When Mother came to the part in her neverending story about going aboard the ship, she always talked about being in her eighth month. Probably it was the eighth. No matter which month, she was assigned to the maternity ward. It was located next to the so-called Bower, where the critically wounded soldiers were groaning, packed in like sardines. During KDF times, the Bower had been popular with the cruise participants as a sort of winter garden. It was located under the bridge. The ship's physician, Dr. Richter, chief medical officer of the Second Submarine Training Division, oversaw the Bower as well as the maternity ward. Every time Mother told me about getting on board, she said, “It was so nice and warm there. And I got hot milk right away, too, with a nice dollop of honey in it…”
It must have been business as usual in the maternity ward. Since the beginning of the embarkation process,four babies had been born, “all little shavers,” as I was told.
Some say that the Wilhelm Gustloff had the misfortune of having too many captains. That may be true. But the Titanic had only one, and even so things went wrong on its maiden voyage. Mother says that shortly before the ship pulled away from the dock, she wanted to stretch her legs, and somehow wandered onto the bridge, without being stopped by the guards — ”It was only one flight up.” There she saw “this old sea dog having a real knockdown-drag-out with another fellow with a goatee…”
The sea dog was Captain Friedrich Petersen, a civilian who in peacetime had held the command on several passenger liners, including the Gustloff for a short period, and after the outbreak of war had been captured by the British as a blockade runner. But then the British decided that because of his age he couldn't possibly be fit for military service, and once he had sworn in writing that he would never again take to the seas as a captain, he was deported to Germany. That was why this man in his mid-sixties had been assigned as a “stationary captain” to the “floating barracks” at the Oxhöft Quay.
The one with the goatee must have been Lieutenant Commander Wilhelm Zahn, who always had his German shepherd Hassan at his heel. The former U-boat commander, whose career had been only moderately successful, was supposed to serve as the military transportation officer for the ship loaded with refugees. In addition, to support the elderly captain, whose seagoing instincts were rusty by now, two more captains, young but experienced in sailing the Baltic, also occupied the bridge; their names were Köhler and Weiler. Both had been brought over from the merchant marine, and were therefore treated with considerable disdain by the naval officers, chief among them Zahn; the two groups ate in different officers' messes and talked to each other only when absolutely necessary.
Thus the bridge harbored tensions, but also shared responsibility for the ship's hard-to-define freight: on the one hand the ship was a troop transport, on the other a refugee and hospital ship. With its coat of gray paint, the Gustloff offered an ambiguous target. For the moment it was still safe in the harbor, except from possible air attacks. For the moment the inevitable friction among the too many captains had not yet produced a conflagration. For the moment yet another captain was completely unaware of this ship carrying children and soldiers, mothers and naval women's auxiliaries, and equipped with antiaircraft guns.
Until the end of December, S-13 lay in the dock of the Red Banner Fleets floating Smolny base. Once the ship had been serviced, refueled, provisioned, and loaded with torpedoes, it was ready to set out on a mission, but the commander was missing.
Alcohol and women prevented Aleksandr Marinesko from breaking off his shore leave and being on board in time for the major offensive slated to roll over the Baltic and East Prussia. As the story goes, pontikfa, Finnish potato schnapps, had knocked him off an even keel and wiped out all memory of his obligations. He was searched for in brothels and other dives known to the military police, but in vain; the boat's captain had gone missing.
Not until 3 January did Marinesko, by now sober again, report back to Turku. The NKVD immediately interrogated him, holding him under suspicion of espionage. Since he had no recollection of any of the stages of his extended shore leave, he had nothing but memory gaps to present in his own defense. Eventually his superior, Captain First Class Orjel, managed to postpone the convening of a court-martial by citing Comrade Stalin's recent order for an all-out effort. Captain Orjel had only a few experienced commanders at his disposal and did not want to diminish the fighting power of his unit. When even die crew of S-13 intervened in the proceedings against their captain with a petition for clemency, and the NKVD began to see mutiny as a possibility, Orjel ordered this U-boat commander, who was unreliable only on shore leave, to set course at once for Hangö, whose harbor S-13 left a week later. Icebreakers had opened the navigation channel. The boat was supposed to head for the Baltic coast, passing the Swedish island of Gotland.
There is a film in black and white made at the end of the fifties. It is called Night Fell over Gotenhafen, and its cast includes stars like Brigitte Horney and Sonja Ziemann. The director, a German American by the name of Frank Wisbar, who had earlier made a film about Stalingrad, hired the Gustlojf expert Heinz Schön as an adviser. Banned in the East, the film achieved only modest success in the West, and is now forgotten, like the unfortunate ship itself, submerged in the depths of archives.
While I was living with Mothers friend Jenny Brunies in West Berlin and attending secondary school, I went to see it, at her insistence — ”Tulla conveyed to me that she would very much like us to see the film together” — and was quite disappointed. The plot was utterly predictable. Just as in all the Titanic films, a love story had to be brought in as filler, taking on heroic dimensions at the end, as if the sinking of an overcrowded ship weren't exciting, the thousands of deaths not tragic enough.
A wartime romance. In Night Fell over Gotenhafen, after a much too long prelude in Berlin, East Prussia, and elsewhere, the love triangle is revealed: the cuckolded husband, a soldier at the eastern front, who is later brought onto the ship, critically wounded; the unfaithful wife, a temptress torn between two men, who manages to get on board with her infant; and a playboy naval officer who figures as adulterer, father, and rescuer of the infant. Although Aunt Jenny managed to cry at certain passages in the film, when she invited me afterward to join her at the Paris Bar, where I had my first Pernod, she remarked, “Your mother would not have found much to like about the film, because they show not a single birth, either before or after the sinking of the ship…” And then she added, “In point of fact there's no way you can film something so terrible.”
I'm sure that Mother didn't have a lover on board, or any of my possible fathers. It's not out of the question, however, that even in her advanced state of pregnancy she attracted men from the ship's personnel — that was her way, and still is: she possesses an internal magnet that she refers to as “a certain something.” As the story goes, the anchors had hardly been weighed when one of the naval recruits, in training for U-boat duty — ”A pale fellow with pimples all over his face” — escorted the pregnant girl to the top deck. She was feeling too restless to stay put. I would reckon the sailor was about Mothers age, seventeen or barely eighteen. He carefully guided her on his arm across the sundeck, which was slippery as glass, because it was completely iced over. And when Mother looked around, with those eyes that never missed a thing, she noticed that the davits, blocks, and mountings of the port and starboard lifeboats and their cables were coated with ice.
How many times have I heard her comment: “When I saw that, my knees went weak”? And in Damp, as she stood there, lean and all in black, surrounded by older gentlemen and initiating my son Konrad into the myopic world of the survivors, I heard her saying, “I realized then there was no way we could be rescued with them boats iced over. I wanted to get off. I screamed like a maniac. But it was too late already…”
The film I saw with Aunt Jenny in a theater on Kantstrasse showed none of this — no lumps of ice on the davits, no ice-coated railing, not even ice floes in the harbor. Yet in Schön's ac
count, as well as in the paperback report by the Englishmen Dobson, Miller, and Payne, we read that on 30 January 1945 the weather was frigid — minus 180 Celsius. Icebreakers had had to clear a channel in the Bay of Danzig. Heavy seas and squalls were predicted.
When I let myself wonder nevertheless whether Mother might not have left the ship in time, the basis for this essentially pointless speculation can be found in the established fact that soon after the Gustlojf pulled away from the dock, a coastal steamer, the Reval, suddenly materialized out of the driving snow, heading straight for the Gustloff. Crammed with refugees from Tilsit and Königsberg, the ship was coming from Pillau, the last harbor in East Prussia. Since there was not enough room below decks for all the passengers, they were packed in tight on the open deck. As would become clear later, many had frozen to death during the crossing but remained upright, held in place by the standing block of ice.
When the Gustlojf stopped and let down a few rope ladders, some survivors managed to scramble to what they thought was safety on the large ship; they found crannies in the overheated corridors and stairwells.
Couldn't Mother have gone in the opposite direction by way of a rope ladder? All her life, she has known when to turn back. This would have been her chance!
Why not leave the doomed ship for the Reval? If she had ventured down the ladder, in spite of her big belly, I would have been born somewhere else — who knows where — but certainly later, and not on 30 January.
There it is again, that damned date. History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising. For instance, this accursed thirtieth. How it clings to me, marks me. What good has it done that I have always avoided celebrating my birthday — whether as a schoolboy or a university student, as a newspaper editor or husband, whether among friends, colleagues, or family members? I was always afraid that at a party someone might pin the thrice-cursed significance of the thirtieth on me — in a toast, for example — even when it looked as though this date, once force-fed to the point of bursting, had slimmed down over the years, becoming innocuous, a day on the calendar like any other. By now, after all, we Germans have come up with expressions to help us deal with the past: we are to atone for it, come to terms with it, go through a grieving process. But then it seemed as if on the Internet flags had to be displayed — still, or again — on the thirtieth, the state holiday. At any rate, my son highlighted the day of the Nazi takeover as a red-letter day, for all the world to see. In the housing project in Grosser Dreesch, built of concrete slabs, where he had been living with his grandmother since the beginning of the new school year, he continued his activity as Webmaster. Gabi, my ex, had not wanted to interfere with our son's desire to exchange left-leaning maternal lecturing for grandmotherly brainwashing. Even worse, she had shrugged off all responsibility: “Konrad s going to be seventeen soon, old enough to make choices for himself.”
No one thought to ask me. The two of them parted “amicably,” I was told. The move from Mölln's lake to Schwerins took place quietly. Even the change of schools supposedly went smoothly, “thanks to his above-average record,” although I had a hard time picturing my son in the stagnant atmosphere of the Ossie schools. “Your prejudices are showing,” Gabi commented. “Konny prefers the structured environment there to our more lax one.” Then my ex put on a show of detachment: although as an educator who advocated freedom of choice and open discussion she was disappointed, as a mother she had to support her son's decision. Even Konny s girlfriend — that was how I learned of the shadowy existence of the dental assistant — could understand the step he had taken. Rosi herself planned to stay in Ratzeburg, but looked forward to visiting Konrad as often as possible.
His partner in dialogue, too, remained faithful. David, the invented or real-life provider of cues, did not object to the move, or remained unaware of it. At any rate, when the subject of the thirtieth came up in my son's chat room, he resurfaced after a fairly long absence, still spouting his antifascist sentiments. In general, the chatting had become polyphonic: protest-laden or blindly assenting. At times the babble was deafening. Soon the appointment of the Führer to the chancellorship was not the only subject of contention; now Wilhelm Gustloff's birthday was thrown into the mix. Disagreement raged over the “dispensation of Providence,” as Konny insisted on calling it, that had caused the martyr prophetically to come into the world on the very date that would later mark the takeover.
This historical sleight of hand was presented to all the chatters as evidence that the events in question were predestined. Whereupon the actual or merely invented David mocked the Goliath who had been stopped dead in Davos: “So I suppose it was also Providence when the ship named after your puny Party functionary began to sink with all hands on board, on his birthday — which was also the twelfth anniversary of Hitlers putsch — and in fact at the very minute when Gustloff was born; it was exactly 9:16 in the evening when the three blasts occurred…”
They played their roles as if it had all been rehearsed. Yet I was becoming increasingly dubious about my assumption that the David who clicked into the chat room from time to time was an invention, that a homunculus was jabbering preprogrammed statements such as, “You Germans will always have Auschwitz on your brow as a mark of shame…” or, “You're a clear example yourself of the evil that is coming to the surface again…” or sentences in which David hid behind the plural: “We Jews are condemned to neverending lamentation,” “We Jews never forget!” To which Wilhelm would respond with statements straight from the primer of racism, asserting that the “world Jewish conspiracy” was everywhere, but particularly powerful on New York's Wall Street.
The conflict raged relentlessly. But now and then the two would fall out of character, for instance when my son, as Wilhelm, praised the Israeli army for its toughness, while David condemned the Jewish settlements on Palestinian soil as “territorial aggression.” It could also happen that they suddenly agreed with each other as they expertly discussed Ping-Pong tournaments. Thus their individual utterances, sometimes harsh, at other times chummy, revealed that two young people had found each other in cyberspace who, for all their hostile posturing, might have become friends. For example, when David logged on with something like this: “Hello there, you bristly Nazi swine! This is your Jewish sow, ripe for the slaughter, with some tips on how you might celebrate the Nazi takeover today: first put on your broken record…” Or when Wilhelm attempted to be witty: “That's enough Jewish blood spilled for today. Your favorite German chef, who loves whipping up a nice kosher brown gravy for you, is going to say bye-bye for now and log out.”
Otherwise the two of them came up with nothing new on the subject of the thirtieth. Konny did have one fact with which he surprised his bosom enemy: “Did you know that our beloved Führers last speech was broadcast on all decks of the doomed ship over the PA system?”
That was true. On the Gustloff, wherever loudspeakers were mounted, Hitlers speech to his people over Greater German Radio was heard. In the maternity ward, where Mother had been advised by the head nurse to lie down on a cot, she heard that unmistakable voice proclaim, “Twelve years ago, on 30 January 1933, a truly historic day, Providence placed the destiny of the German Volk in my hands…”
Then Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia, spouted a dozen slogans about staying the course. Tragic music followed. But Mother mentioned only the Führers speech: “It sure gave me the creeps when the Führer went on that way about destiny and stuff like that…” And sometimes, after falling silent for a moment, she would add, “It sounded like what you'd hear at a funeral.”
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The broadcast didn't come until later. For now the ship was steaming across the relatively calm Bay of Danzig toward the tip of the Hela Peninsula.
The thirtieth fell on a Tuesday. Despite the ship's having been docked for years, the engines ran smoothly. A choppy sea and snow flurries. Soup and bread were do
led out on all the enclosed decks to those with meal tickets. The two torpedo-interception boats that were supposed to escort the ship safely to Hela soon found they could not make any headway against the increasingly heavy seas and had to be authorized by radio to turn back. Also by radio came instructions as to the ship's final destination: in Kiel the future U-boat crewmen of the 2nd Training Division, the wounded, and the naval auxiliaries were to disembark or be carried off the ship; the refugees would continue on to Flensburg. Snow was still falling. The first cases of seasickness were reported. When the Hansa, likewise crammed with refugees, hove into view in the Hela roadstead, the convoy was complete, with the exception of the three escort boats that had been promised. But then an order was received to drop anchor.
I don't want to go into all the circumstances that caused the doomed ship — forgotten by the entire world, or, to be more accurate, repressed, but now suddenly roaming the Internet like a ghost ship — to continue its journey eventually without the Hansa, whose engines were damaged. The Gustloff was accompanied by only two escort vessels, of which one was soon called back. Just this much: the engines had hardly started up again when the quarreling broke out on the bridge as to who was in charge. The four captains were arguing with and against each other. Petersen and his first officer — also from the merchant marine — insisted that the ship travel no faster than twelve knots. The reason: after being docked so long, it should not be pushed to do more. But Zahn, the former U-boat commander, fearing enemy attacks from a firing position with which he was very familiar, wanted to increase the speed to fifteen knots. Petersen prevailed. Then the first officer, supported by the navigation captains Köhler and Weller, proposed that from Rixhöft they follow the coastal route, which was mined but shallow enough so they would be safe from U-boats. But Petersen, now supported by Zahn, decided in favor of the deep-water channel, which had been swept for mines. He rejected, however, the advice from all the other captains that the ship steer a zigzag course. The only thing not subject to dispute was the weather report: wind west-northwest at a force of six to seven, turning westerly and falling to five as evening approached. The swell at four, driving snow, visibility one to three nautical miles, medium frost.
Crabwalk Page 10
