the Africa Corps took Tobruk, nothing much happened on board, aside from the uninterrupted production of cannon fodder and the relatively safe and comfortable rear-echelon service in which the training personnel and the rest of the crew engaged (in the ship's cinema they showed Ufa's older and newer films), unless one counts the appearance of Admiral of the Fleet Dönitz during his visit to the Gotenhafen-Oxhöft docks as an event; to be sure, only official photos have been preserved.
His visit took place in March of '43. By then Stalingrad had fallen. All the front lines were receding. Since control of the skies over the Reich had been lost long since, here, too, the war was edging closer; but instead of the nearby city of Danzig, it was Gotenhafen that the American 8th Awbof «e-Division chose as its target. The hospital ship Stuttgart burned. The submarine escort vessel Eupen was sunk. Several tugboats, as well as a Finnish and a Swedish steamer, sank after receiving direct hits. A freighter in dry dock sustained damage. The Gustloff, however, escaped with only a gash in the starboard hull. A bomb that detonated in the harbor had caused the damage: the ship had to be put in dry dock. On a subsequent test run in the Bay of Danzig the “swimming barracks” proved to be still seaworthy.
Crabwalk Page 7
