In the meantime, the captain in command of the ship was no longer Bertram but — as once before, in the KDF era — Petersen. There were no more victories, only reverses along all sections of the eastern front, and the Libyan desert also had to be evacuated. Fewer and fewer U-boats returned from their missions. The large cities were crumbling under the impact of surface bombing; but Danzig still stood, with all its gables and towers. In a carpentry shop in the suburb of Langfuhr, work continued unabated on doors and windows for barracks. Around this time, when not only special victory bulletins but also butter, meat, eggs, and even dried legumes were scarce, Tulla Pokriefke was called up for war service as a streetcar conductor. She was pregnant for the first time, but lost the wee one after she intentionally jumped off the car on the trip between Langfuhr and Oliva: repeatedly, and each time just before a stop, which she described to me as if it were a particular form of physical exercise.
And something else happened in the meantime. When the Swiss began to worry that their still megalomaniac neighbor might decide to occupy them, David Frankfurter was transferred from the prison in Chur to a penal institution in the French part of the country, for his protection, as the explanation went; and the commander of the 250-metric-ton submarine M-96, Aleksandr Marinesko, was promoted to lieutenant commander and put in charge of a new boat. Two years earlier he had sunk a cargo ship, which according to his report was a seven-thousand-tonner but according to the Soviet naval command was a ship of only eighteen hundred tons.
The new boat, S-13, of which Marinesko had dreamed so long, whether sober or sloshed, belonged to the Stalinetz class. Perhaps fate — no, chance — no, the strict conditions of the Treaty of Versailles — helped get him this state-of-the-art ship. After the end of the First World War, the German Reich was prohibited from building U-boats, so the Krupp-Germania Shipyard in Kiel and the engine-building company Schiffsmaschinenbau AG in Bremen took their plans to the Ingenieurs Kantoor voor Scheepsbouw in The Hague and had this company, under contract to the German navy, design an oceangoing vessel to the highest technical specifications. Later, under the aegis of German-Soviet collaboration, the newly built boat was launched in the Soviet Union, like the earlier Stalinetz boats, and was put into service as a unit of the Baltic Red Banner Fleet, shortly before the Germans' surprise attack on Russia. Whenever S-13 left its floating base, the Smolny, in the Finnish harbor of Turku, it had ten torpedoes on board. On the Web site, my son, bristling with naval expertise, voiced the opinion that the U-boat designed in Holland was a prime example of “German engineering.” That may be true. But for the time being, Marinesko managed to sink an oceangoing tugboat called the Siegfried along the coast of Pomerania only by dint of using artillery fire. After three torpedoes failed to hit their mark, the submarine surfaced and immediately put its 10-cm guns in the bow to work.
Now let me leave the ship lying where it was relatively safe, except from air attacks, and crabwalk forward to return to my private misery. It was not as though you could tell from the beginning in what way Konny had gone astray. It looked to me like innocuous childish stuff that he was scattering as he roved through cyberspace, for instance when he compared the KDF cruises, kept inexpensive for propaganda reasons, with the package deals offered to participants in todays tourism for the masses — the cost of tickets for Caribbean cruises on so-called dream ships, or TUI offerings. Needless to say, the comparisons always worked out to the advantage of the “classless” Gustloff, on course to Norway, and other ships of the German Labor Front. Now that had been true socialism, he boasted on his Web site. The Communists had tried to get something similar going in the GDR. Unfortunately, he commented, the attempt had not succeeded. After the war they didn't even manage to complete the gigantic KDF facility of Prora, on the island of Rügen, planned in peacetime to accommodate 20,000 people for holidays at the seaside.
“Now,” he asserted, “the KDF ruins must be designated a historic site!” And he went on to bicker in schoolboy fashion with his adversary David, whom I had long taken for his invention. They argued about the prospects of achieving a Volk community that would be not only nationalist but also socialist. Konny quoted Gregor Strasser, but also Robert Ley, whose ideas received from him a grade of “excellent.” He spoke of a “sound Volk body,” whereupon David warned him against “socialist-style pseudo-egalitarianism” and called Ley an “alcohol-sodden blowhard.”
I skimmed through this chitchat, finding it only mildly amusing, and realized that the more my son raved about Strength through Joy as a brilliant project and model for the future, and praised the Workers' and Peasants' State s efforts to bring a similar socialist vacation paradise to fruition, notwithstanding all the shortages and shortcomings, the more embarrassingly I could hear his grandmother speaking through him. I no sooner entered Konny s chat room than my ear was filled with the irrepressible jabber of the has-beens.
Mother had provoked me and others in much the same way long ago. During the period before I went to the West, I would hear her holding forth at our kitchen table in her role as Stalin's last faithful follower: “And let me tell you, comrades, you know how our Walter Ulbricht started out small as a carpenter's apprentice? Well, I started in a carpentry apprenticeship, too, and always smelled of bone glue…”
Later, after the First Secretary was forced to vacate the premises, she apparently experienced difficulties. Not because I had fled the Republic, but rather because she belittled Ulbrichts successor as a “puny roofer” and suspected revisionists under every rock. When she was summoned before the Party collective, she is said to have cited Wilhelm Gustloff as a victim of Zionism, describing him as “the tragically murdered son of our beautiful city of Schwerin.”
Nonetheless, Mother managed to hang on to her position. She was both loved and feared. The recipient of several awards for “activism,” she continued to fulfill quotas successfully, and up to the end remained the leader of her carpenters' brigade at the People's Own Furniture Combine on Güstrower Strasse. She also increased the number of women apprenticing as carpenters to over twenty percent.
When the Workers' and Peasants' State was gone and the Berlin Handover Trust opened a branch in Schwerin, responsible for the city and surrounding countryside, Mother is supposed to have had her ringers in the pie, assisting with the winding down and privatizing of the People s Own Cable Works, the PlastExtrusion Machine Works, and other large manufacturing plants such as the Klement Gottwald Works, which made marine hardware, and even her own old Furniture Combine. It is safe to assume that she did not come away empty-handed from the general grabfest that took place in the East, for once the new currency arrived, Mother was not completely dependent on her pension. And when she gave my son the computer, with all the costly peripherals, the purchase did not leave her destitute. I attribute her generosity — toward me she was always fairly stingy — to an event that didn't make waves in the West German press but had a decisive influence on Konny.
But before I get around to describing the survivors' reunion, I have to bring up an embarrassing incident that a certain someone would like to talk me out of, he having formed a far too immaculate picture of his Tulla. On 30 January 1990, when that damned date seemed to have been withdrawn from circulation, because everywhere people were dancing to the tune of “Our Single German Fatherland,” and all the Ossies were panting for the D-mark, Mother undertook her own kind of action.
On the southern bank of Lake Schwerin, a three-story mouse-gray youth hostel was quietly crumbling away. It had been built in the fifties and named for Kurt Bürger, an early Stalinist who had arrived from Moscow at war's end as a certified antifascist and had earned his spurs in Mecklenburg by taking a tough stance. Behind the Kurt Bürger Youth Hostel, Mother placed a bouquet of long-stemmed roses at approximately the spot overlooking the lake where the granite boulder honoring the martyr was supposed to have stood. She did this in the dark, at exactly 10:18 p.m. She later described her nocturnal act to her friend Jenny and me, giving the
precise time. She was all alone, and with her flashlight had searched for the place behind the youth hostel, which was closed for the winter. For a long time she was uncertain, but then, with the sky overcast and a cold rain falling, she decided that she had found it. “But I didn't bring them flowers for Gustloff. He was just one Nazi of many that got shot down. No, it was for the ship and all them little children that died that night in the ice-cold sea. I put down that bunch of white roses at ten-eighteen on the dot. And I cried for them, forty-five years after it happened…”
Five years later, Mother was no longer alone. Herr Schön and the management of the Baltic seaside resort of Damp, along with the gentlemen from the Rescue by Sea organization, issued the invitation. Ten years earlier a reunion of survivors had taken place at the same location. In those days the Wall and the barbed wire were still in place, and no one had been allowed to come from the East German state. But this time people came who for years had not dared to mention the sinking of the ship, for political reasons. Thus it was not surprising that the guests from the new German states were greeted with particular warmth; among the survivors, there were to be no invidious distinctions made between Ossies and Wessies.
In the resorts ballroom a banner hung over the stage, proclaiming in lettering that varied in size from line to line, MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR THE 5OTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SINKING OF THE “WILHELM GUSTLOFF,” DAMP ON THE BALTIC, 28–30 JANUARY 1995. No one mentioned publicly that this date happened to coincide with the takeover in '33 and the birthday of the man whom David Frankfurter had shot in order to give a sign to the Jewish people. But in smaller circles, during coffee breaks or between sessions, it was alluded to parenthetically, in an undertone.
Mother had forced me to come. She hit me over the head with an irrefutable argument: “Seeing as how it's your fiftieth, too…” She had invited our son Konrad, and when Gabi raised no objections, she carried him off in triumph. She drove up in her sand-colored Trabant, quite a sight in Damp among the gleaming Mercedes and Opels. She had ignored the request I voiced earlier that she be satisfied with me and spare Konny this wallowing in the past. As a father and in other respects, too, I simply didn't count; on this assessment of me, my mother and my ex, who otherwise had little to say to each other, agreed: to Mother, I was “a wet noodle,” and Gabi never missed a chance to tell me what a failure I was.
Thus it was not surprising that the two and a half days in Damp proved quite awkward for me. I stood around at a loss, smoking like a chimney. As a reporter, of course, I could have put together a feature article on the event, or at least a news brief. Probably the organization's directors expected something of the sort from me, because Mother introduced me at first as “a reporter from them Springer papers.” I didn't correct her, but the only sentence I got down on paper was, “The weather is the way it is.” In whose voice could I have written a report? That of a “child of the Gustloff”? Or that of an objective professional?
Mother had an answer for everything. Since she recognized several other survivors among the crowd and was spontaneously approached by former crew members from the torpedo boat Löwe, she seized every opportunity to introduce me, if not as a Springer reporter, then as “the little boy who was born smack in the middle of the disaster.” And she had to add that the thirtieth would provide an occasion to celebrate my fiftieth birthday, even though the schedule called for an hour of silent remembrance on this day.
Several births are supposed to have occurred before the ship sank, as well as on the following day, but with the exception of one person born on the twenty-ninth, no one else of my age was there in Damp. The majority of the guests were old people, because hardly any children had been saved. Among the younger survivors was a ten-year-old from Elbing, who now lives in Canada. He had been asked by the directors to describe for the audience the particulars of his rescue.
Altogether, and for obvious reasons, there are fewer and fewer witnesses to the disaster. If over five hundred survivors and rescuers had turned up for the reunion in '85, this time only two hundred had come, which caused Mother to whisper to me during the hour of remembrance, “Soon none of us will be alive anymore, only you. But you just don't want to write down all the stuff I've told you.”
Yet I was the one who managed to smuggle Heinz Schöns book to her, long before the Wall came down, though admittedly to silence her gnawing reproaches. And shortly before the reunion in Damp she received from me an Ullstein paperback, written by three Englishmen. But even this documentation of the catastrophe, which I must admit was written factually but too emotionlessly, did not please her: “It's all too impersonal; nothing comes from the heart!” And then she said, when I stopped in to see her in Grosser Dreesch, “Well, maybe my Konradchen will write something about it someday…”
That explains why she took him along to Damp. She arrived, or rather made her entrance, in a black velvet ankle-length dress, buttoned up to the neck, that set off her cropped white hair. Wherever she stood, or sat over coffee and pastries, she was the center of attention. She especially drew men. As we know, she had always had that effect. Her schoolmate Jenny had told me about all the boys who stuck to her like flies during her youth; from childhood on, she is supposed to have smelled of carpenters glue, and I could swear there was a hint of that odor about her in Damp.
But now it was old men, most of them in dark-blue suits, standing around this tough old bird in black. The stout graybeards included a former lieutenant commander who had been in charge of the torpedo boat T-36 — its crew had rescued several hundred of the victims — and an officer who had survived the sinking of the Gustloff. But it was especially the crew members from the Löwe whose memories of Mother had remained vivid. I had the distinct impression that the men had been waiting for her. They thronged around Mother, whose demeanor took on something girlish, and could not tear themselves away. I heard her giggle, saw her cross her arms and assume a pose. But it was no longer about me and my dramatic birth at the moment of the ship's sinking; now it was all about Konny. Mother introduced my son to the older gentlemen as if he were her own; and I kept my distance, not wanting to be questioned or, worse still, celebrated by the Löwe veterans.
Watching from the sidelines, I noticed that Konny, who had always seemed rather shy, handled himself confidently in the role Mother had assigned him, giving brief but clear answers, asking questions, listening intently, venturing a youthful laugh now and then, even standing still to have his picture taken. At almost fifteen — his birthday would come in March — he showed not a trace of childishness, instead appeared ripe for Mothers plan of initiating him into the complete story of the disaster and, as would become apparent, having him promulgate the legend.
From then on, everything revolved around him. Although one survivor in attendance had been born on the Gustloffthe day before the boat sank, and he, like me, was given his own copy ofSchöns book by the author — the mothers were honored on stage with bouquets — it seemed to me as though all this was done merely to impress Konny s obligation upon him. People were placing their hopes in him. Great things were expected of our Konny. He would not let the survivors down.
Mother had stuck him in a dark-blue suit, which called for a collegiate tie. With his glasses and curly hair, he looked like a cross between an archangel and a boy at First Communion. He presented himself as if he had a mission, as if he were about to proclaim something sacred, as if he had been vouchsafed a revelation.
The service of remembrance took place at the hour when the torpedoes struck the ship. I don't know who suggested that Konrad sound the ship's bell, hung next to the altar; in the late seventies Polish divers had salvaged it from the aft of the wrecks upper deck. Now, on the occasion of this survivors' reunion, the crew of the salvage vessel Szkwał had presented their found object to signal Polish-German rapprochement. But in the end it was Herr Schön after all who was allowed to strike the bell three times with a hammer to mark the end of the service.
The pursers assistant on
the Gustloff was eighteen when the ship went down. I do not want to conceal the fact that in Damp little gratitude was expressed to this man who after the disaster had collected and researched almost everything he could track down. At the beginning of the reunion he spoke on the topic “The Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff on 30 January 1945 from the Russians' Perspective.” In the course of his speech, it became evident that he had visited the Soviet Union often to do his research, had made the acquaintance of a petty officer from the U-boat S-13, and, what is more, had remained in friendly contact with this Vladimir Kourotchkin, who, on his commanders orders, had sent the three torpedoes speeding on their way, and had even been photographed shaking hands with the old man. With these revelations, he had, as Schön later reticently put it, “lost some friends.”
After the speech, they cut him dead. From then on, many in the audience labeled him a Russian-lover. For them the war had not ended. The Russian was still “Ivan,” the three torpedoes murder weapons. But from Vladimir Kourotchkin’s point of view, the nameless ship he sank had been stuffed to the gills with Nazis, responsible for launching a surprise attack on his homeland and leaving scorched earth when they retreated. Not until he met Schön did he learn that after the torpedoes hit their mark, more than four thousand children drowned, froze to death, or were sucked into the depths with the ship. The petty officer apparently dreamed of those children for a long time afterward, always the same dream.
For Heinz Schön, being allowed to strike the bell after all did help soften the slights he had suffered. But my son, who on his home page introduced the Russian who fired the torpedoes, paired in a photo with the Gustlaff researcher, commented that this tragedy had brought two peoples together by virtue of its lasting effects; he pointed to the origin of the U-boat, with its sure aim, citing the “superb German engineering,” and even went so far as to assert that only a boat built to German specifications could have brought the Soviets such success that day off the Stolpe Bank.
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