Field Study

by Rachel Seiffert

  His father wrote articles and books, on the pre-war German Communist movement and the postwar division. He was considered something of an authority in East German circles, celebrated for a while in left-leaning West German ones too. Jochen remembers finding his father’s name in a book at school once, in a list of prominent anti-Nazis, but still he has no pride in his father’s ideals, his achievements. On the rare occasions he speaks about them, he is at best sarcastic, at worst really mean.

  – Postwar Germany according to my dad, are you ready? In the East there are the good people, the farmers and workers. In the West, on the other hand, are the capitalists and the old Nazis, who will of course stop at nothing in their quest to corrupt and undermine. And so to keep these fascists and exploiters at bay they, regrettably, had to build a nice big wall.

  – Come on. He’s an intelligent man. It won’t be as simplistic as that.

  – Okay, granted, I am being less than generous. But to him the cold war was western aggression, and everything that happened in the East was somehow a defensive reaction. This is what I hate, you see, this hypocrisy.

  – The state was hypocritical, or your father?

  – Listen Hannah: my father fought one repressive regime and then used his credentials to defend another. He was so righteous about the journalists who worked for the Nazis, and then he spent his own career writing lies and excuses.

  __

  His books are no longer in print but Hannah does find one of her father-in-law’s articles in the microfiche room at the university library. The rhetoric is indeed off-putting, but the photo of the author fascinating. Tight-mouthed, guarded. An expression she recognises from her husband’s face.

  __

  Their discussions that autumn are often tense, but they argue less and less, and sometimes when Jochen phones his brother, Hannah notices that he will also talk briefly with his father. And then, just before Christmas, a further health scare helps Hannah win him over. When New Year arrives, they fly with their sons to Germany, because Jochen agrees that it is right for them to see their grandfather. That he should see his grandchildren at least once before he dies. He sends them a letter, the old man, in response to the announcement of their visit. Brief, curt, and in English: Hannah uses it as a page-marker in the book she takes onto the plane to read to the twins.

  Since you are coming all this way, it would seem a waste of time to just stay in Frankfurt. I would strongly suggest that we pay a visit to Berlin.

  – Out of the question.

  Jochen nods at the letter over his complimentary drink.

  – Why?

  – Karl says Dad’s not well enough.

  – Did he ask your father?

  Jochen shrugs. They lose altitude slowly as they approach Frankfurt, and the twins rub their ears and pull their faces into exaggerated yawns.

  – He wants to go. I want to go. You and the boys can stay with your brother. I’ll take your dad to Berlin.

  – It’s a bad idea, Hannah. He’s too old, ill. It will be a nightmare.

  – How do you know?

  Karl picks them up at the airport. Hannah tells him about the letter and he sighs, pushing the luggage trolley ahead of him.

  – He’s up to something.

  Hannah sits in the back again, between her sons, who are restless after the long flight. She tries to find rusks and toys in her bag and still keep an eye on her husband and brother-in-law in the front. Strains to understand what they are saying, becomes aware that she is the only woman in the car, surrounded by two generations of her male relatives: all tired and tense, with their shoulders hunched around their ears.

  __

  Her eldest male relative responds to her idea of a hire car and a road trip to Berlin with gruff enthusiasm.

  – Very good, yes. I am going to bed now and shall see you in the morning.

  The twins sleep in travel cots in the living room and Karl, Hannah and Jochen eat together in the small kitchen.

  – At least no one will print his stuff now. Even if he could still write.

  Karl rolls a cigarette, exchanges a glance with Jochen, and then tells Hannah:

  – That was the worst time. After reunification, after the Stasi files were opened.

  – He worked for the Stasi?

  – Yes he worked for the Stasi, one of their informers. Informal co-workers.

  – But he wasn’t the only one. Thousands of people did that, didn’t they?

  – Yes, of course, but does that mean he is not responsible for his actions?

  Karl doesn’t raise his voice, but his tone has changed. He looks at Jochen, then continues:

  – He was against the Nazis, he had suffered for the cause. I think he felt that this absolved him.

  Jochen opens another bottle and nods at what his brother says. Hannah sighs at the rhetoric, thinks the sons can be just as dogmatic as their father.

  – One of our cousins, Sascha, he wrote some critical essays when he was a student. Critical of the government, and so he was thrown out of university.

  – What did he write?

  – Oh, unkind things about Honecker: nothing earth-shattering. But they had been following Sascha for some time, the Stasi. And then without a degree, you see, his career chances were ruined.

  – And that is your father’s fault?

  – Well it’s not certain, of course, but our father lived with them for a while, in Sascha’s last years of school. You never know what piece of information brought him to their attention, do you? Sascha says he read things in his file that only our father would have known.

  Hannah can feel Jochen looking at her. She keeps her eyes focused just beyond Karl’s shoulder.

  – Do you know what he thinks now?

  – No, he won’t engage with me. That’s what pisses me off the most. You just draw this blank with him there. No conversation, just this silence, this massive disappointment. Like we’ve all been a disappointment to him, the whole world, and we owed it to him to be what he expected of us, because he wanted it so much.

  – He’s an old man. He was old by the time the wall came down. Maybe it’s not fair to expect too much of him?

  – Oh, come on!

  Jochen has been listening quietly, but is irritated now. He raises his hands in a defeated gesture. Hannah thinks he is about to declare the conversation boring and therefore over.

  – Well? You don’t like talking about the past with me, do you? Maybe your father is not so different?

  Jochen blinks at her.

  – There is a difference, Hannah.

  – Oh, really?

  – Yes, really. He still believes the old lies.

  __

  Hannah is unsettled by the Stasi revelations. Awake on the sofa-bed next to Jochen, heart pounding. She takes deep breaths, but cannot fill her lungs, regrets the late-night coffee, the evening’s red wine. Jochen sleeps on and she is angry. Wonders why he and Karl decided to tell her now: to change her mind about the Berlin visit? She goes over their conversation again, those glances exchanged between the brothers, the tight smiles that appeared at her questions. Hannah lies there and resents them. The way they always insist on complication, the impossibility of explanation. Thinks they enjoy their Germanness and all its secrets, and after that she feels lonely and unkind.

  She wakes early, finds her father-in-law already in the kitchen. He smiles and waves a silent good morning. Hannah catches herself watching him as he pours her some tea. Can’t help herself: she is intrigued. By this blunt man who can be so gentle, by this horribly compromised idealist. It occurs to her, making toast for them both, that she has only tried talking with the sons, never with the father. In her bag she has a road map of Germany, and one of Berlin. Awake now, despite her bad night, Hannah is determined to take him.

  __

  The autobahn is dull and the day chilly and grey, but her father-in-law makes good driving company. He finds a radio station without commercials, tells her the names of the rivers
they pass over, breaks a chocolate bar into neat pieces, lays them within easy reach on the dashboard for her.

  – Strength for the road ahead.

  Countless topics considered, discarded, Hannah talks non-stop about the twins for the first hour or so, and although their grandfather is interested, she is uncomfortable, sure he is aware that this is conversational safe ground. They come to a service station, and he suggests a coffee. He finds them a table by the window, and they smile together about the surly waiter and the plastic plants on the windowsill. Hannah remembers how they danced together at the wedding reception, in the restroom mirror tells herself to relax. Back in the car, she lets him ask her questions: is astonished by what he remembers, details even she had forgotten. That she had broken off her doctoral studies shortly before the wedding: the impossibility of combining work and research, the frustrations with her supervisor. He is sympathetic with her anger now over the cost of childcare, over having to stay at home because she cannot earn enough to pay for it.

  – Yes. It was much easier in the GDR for women to work than now. Good nurseries and the state paid for them.

  He smiles in the pause this produces.

  – Sorry. Not propaganda. It’s just one thing we did right, I think. Or at least better.

  __

  Coming into Berlin Hannah notices the weather is changing. The outside temperature reads two below zero and the clouds hang low and heavy over the city. She thinks it might snow and worries about the old man getting cold, fiddles with the dials on the dashboard until the heating system kicks in. The autobahn ends abruptly and they sit at traffic lights, blinking in the dry gusts of warm air from the windscreen. Hannah’s feet feel cramped and hot in her winter shoes. She can smell her father-in-law now, too. Wonders how often the home-help comes to wash him. Too busy inside his own head to remember; shuffling from one room to another, leaving behind a trail of half-read books and papers.

  __

  Inside the city the traffic is stop-start and Hannah struggles with the gear-shift and the lane changes. Her father-inlaw never learnt to drive, he says, navigates badly.

  The old man sits up straighter after a while, tells her they have passed into the eastern side of the city. The difference seems very subtle to Hannah: same ugly apartment buildings, same oppressive crush of traffic lanes. There are trams to add to her unease here, and they are stuck behind one for a while, the tyres singing strangely on the tracks below them.

  Visibly excited, her father-in-law navigates them along one edge of Alexanderplatz before road-works divert them up Karl-Marx-Allee. Smiling, shifting in his seat, the old man asks Hannah repeatedly whether she can see the TV tower in her rear-view mirror.

  – Look. It’s an impressive sight, really.

  He fidgets, turning to look out of the rear windscreen, stiff shoulders straining against the belt.

  – They built it to stand right in the sight-lines of the avenue. Yes, the angle should be right. Just about. NOW. Now, Mädel. What’s wrong with you?

  He stares at her.

  – Sorry. The hire car. I’m not used to it, think I should concentrate on the road.

  He coughs, turns back to look through the front wind-screen at the wide, straight avenue, its imposing buildings.

  – This was called Stalinallee once. Karl Marx is much better.

  He nods. Hannah can see the emphatic movement out of the corner of her eye.

  – Uncle Joe. So the Americans called him, yes? American communists. Who, I understand, were banned from working for some time, put in prison.

  The old man is looking at her now.

  – Yes.

  – Is that remembered in America?

  Hannah changes down a gear, then up again.

  – Yes, I think it is. I believe so.

  – Did you learn this at school?

  – No. My father told me.

  She glances at him. He is listening, watching for her reaction.

  – And so your father will tell your boys? Or you will?

  The lights are red, she has to stop. Has no excuse not to look at him.

  – Yes, I think I will tell them. When they are old enough.

  – And now you are thinking McCarthy was nothing compared to what we did here. Yes? And I don’t talk to my sons about it, do I?

  He is right, or near enough, but Hannah doesn’t respond. The lights change and she drives on, disconcerted by her instinct to defend, to find relative levels of wrong.

  – Is the hotel far now, do you think?

  – I have been taking us on a scenic route. Sorry. I may not see this city again.

  – Okay. Yes.

  The blue signs of the underground stations go by. And then the old man directs them the wrong way up a one-way street, so Hannah has to take a few quick right and left turns to get them away from the angry drivers and pedestrians. She starts to sweat.

  – Sorry. They changed the traffic rules along with everything else, it would seem.

  Detached. Dry. Hannah unzips her coat at the next junction, catches sight of the damp patches under her arms. Feels the sweat trickle down her sides and drives and drives and says nothing even though she has a feeling they have been lost for a while because her father-in-law spends too much time looking out of the window and not enough time looking at the map.

  __

  – Here.

  They are at a busy crossroads. Four lanes of traffic, trams, bicycles, an elevated train line, but he makes her pull over.

  – Stop, stop. Don’t go so far from the corner.

  – Is this allowed? I don’t think I can park here.

  – I won’t be long.

  She has not pulled up yet and he is already opening the door.

  – Wait.

  But he doesn’t listen. By the time Hannah has straightened up and found the hazard lights, her father-in-law is already striding back down the road to the corner. When she gets to him, he has positioned himself underneath the street sign and is addressing the people waiting at the pedestrian crossing in a surprisingly loud voice. Most of them cross when the lights change, but a few stay to listen.

  Hannah steps forward and takes his arm, but he shakes her off, opens his briefcase and takes out a long piece of white card, on which is written, in black lettering, Dimitroff Strasse. Home-made, the pen lines are a little shaky, but the whole thing is quite lovingly done, with small brass hooks taped to the back. He holds the sign up so the gathering people can read it.

  The afternoon is cold, getting dark already. A small crowd has formed around them now, fifteen or twenty people, and Hannah finds herself absorbed among them. Watching her father-in-law gesturing and shouting: a thin man in a thin coat, strangely fragile. The people around her are talking, some of the voices sharp, but others are light, laughing. A train clatters above on the elevated track, drowning the old man’s voice out. He points to the street sign above him. Danziger Strasse. It has started to snow.

  Danzig she knows. Gdansk. Once in Germany, now Poland. But Dimitroff?

  A young man has stepped forward out of the crowd. Blue hair and torn trousers, he makes an unlikely partner for Hannah’s father-in-law, but they shake hands warmly, and then the young man takes the cardboard strip between his teeth and shins up the signpost. When he hangs the hand-drawn words over the street sign, a few people in the crowd cheer, one or two shout angry words, still others walk away. The blue-haired boy smiles triumphant, embarrassed. He slides down a little, hesitates, unsure whether to jump, and Hannah steps forward to help him.

  Six or seven people are left now, out of the original crowd, and the old man stands in the middle of them all with his watery eyes, animated hands, pink in his cheeks from the wind. Hannah wonders whether she should go and claim her father-in-law, but the conversation is intense, involved, and she doesn’t know if she can stop it. She offers the boy with the blue hair a handkerchief, asks if he speaks English.

  – Dimitroff was a communist, in the Nazi times. Thank you.


  He wipes his hands on his saggy trousers first, then on Hannah’s handkerchief, smiles.

  – This is what it was called before, Dimitroff Strasse, when this was East Berlin.

  The snow is settling now, blotting the letters of Dimitroff’s name, turning to hissing slush under the passing cars. Voices raised and arms, the small group is oblivious to the dark and weather, debating a history of which Hannah has only the vaguest knowledge. She zips up her coat again and the young man gestures to her father-in-law.

  – He is little crazy, maybe, but harmless.

  – What are they arguing about? Can you hear them?

  – Don’t ask me, they’re all Ossies.

  – You are not from the East?

  He shrugs.

  – No, I am a student here. From Hamburg. Hey!

  __

  Hannah does not see the woman hit her father-in-law. Only the way he holds his hands over his face, beret lying on the wet pavement next to him.

  – Hey!

  Hannah puts herself in front of the old man, finds herself looking into shocked and furious faces. A second or two later, they are already disappearing, backing off, the woman who slapped her father-in-law moving away last. She is crying.

  __

  The old man sits in the passenger seat next to her, breathing, and Hannah tries to drive, but her feet shake on the pedals and her arms feel useless. She turns off the main road, parks on a side street, tries to gather her thoughts, the map, the biro circle that marks the hotel. The boy with the blue hair said it wasn’t far, easy from here. She will just stop for a moment, just to calm down a little. The old man sits quietly, blinking, his shoulders curled around him. Hannah rests a hand on his back but he doesn’t respond, and after a few minutes she decides to take it away again.

  Trams pass, people, the street lights are on, shop signs: evening. Hannah wonders how she will describe the scene to Jochen. She feels excluded, but also in a way relieved. Not German.

  __

  After German reunification many streets in eastern Berlin were given their pre-GDR names again. One such street was Dimitroff Strasse, which returned to being Danziger Strasse in 1995. Georgi Dimitroff was a communist and one of three men falsely accused by the Nazis of setting the Reichstag fire in 1933. He defended himself in court, humiliating the Nazi lawyers, and eventually winning his case.