by Erich Topp
Loaded down by my heavy seabag, the bottles neatly stored among the fish, I stumbled up the gangplank and showed the guard my receipt for 10 pounds of fresh fish. It took a good deal of acting on my part to convince the man that nothing fishy was going on. When I handed my ticket to the British soldier at the gate, he only said: "Fish? O.K." He did not seem interested in the least in my heavy bag. It took me three quarters of an hour to make it home instead of the customary 20 minutes. The flounders and the cod I will give to Peter and my landlord for the nice treatment they have extended to me. It would be impossible to send you the fresh fish, given our inadequate means of transportation, but everything else is on the way.
Then your husband had to see the doctor. You need not panic; it is all taken care of. It simply goes with the life of an ordinary seaman on a fishing vessel that his hand will be torn up from handling the steel hawsers and the fish. Result: blood poisoning, but nothing really serious. The doctor has forbidden me to use the hand for a while. This means I will have to sit out the next voyage. I regret it because in spite of all the difficulties I had begun to find my way around. So for the next two weeks I will stay ashore and try to learn a little more about the business side of the fishing industry.
I am sitting in my little room in the attic, covered by a blanket, and I feel good and warm as I exchange these words with you. The hand still bothers me a little bit. For that reason, and because I have a cold, I will keep my letter short. You can imagine how often I am thinking of you. The cold, the wetness, the pain, the lack of sleep, the loneliness among strangers-1 am prepared to bear it all if it can buy us a halfway secure livelihood. The price is very high, the struggle hitter and hard, much harder than I had feared.
Diary:
After a short time this much was clear to me: until the end of the war I had lived and worked among comrades, among friends who shared my values and attitudes; now I stood alone. Around me I saw people whose ambitions in life were limited and who barely concealed their aversion against anyone with a different face, different priorities, and different ways of expressing himself. This was something new for me and I, as a former officer, became an obvious target of this aversion. It made little sense to try to avoid this confrontation. I was determined to remain steadfast and to face this social problem.
And yet I kept imagining that I could become active in a creative sense, to construct something with my own hands. This kind of sorting out, organizing, and registering that loomed ahead, this atmosphere of fish heads, was not to my taste. Had I not already been busy creating something? Right next to the destructive side of mastering the art of war there had been the challenge of forming and leading human beings. And not just any kind of human beings, but those who went out to sea into the very teeth of death.
How wonderful it would be to be able to study architecture after all! It simply must work: complete concentration on that one goal; saving every penny; the help of others who might open doors for a friend in need.
December 3, 1945
At the suggestion of a businessman, I saw today the secretary of the free labor unions in Cuxhaven. The result was as planned. My step will make it more difficult for the workers' councils to discriminate against former military officers. The secretary is a lowly figure, but honest. He suffered terribly in the concentration camps for his unflinching views. For him the Social Democrats are the only acceptable political party. These people move themselves to tears. They are very much convinced of their own importance and are patronizing toward others.
December 21, 1945
Just finished our third voyage. As far as physical challenges are concerned, it was worse than the first one. The seas averaged force 6 to 7. We kept on fishing except for one day when the storm was too bad. The men are being pushed to the limits of their endurance. Even the older men among us seem to have had enough. One day I was almost swept overboard but could hang on to a piece of the stern at the last moment. We are forever wet and cold. I feel something is not quite right with my kidneys. Bending down to kill the cod is very tiresome and makes my back hurt badly.
This time our crew enjoys a more congenial composition. Above all, Otto from East Prussia is a fine companion. Von Seydlitz, too, is with us again, this time promoted to apprentice seaman. There is also another former submarine commander. The original members of the crew are more open to us newcomers after they realized that I had rejoined them. The surprise their faces betrayed was like a small triumph for me.
Finally home again! And there I find my wife's telegram informing me that I have been accepted to begin my studies at the university!
My journal and the letters show how steep my fall was from the position of a celebrated U-boat commander to that of an ordinary seaman before the mast.
STUDYING ARCHITECTURE
On January 4, 1946, I attended my first lecture at the Technical University in Hanover, Professor Wickop's course on construction theory. When I entered the classroom I was under the impression that I was pretty good at drawing things. But the professor's proficiency and speed of producing ground plans and perspective views on the board was a difficult act to follow. I would have become very depressed in a short period of time had it not been for a fellow student who gave me helpful hints. He had returned from the trenches with a shot-up hand.
How had I as a U-boat commander and "war criminal" been accepted by the university? I later learned that several professors on the board overseeing admissions had put in a good word for me as a native Hanoverian. Perhaps they recalled that my crew and I had been official guests of the city and even had signed Hanover's book of honor. Naturally there had also been opposition, which became more vehement when I was elevated to the position of scientific assistant.
The School of Architecture, housed in the Schlosswenderstrasse, was half destroyed. It was wintertime. In the workrooms we used stoves to keep warm, but they were far from tight. Smoke filled the air and we sat bent over our drawings with red and watery eyes. Those of us who had been soldiers were in the habit of studying more intensively than the rest because we were eager to pass our exams as soon as possible to be able to provide for our families. We helped each other as much as circumstances permitted. Professor Wickop confided in me later that he had never before or later encountered students who devoted themselves as fully and as eagerly to their assignments as our group. I lived during this time in an old trailer once used by lumberjacks in the woods. It had no insulation against either cold or heat and belonged to the construction firm Bosse in Stadthagen, where I had worked as an intern. Our trailer stood in the courtyard of a parsonage. Inside there were two bunks, one on top of the other. The upper bunk belonged to Mr. Bosse's son, who was also a university student in Hanover. Our furniture consisted of a small table, two chairs, and a tiny closet. In a corner we had a sink with a ewer beneath it. We had to get our water from an old pump in the yard. Whenever temperatures fell below the freezing point the water would freeze in the sink.
After her life-threatening trip from Lubeck to Celle, my wife tried to find appropriate accommodations in view of my impending release from captivity and the birth of our son. Two weeks before the expected birth of the child she had the following encounter with our local housing director, a communist. "What do you want? Who are you?" "I would like to be assigned to the room that the family of Mr. S. has kindly placed at my disposal. Here are my identification papers." "You cannot get the room; it is too large for you." My wife: "I expect the arrival of my husband as well as a child." The director: "I would not count on the return of your husband. fle is a war criminal. You won't see him again." My wife, who at that point had not yet heard from me, was close to passing out. But she composed herself in order not to appear weak in front of this creature and said: "You are wrong, Sir. I do have news from my husband." Hereupon the man became unsure of himself and signed the papers.
I saw this room a few days later when I returned to Celle. In the end we gave it up again and exchanged it for two smaller rooms w
ith outside walls. A disadvantage was, of course, that we had more trouble keeping the rooms warm with our little stove. We had no heating fuel, neither wood, briquettes, nor coal. I got in touch with a forest ranger who allowed us to cut wood in his district, which consisted mainly of torched trees. The British, in search of Germans hiding in the woods, had burned everything down with their flame-throwers. All families in our house pooled their resources and together we cut enough wood to last us through the winter.
I knew almost all the residents in our house from my school days. The proprietor owned a machine tool manufacturing plant specializing in oil drilling equipment. His sister had married a Luftwaffe captain, a former dive bomber pilot who was now enrolled as a student in Celle's teachers' college. On the first floor lived a couple. He worked as an insurance agent in Hanover. Since he often took time off from work, one day a commission showed up to investigate his frequent absences. It turned out that he was indeed working hard, but only for his family. He was fired the next day. But the man showed himself flexible. It was the time of the massive Berlin airlift, and one of the airports involved was Fassberg near Celle. Along with the American soldiers came the German prostitutes, a real land plague. But for the former insurance agent this meant the chance of a lifetime. He would provide transportation services so that the soldiers and girls could get together. He took them out into the hay, waited until the business was properly conducted, collected his fee, and then drove them back to town.
Also on the first floor lived a widow with her son, and next to her an employee of the city construction office. He was originally from the zone now occupied by the Russians, and he had left his wife behind. Eventually the two were reunited. He had graduated from a specialized school for construction personnel and was in the habit of complaining that people with an academic background knew nothing about the construction business. Deep down, however, he was clearly envious of those who had earned a university degree. We all shared a common kitchen downstairs. It was an ideal place for exchanging gossip, telling jokes, and hatching intrigues.
My family lived in a city that had been spared the bombing terror and among people who had suffered no material sacrifices. One day, after asking in vain for help from someone in the house, my wife hired two men from the shelter for homeless men to build a wooden partition in the basement for us to store our few extra belongings. Even though the owner of the house ran a machine tool outfit, we asked in vain for the use of a hammer. A few days later, someone broke into the basement and stole some sixty cans of meat belonging to the owner of the house. My wife was convinced that it was the work of our two bums, for whom she had even prepared a potato soup from our meager supplies to thank them for their assistance.
We lived on the edge of starvation. One day my wife had to be taken to the hospital suffering from edema caused by hunger. As refugees we had no reserves. For reasons beyond our comprehension the owner of the house stored a considerable number of sausages right above the passageway to our two rooms. They knew that we were starving. It cannot have been ignorance, as in the case of Marie Antoinette before the French Revolution. When Parisians one day were clamoring for bread, she is said to have responded without meaning any harm: "Let them eat cake!" No, for our landlord it was a matter of cold chicanery, of undisguised egotism.
But not everything in Celle was touched by a sense of sadness. Next to us lived the Reinhardts. He had once worked for the industrial giant Rheinmetall and now ran a factory in Celle together with a partner. And he who produced something also had something to eat. Mrs. Reinhardt was a generous woman. Since our children were forbidden to play in the backyard of our house, they played instead with the Reinhardt children in theirs. As a result, the children of both families grew up together in considerable freedom. We also had friends whom I knew from my school days, for example Dr. Jessen, our family physician. After the currency reform, when our savings had all but disappeared, his son-in-law Dr. Ne- belsieck offered to lend us money so that I could finish my studies. Fortunately, the availability of financial loans through the university enabled me not to have to take him up on his generous offer. Also, my old music teacher, Professor Fritz Schmidt, in whose choir I had once sung Bach's St. Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor, had an open house for us in the Kalandgasse, the old Latin school.
I also belonged to a round table discussion group organized by the painter Erich Klahn. I had come to know him and his work through the Schmidts. Besides Klahn and myself, our group consisted of Professor Plassmann, a specialist in Germanic studies; another former naval officer; and Peter Seeger, who would later become director of the Pelizaus Museum in Hildesheim. In our discussions, and inspired by Klahn's works, we tried to rescue what was still of value in the ruins around us, notions that would stand the test of time. Who were we? Where could we detect relationships and contexts?
It was clear enough that visible phenomena were little else but the result of underlying forces beyond our immediate detection. To pinpoint these forces became the basis of our inquiries. To get us going, one day Klahn wrote the ambiguous French phrase Sans Celle Rien beneath the likeness of the goddess Fortuna standing tall atop the earth on an engraved plate. It could either mean that we could achieve nothing without the help of fortune (Celle = Fortuna), or that we were nothing without Celle, our town, our home, our discussion group. We shared the demand of the hour: to understand and tame the forces that operated behind and between the things around us; to do so with the materials that have been entrusted to man; to create artistically complete forms-in architecture, through painting, or through the other arts-without expectations, but also not without hope. We wanted to juxtapose true shape and form against the substitutes of a civilization dominated by technology and industry. We desired to prevent the further loss of substance-indeed, to see ourselves as the ultimately important substance and to base our creations on that experience. In some ways our discussions reminded me of the debates we had engaged in so many years before as members of the youth movement. The chief difference was, of course, that we had gained experience, had matured, had fathomed life in all its heights and depths like the knight in Diirer's etching, accompanied by death and the devil.
Through Dr. Spandau, who as a major in Gotenhafen had presented talks about German history for the officer corps, I made the acquaintance of the professor of physics, Pascual Jordan. He introduced me to key aspects of the theory of microphysics. According to Professor Jordan, changes in our scientific knowledge, spearheaded by microphysics, have brought about changes in the very way we are thinking. As an analogy he compared the revolution of modern physics to man's earlier realization that the earth is round. As long as man saw the earth as a gigantic disk he could hope to explore and explain everything on it because of its clear limitations. Columbus, whose discovery ultimately changed only our perception about the parts of the world that were unknown until then, destroyed this hope forever. Since that time we know there are many questions in the world that we will never be able to answer no matter how far we travel, for the answers lie beyond our grasp in the realm of infinity. In a similar way, modern physics has shown that we should never expect to be able to deduce the entire field of possible knowledge from a limited set of experiences: for instance, the way Descartes had done it when, starting from his cogifo ergo sum, he built up an entire ideology. Today we find ourselves in a situation similar to that of Columbus, who possessed courage enough to leave behind everything that was known to him in the hope of finding more land beyond the seas. The way modern physics has pointed to the limits of classical physics has also removed the basis for explaining the world through the principle of dialectical materialism. From the insights of modern physics a new type of philosophy must one day come that restores the unity of our view of the world, which we have lost over the past centuries.
Our discussions naturally also touched on the Nuremberg Tribunal and its effect on the population. We were particularly interested in the two indicted Grand Admirals Raeder and
Donitz. Words and phrases like "Free Corps Donitz," "U-boat spirit," "Comradeship," and "Loyalty" had been associated with the U-boat arm in broad circles of the population. Now their Admiral stood accused and his followers were silent. That was an impossible situation. At the time none of us knew how deeply Donitz had become involved with the National Socialist regime, which had since been recognized and branded as criminal. Certainly he had not hesitated to become Hitler's successor. On the other hand, we were familiar with what Donitz as Commander-in-Chief of the U-Boat Command had instilled in his men in terms of soldierly virtues and that such virtues lost none of their value if they had been misused by others. Donitz was also prepared to make sacrifices. After all, he lost his two sons at sea.
I had intended to gain and maintain distance from these matters and not become engaged in public discussions after the war. In this case, however, I could not remain on the sidelines. I was well aware of the personal risk I was taking. The very completion of my studies was at stake. And always in the background I had to be mindful of the British "Education Officer"-what arrogance the word alone conveyed-before whom I had to appear every three months and who queried me about my democratic disposition. On those occasions we-that is, two former army officers serving on the General Staff and I-had to stand in front of a British officer who was dressed in breeches and as outward indication of his opinion about us held a riding crop across his knees. Oh yes, we had learned well to camouflage our feelings.
