To no avail. Hans Herbert Grimm was no longer allowed to teach. But he could work in the theatre, which he did for a season as a dramaturg. He compiled lists of plays he wanted to see on the stage in Altenburg, including Borchert’s The Man Outside and Max Frisch’s Nun singen sie wieder (Now They’re Singing Again). He put ticks beside the plays that the administration approved for theatrical performance. There aren’t many ticks on his list.
After eighteen months the theatre was finished too. He’d staged two plays by J. B. Priestley. Cultural policy became stricter. Grimm was forced to go and work in a sand mine. He was prohibited from working in schools or the theatre for an unspecified period. But his situation could get worse at any time. In April 1946, his good friend, fellow teacher and later headmaster of the Karolinum, Friedrich Wilhelm Uhlig, was arrested, imprisoned and then interned in Buchenwald, near Weimar, which the Soviet occupiers had continued to run as a camp. On 24 May 1948 he died there from starvation.
In summer 1950, Hans Herbert Grimm was summoned to Weimar by the authorities of the newly established GDR. He never told anybody what was discussed at this meeting. Did they make it clear to him that he’d never again be able to work as a teacher? Did they impose conditions such as obligatory membership of the SED (Socialist Unity Party), or help in founding a new block party? Would he again have to play along with a party he despised?
On 5 July, 1950 Hans Herbert Grimm went back to his family in Altenburg. Two days later, while his wife was out shopping, he killed himself in his own house.
A small crack remains in the wall.
Grimm’s name is not recorded in literary histories.
In the letter to Alfred in which he expressed his concerns that Remarque’s success could completely swamp his book, Grimm also wrote, ‘My publisher hopes that one day someone will come along and rediscover Schlump.’
It is a peculiar but major stroke of fortune that today, more than a hundred years after the beginning of the war it describes, many new readers can now do exactly that.
—VOLKER WEIDERMANN
2014
Schlump Page 24
