by Jurek Becker
Also by Jurek Becker
Jacob the Liar
The Boxer
Bronstein’s Children
Sleepless Days
This collection copyright © 2014 by Suhrkamp Verlag
“The Wall” copyright © 1980 by Suhrkamp Verlag; English-language translation copyright © 1982, 2014 by Jurek Becker and Leila Vennewitz
“The Tale of the Sick Princess” from Jacob the Liar, first published at Aufbau Verlag 1969, copyright © 1976 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main; English-language translation copyright © 1990, 2014 by Jurek Becker and Leila Vennewitz
“The Most Popular Family Story,” “The Suspect,” and “Romeo” copyright © by 1980 by Suhrkamp Verlag; English-language translation copyright © 2014 by Christine Becker
“The Invisible City” copyright © 1996 by Suhrkamp Verlag; English-language translation copyright © 2010, 2014 by Christine Becker
Introduction copyright © 2014 by Christine Becker
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Becker, Jurek, 1937–1997.
[Short stories. Selections. English]
The wall and other stories / Jurek Becker; introduction by Christine Becker. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-62872-325-0 (hardback)
eISBN 978-1-62872-402-8
1. Becker, Jurek, 1937–1997—Translations into English. I. Title.
PT2662.E294A2 2014
833’.914—dc23 2013049434
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction by Christine Becker
The Wall
The Tale of the Sick Princess
The Most Popular Family Story
The Suspect
Romeo
The Invisible City
Acknowledgments
Introduction
by Christine Becker
In the late eighties, four hundred fifty photographs of the Lodz Ghetto were discovered and a plan for an exhibition was put into motion. Jurek received copies of the pictures and was asked to write about them. He examined them with feelings of horror, excitement, and hope, knowing they could depict his parents or even himself. And he wrote “The Invisible City,” which begins with the bare facts about himself, presented in his typical sober and ironic manner: “When I was two years old I came to this ghetto. At age five, I left it again, headed for the camp. I don’t remember a thing. This is what people told me, this is what is in my papers, and this was, therefore, my childhood. Sometimes I think: What a shame that something else is not written there.” These first sentences already provide insight into the lifelong burden that became the topic of this text—and which characterized all his works. As a personal testimony and the only nonfiction text, we have placed the essay at the end of this collection.
The title story, “The Wall,” relates the experiences of a young boy in the ghetto. When the child and his parents are interned in a provisional camp, which is separated from the ghetto by a wall, the story takes the form of an adventure. Together with his friends, the boy hatches a plan that he keeps secret from his parents and eventually carries out: the wall is to be surmounted.
Jurek, at the age of forty, wrote the story consistently from the perspective of the child. This allowed him to provide a momentary view of the ghetto and of life in the camp while at the same time refraining from projecting contemporary values on the situation. Without a doubt, “The Wall” is the work of fiction in which Jurek most engages with his childhood. It is hard to believe that memory is supposed not to have played any role.
Jurek’s first novel, Jacob the Liar, which brought him international acclaim, had already been interpreted as a story of recollection. He insisted, however, that it was purely inspired by what his father had told him. In the plot of Jacob the Liar, another child plays an important role. After her parents are deported, Jacob takes Lina into his care.
Jacob supplies an entire ghetto with news from a radio that circumstances force him to invent. He merely heard one real news report, by chance, but—once circulated among the ghetto inhabitants—the report inspires such hope that henceforth Jacob feels obliged to lie. He begins to claim that he owns a radio.
Eventually, Lina wants to listen to Jacob’s radio too. Jacob gives in and, sheltering behind a wall, presents the little girl with the broadcast of a fairy tale. This is the “Tale of the Sick Princess,” a fairy tale embedded within the novel. Here, just as he would later do in “The Wall,” Jurek grants the influence of childish behavior: the children make child-appropriate demands, which seem inappropriate in light of the given circumstances but, by the same token, lend some normality to their own existence. The assertion of normality in turn gives people dignity within an undignified situation and frees them from the only role they are so often assigned retroactively, which is that of the victim. The fairy tale can be read as another contribution to the topic of childhood in the ghetto, and so is included in our collection.
“The Most Popular Family Story,” as the title suggests, addresses the issue of storytelling itself, storytelling in general as well as the specific practice of telling stories as a part of family tradition. The narrator is a member of the younger generation who tries to reconstruct a funny story that, in years before his time, was traditionally told at family gatherings. At the beginning of the story, Jurek addresses the narrator’s doubts about his enterprise, and later he switches off between the embedded and framing narratives. Jurek himself liked to recite the story at public readings, more frequently so than any other text. I myself heard it countless times and could not wait to see how time and again his audience interrupted him with laughter. It was his intention to make us laugh, and only in one, incomplete sentence does the story’s background shine through: the loss of the family through displacement and murder.
After a childhood spent in the ghetto and concentration camps, Jurek was left with only his father to tell him about the past. His mother had died shortly after the Red Army had liberated the camp. But his father, like so many survivors, was rarely prepared to provide information. His energy was consumed by trying to make a life for himself in postwar Berlin. He had settled in the eastern part of the city. It was here that Jurek first went to school at the age of nine, and he later became a citizen of the socialist East German state.
Thus, in 1961, Jurek bore witness to the erection of the Berlin Wall, which was to become a portion of the barrier—unconquerable to those in the East—separating the two German states. Visible every day, the wall created East and West Berlin, each subject to the laws of their respective countries, with different economic conditions and different currencies.
In 1977, after prolonged and fierce conflict with the authorities and with their approval, Jurek left East Berlin. He traveled to the United States for the first time, was writer-
in-residence at Oberlin College in Ohio, and later settled in West Berlin. He had retained his East German passport and could routinely cross the border in both directions. Naturally, the life situation of the inhabitants of both parts of the city became the subject of his prose.
In the short story “The Suspect,” the protagonist, from whose perspective the story is narrated, finds himself surprisingly and unfairly subject to surveillance by the state authorities. Without being explicitly mentioned, the story can be assumed to take place in East Berlin—the German Democratic Republic had quickly gained the reputation of being a police state. The nameless protagonist is portrayed as loyal to the state and uncritical; for this reason the surveillance he is under appears to him as a mistake. To disperse the suspicions against him, “the suspect” undergoes a self-evaluation and begins to cease all behaviors that could be construed as suspicious. At the end of his efforts—at the end of the story—he again makes a surprising discovery. We experience the narrator to be assiduous and yet surprisingly dispassionate, and eventually the process of surveillance and self-regulation is not only menacing but at times also funny.
“Romeo” tells the story of a young migrant worker who lives and works in West Berlin and of a young woman from East Berlin. His high rent, low wages, and the favorable exchange rate between the two German currencies entice him to try to quintuple his money on the illegal exchange market. He searches for and finds a young woman in East Berlin who can provide accommodation. Both characters behave in a pragmatic manner, yet it remains unclear whether their connection is bound purely by its purpose. The director Andreas Dresen, one of the most renowned directors of contemporary German film, saw a film plot in this and wrote the author: “It is notable that among the cool calculation there is also a degree of warmth. There is this spark of hope for humane action, even under adverse circumstances that demand otherwise—and that usually dominate us.” Dresen’s movie was made in the year the Berlin Wall fell, and thus represents an era that was soon to end.
The story “The Wall” was also turned into a film in the early nineties. For the project, Jurek collaborated with director Frank Beyer, who had already received an Academy Award nomination for his screen adaptation of Jacob the Liar. And then it finally happened: Jurek was describing the furnishings of the small room in the ghetto where the little boy and his parents live. And suddenly everything had its place: table, cupboard, a stool with a tub on it. . . . Excitedly, he got up from his desk and stood before me. “Since I have no memories—how could I know? How would I know exactly what the room looked like?” he asked. It appears that, for once, he succeeded in unlocking at least part of his childhood.
In the nineties, the years after the reunification of the two German states, Jurek had retreated from the commotion of Berlin to the countryside. Once more, an unexpected political development had relegated him from actor to observer. He had come to Germany involuntarily, had only learned the language in which he wrote at the age of nine, and according to him had never felt fully German. It is to this late and attentive acquisition of language, however, that Jurek owed his literary language, which was later lauded as especially clear and precise. And being an outsider allowed him to take the step back that enables us to see the whole. Both may help explain why, in his prose, Jurek dared to engage with the unimaginable and unspeakable—and to suspend the widespread impulse to close one’s eyes and ears.
The Wall
Here I am, at a time when we Jews are quietly minding our own business and our neighbor is called Olmo who spends half the day quarreling with his wife, and if you have nothing better to do you can stand behind the door and hear every word. And the street still has its houses, in each of which something has happened to me. I’m not allowed to leave it, the street—Father has strictly forbidden me. Often I don’t believe his reason for this, but sometimes I do: that there is a boundary, an invisible one, beyond which children are snatched away. No one knows where it runs, that’s the sneaky part. It seems to be constantly changing, and before you know it you’ve crossed it. Only in our own street, it seems, are children relatively safe, safest of all outside their own house. My friends, with whom I discuss this enormous problem, are of two opinions. The know-it-alls laugh, but there are others who have already heard about it too.
I ask: “What’ll happen to me if they catch me?”
Father replies: “It’s better for you not to know.”
I say: “No, tell me—what will happen to me?” He merely makes a vague gesture and refuses to talk to me anymore. Once I say: “Who is it anyway who snatches away the children?”
He asks: “Why do you have to know that too?”
I say: “It’s the German soldiers.”
He asks: “The Germans, our own police—what’s the difference if they catch you?”
I say: “But there’s a boy who plays with us every day who lives many streets away.”
He asks me: “Is your father a liar?”
I’m five years old and can’t keep still. The words tumble out of my mouth. I can’t keep it shut, I’ve tried. The words push against my cheeks from the inside, multiplying at a fantastic rate and hurting my mouth until I have to open it. “What a child!” says my Mother, who no longer has a face, only a voice. “Just listen to that child, that crazy child.”
What happened must have been strange, unheard of, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth telling. For all I know I may have killed Mr. Tenzer, the shopkeeper. I’ll never find out. He lives in our street and wears a little black cap and has a little white beard. He is a tiny little man. When the weather is cold or wet you can go to his place. He tells stories. The toughest kids sit silently in front of him, not saying a word, never opening their mouths, perfectly quiet, even though later they make their jokes. But he never lets more than four come in at one time. I am his favorite: it makes me feel good believing that. Once when he picked me up and put me on top of the cupboard—he proved to be very strong. We were all surprised.
Father says: “What kind of person would put a child on top of a cupboard? And anyway, why are you always hanging around old Tenzer? He must have a screw loose.”
I say: “You have a screw loose.” He swings his arm back, but I run away, and when I return later he’s forgotten all about it. Father often swings his arm back, but he never hits me.
One day I’ve quarreled with everyone and go over to Tenzer’s place. I’ve never been alone with him before. When he opens the door and sees only me outside he’s surprised and says: “Such a small gathering today?” He is busy doing his laundry, but he doesn’t send me away. I am allowed to watch. He washes differently from my mother, who always splashes water all over the room. He handles the underpants and shirts gently, trying not to make even more holes, and sometimes he sighs over an especially big hole. He holds a shirt high above the bowl, and while it drips he tells me: “It’s thirty years old. Do you know what thirty years means for a shirt?”
I look around the room; there’s not much to look at. There is only one thing that I’ve never noticed before. Behind the high headboard of the bed, on the floor beside the window, stands a pot. A large cloth hangs in front to hide it. I would never have made the discovery if I hadn’t been lying on the floor and looking in that very direction out of boredom. I make a little detour over to the thing. I push aside the cloth, which would hide it from someone twice my size. In the pot there is a green plant, a strange one that pricks sharply as soon as you touch it. “What are you doing back there?” shouts Mr. Tenzer after hearing me cry out. There is a drop of blood on my forefinger—I show him my thick blood. I stick my finger in my mouth and suck it; then I see tears in his eyes and am more scared than ever.
I ask: “What did I do?”
“Nothing,” he says, “nothing at all, it’s my fault.” He explains how the plant functions and how many animals would have eaten it if it weren’t for the prickles. He says: “You’re not to tell anybody about it.”
I say: “Of course I won’t
.”
He says: “You know that no one’s allowed to have a plant?”
I say: “Of course I know that.”
He says: “You know what happens to anyone who ignores a rule?”
I say: “Of course.”
He asks me: “Well, what do they do to him?” I don’t answer. I just look at him because he’s about to tell me. We look at each other for a while, then Tenzer picks a piece of washing out of the bowl and wrings it out violently. He says: “That’s what they do to him.” Of course I tell the story to millions of people, not to my parents but all my friends.
I pay another visit to Mr. Tenzer because ever since that day he has allowed me to play with his plant as if we were brother and sister. The door is opened by an old woman, so fearfully ugly that anyone in my place would have been terrified. She asks in a nasty voice: “What do you want here?” I know that Tenzer has always been alone and wouldn’t have dreamed of letting such a person into the house, so the fact that she is in his home alarms me even more than her appearance. I run away from the witch and pay no attention to the curse she calls out after me. The street hardly sees me—I just fly along it. I ask my Mother where Mr. Tenzer is. She starts to cry. Only a moment ago she had been embroidering the cloth to which she belongs. I ask: “Where is he? Tell me!”
But I have to wait for Father to tell me when he comes home that evening: “They’ve taken him away.”
By this time I’m no longer surprised, hours have passed since my question, and many times they have taken someone away who was suddenly no longer there. I ask: “Whatever did he do?”
Father says: “He was meshugge.”
I ask: “What did he really do?”
Father rolls up his eyes and says to Mother: “You tell him, if he really wants to know.” And at last she says, though very softly: “He had a flowering plant. Just imagine, they found a flowering plant in his room.” It is rather quiet. I am suffering because I mustn’t say that the plant and I are friends. Tears drip from my Mother’s eyes onto her cloth. Never before has she had a good word to say for Tenzer.
