This Great Escape

by Andrew Steinmetz

  Your son died in a tragic manner. A shot that struck his ammunition pouch caused the bullets to explode without injuring him. He sought cover to see if everything was in order. As he took off his pullover, he stood up too straight, and a shot to his heart killed him. He was the only loss that the company had suffered on that day.

  I recently acquired a photocopy of this odd, which is to say, rather touching letter. On the back side is a diagram of the battlefield, hand-drawn by Abelard’s field officer. The diagram—rudimentary, but carefully composed—shows roads and a bending river, and it pinpoints the battalion’s position on the day Abelard died. Reading the letter again, I realize that the detail of Abelard standing absurdly “too straight” to remove his pullover is something that I had heard repeated many times. That is, in the telling of the story, at different times and over the years, this detail had stuck. It appears to be authentic, after all.

  Killed on a day when no one else in Battalion 48 had lost his life. There is a rightness to this statement, another element of the story that I seem to have known about from the beginning. It is as though on 11 December 1941, Abelard paid a price. He was chosen to die; and to die young; Abelard for his company of men. All the more reason I would whisk my naïve boyhood image of him away from the battlefield into my imagination for polishing, possibly for safekeeping.

  The stories about Abelard and Hrolf struck a chord in me, dissonant but romantic, that would ominously resound years later when I learned more about Michael, and Michael’s spin as a Gestapo agent in The Great Escape. Michael became a fascination, and the irony is that Michael’s experience of the war always seemed more vital for me, and he the actor more real to me than the other two, Hrolf and Abelard, who in fact were soldiers, if we are still calling them soldiers.

  When my nuclear family left Canada to live two years in East Africa in the late 1970s, we stopped off in Germany on the way over to visit with relatives. One day, my parents took me and my brothers and sister to the concentration camp at Dachau, easily accessible by train from Munich. We entered the camp the same way the first prisoners—these first were political prisoners—entered in 1933, through the Jourhaus and through the rod-iron gate upon which the Nazis had affixed the phrase Arbeit macht frei. Inside, we spent the afternoon, in hard-to-break silence, touring the grounds of the memorial site. We saw an exhibit of photographs, the barracks, the crematorium, and I remember a vast area which was called roll-call square, where up to forty thousand prisoners could assemble and would be counted each morning and each night. Arbeit macht frei might be the first German sentence I remember reading. The literal translation—‘Work Makes Freedom’—did not come close to conveying the cruelty of the Nazi policy of extermination through work, nor was such sinister irony fathomable to the ten-year-old tourist I was. I need not properly remember the moment—and I don’t—to be certain that my father that day took us children aside for a good fifteen minutes to explain what the words really meant. He took a long time with us, I’m sure he did, and we understood the gravity without probably understanding him.

  After Munich, we travelled to see uncle Hrolf, still in Constanz. My parents never had anything good to say about him, but off we went to visit anyway. Like him or not, he was family, seemed to be the message. Hrolf was part of the package.

  The central family myth about Hrolf Kramm is that he used his rank in the military and his geographic position—he was stationed in southern Germany, on the border with Switzerland—to help Jewish families escape Germany. Hrolf was a good Nazi. He did what he could to help. He was one of them but not really one of them. Competing myths or the apocrypha suggest that Hrolf’s prime motivation was never ‘to help the Jews’. After the war, he was set up for life. Where did his money come from? It is speculated that Hrolf took bribes from Jewish families in return for safe passage to Switzerland. Not everyone in the family believes this to be true. I’m not absolutely sure I believe it myself.

  What is most striking about Hrolf Kramm at first glance has nothing to do with bribes or blackmail. During the war he had lost an eye. On the few occasions I met him, I spent my time trying to guess into which socket his glass eye had been inserted: the left, or the right? As a boy, I poorly understood the mechanics of a glass eye, but what strikes me as significant today is how Hrolf’s ocular prosthetic altered how I saw him. I must have believed that his prosthetic functioned, or else did it just lie there like a marble in a hole and block his sight? For me, as a child, there was so much anxiety bound to the foreignness of the thing itself—Might it crack? Was it breakable?—that it has taken me years to realize that really, it wasn’t the glass eye that bothered me so much, it was his absent eye. The missing one. Unconsciously I must have equated the injury with some form of penalty. Missing an eye was his punishment for being a Nazi. Was he a Nazi?

  But then, what if the wound was self-inflicted? I didn’t think of this possibility until much, much later. I wished for all the related Steinmetzs and Kramms that I was right about this. But no. It had been an accident. Shrapnel from a grenade explosion. So I’d heard, friendly fire.

  My train car is boisterous. Laughter erupts down the aisle. A party of six are sharing lunch. Cold cuts, cheese, dark rye. The DB ticket collector enters and walks toward me, slowly like a lazy bee swaying between seat rests and passengers. The mission is cross-pollination, and during the return trip to Munich I am set up with my laptop. I cannot stop looking at him, the Gestapo from Breslau, at him from the movie especially, who put a spell on me. He who blossoms despite the sadists in the wardrobe department. Fifty-seven seconds all counting—before we lose sight of him for good, on-screen and off, stardust to rust, so it goes and so it must.

  Stop Pause Play

  PLAY

  He speaks the existential discourse of border guards and customs officials. What is your age? Why have you come here? A song and dance: Michael sings with the philosophers of frontier authority. What is the purpose of your visit? Who in hell are you? Dialectics of flesh and spirit, a chorus-line to-and-fro that springs forth laconic data of the self. Are you French?

  PLAY-REWIND

  I press stop then play-rewind and Michael is sucked backwards-a-blur into the film’s unconscious. I press play—and just in time: Michael re-emerges. Reconstituted, assembled in colour, he is himself again, in Neustadt.

  PAUSE

  Now look. I press pause, and watch: left foot frozen, forward knee uplift, locked-but-stepping aboard train 78185 at 2:08:37.

  Fedora. Lips parted, front teeth prominent. Appalling. Even a split-second pause disturbs his nature. Paused, Michael suffers a seizure. Pause-him-and-he-jitters. He surrenders free will. Becomes a monster. One of them.

  PLAY!

  He enters the coach. He spots the lazy pair of SS officers. It must be either the black uniforms or their higher-functioning evil that makes them drowsy so.

  Michael takes it all in. In the near row of camera-facing benches, the orchard-fresh Nazi Youth fixes a squalid place in history. He is wearing the brown shirt and a bright red armband. His handkerchief is joined under his chin by a wooden ring. What does Michael see in him? In age and putty face, he is the Doppelgänger of the young master Michi, resident of the Lahr DP camp. His double-goer. Does he notice?

  Germany floats freely outside the window. His paranormal twin is mesmerized by what mumbo jumbo now?

  A. The Jungvolk Oath: “In the presence of this blood banner which represents our Führer, I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the saviour of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life for him, so help me God.”

  Or B. One of the Hitler Youth ‘Prayers’ : “Adolf Hitler, you are our great Führer. Thy name makes the enemy tremble. Thy Third Reich comes, thy will alone is law upon the earth. Let us hear daily thy voice and order us by thy leadership, for we will obey to the end and even with our lives. We praise thee! Heil Hitler!”


  Or C. “Führer, my Führer, given me by God. Protect and preserve my life for long. You saved Germany in time of need. I thank you for my daily bread. Be with me for a long time, do not leave me, Führer, my Führer, my faith, my light, Hail to my Führer!”

  Or perhaps in his reverie the youth recites D., one of the many buoyant mottoes for boys: “Live Faithfully, Fight Bravely, and Die Laughing!” “We were born to die for Germany!” “You are nothing—your Volk is everything!”

  Michael takes a moment to reminisce. What does he make of it all?

  PAUSE

  Michael is no stranger to trains. No stranger to the calling, to delivery or travel, no stranger to leaving nor to arriving, no stranger to taking a little time off, some metaphysical flux-en-fer as an excuse for being.

  PLAY

  Richard Attenborough and Gordon Jackson’s documents are false. That much is certain, psst, ihre Pässe ist counterfeit. The audience knows. Michael knows it. The ensuing dialogue may as well be gibberish: Vous êtes Francais? Oui. Oui. Merci. Oui. Moi aussi. Later, I film Gandhi!

  But like the professional he is, Michael speaks his lines in a clear register. Michael repeats the syntax string, without ecclesiastical sing-song, from subject to verb, engine to caboose: Ihre. Paesse. bitte. Vous. Etes. Francais?

  FAST FORWARD

  I fast forward now and Michael swims by the escapees at a high speed of hundreds of frames per second, which is humorous but surely is also dangerous. The visual gag quickly becomes annoying. More tiresome than pause and play. More fatiguing than play-rewind. Tiresome for me and—you’d expect—for him. But not at all. He performs splendidly. Fast forward is his element. Does he not see the fast track for what it is? Fast forward is dangerous, reckless as predestination.

  ‘All is grace.’ Yes. Oui! All is grace, except in hindsight, Michael, wherein some things are an intractable disgrace.

  When I ease off, gradually, equilibrium is restored. Michael regains composure. He finds himself wherever he is. But no matter how many times I’ve done this—blindly fast-forwarded him—I can never predict his exact position. There is a limited range of possibilities, true enough, and Michael eventually surfaces within this range, between Munich and Hamburg (or Breslau and Berlin for the sake of the film), but never at the same spot and never the same Michael.

  STOP

  Achtung! You there! Your Great Emanation. Stand and unfold yourself. You come most carefully upon your hour. You and your historical accuracy. You sham, you florid sham of light waves.

  Is it you? Is it really you? Him?

  Your material trace, your buzzing emanation, is all there is left.

  REWIND

  I rewind, then hit play. You arrive at Neustadt, impossible-to-find Neustadt, the old station located in impossible-to-locate Geiselgasteig. You step out of history and crunch the itching gravel. You walk the station platform, step aboard the train. I observe closely as you enter your passage of time through The Great Escape. Your uncredited fifty-seven seconds.

  PAUSE

  I pause him often, at different intervals, at random: as he boards as he looks left as he looks to his right as he advances up the aisle and when he stops to chat with the British and American actors.

  I gently apply pressure: suspended, under my thumb, shivering in disbelief. Act you little Michael.

  Then I unfreeze him and he always says Danke. Never ‘Thank You’.

  REWIND

  The boy is first-class. He puts up with these experiments. He is tireless. What I mean is, over time, he does not deteriorate. Michael is sharp. He comes from good stock, that’s right. Even after fast-forwarding, slow-reverse, pause, and plain-old play time, Michael is crisp. Intact. He does not fade. Just the opposite: he blooms under the microscope.

  Here, instead of using a live specimen for investigation, I study dead Michael on film.

  STOP

  When I stop to measure his position in reference to the running time of the film, it is obvious that I have lost something.

  The more precisely I can measure his position, the less precisely I know him this instant, and vice versa. This is the gist of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. I cannot know him at any fixed point. He is elusive after all. Stranded within a range of possibilities. Missing in action. Abandoned in a moving picture. Draped in naturalism. Earth shifting beneath his feet.

  So I play.

  PAUSE

  Look at yourself, Michael. I’ve caused trouble, I have. I’ve paused you again and I’ve really done it, you’re trembling in your tan trench coat, wavelengths pouring through your Goonskin. What is it that terrifies you? Who are you hiding from? Son, you’re blushing.

  He’s self-conscious. Red in the face. Michael has method, but he’s vain. Is this, the basis of the uncertainty principle, sub-atomic vanity?1

  Self-consciousness goes undetected unless you fix the image. Molecules, observed, change behaviour.

  Vanity, pure vanity. Nature is shot through with it.

  PLAY

  That on my flat screen is the quantum aspect of him. The smallest discrete amount of Michael. A single frame fixed for the eye. Jittering as vibrations and pixels and dots per inch pour through him. Act little Michael. Acht du lieber!

  Look at the boy. He shakes and trembles. What have I done? Wavering between future and past, between rewind and forward, between fast and slow speed, what have I done?

  I said he came from good stock, but is that enough? Perhaps he is like the actors his father Karl Paryla loved so much, one of Brecht’s human puppets who were instructed to perform self-consciously, as though, at every moment, they know the beginning, middle, and end of the play.

  Michael has full knowledge­—beyond his seconds on film—of the span of his life. That is why he shakes and trembles so. He knows about the beginning, middle, and especially he knows the end. He knows and it has all gotten to him. He’s frayed. His nerves are shot. He doesn’t know once upon a time from ever after.

  *

  He does a fine job. He speaks fluently. But at the end of the line, when the credits begin to tumble, his name is nowhere. Michael is all lost—already lost: you can see it in his eyes—but the role playing continues: there is Junker Bleichenwang and Sempronius and many others, Francisco, Fred Nicolls, Cosimo de Medici. He is many and none. Alas, the sick seagull cannot find sleep without milk and barbiturates. And despite his rising star he is down on himself. It’s all in his head, but he exists in his head. He naps in the afternoons. A few hours here and there. When he comes to, he remembers Konstantin Gavrilovich Trepliov, the Russian Hamlet, in Chekhov’s play. Michael was twenty when he played the role. The character Trepliov has a complex relationship with his mother, and commits suicide at the end of the play. Maybe Michael found a little of himself in Trepliov. His Trepliov is a young man, a budding playwright with a fragile ego and heart, who is needy and, above all, seeks his mother’s approval. Approval for what? To be himself. At McGill in 1955, Michael is away from home, learning to be a man, learning to act, girlfriend Janine Blum at his side. And Trepliov’s mother, Arkadina, in the play, is a celebrated actress from the old school of Russian drama. Much like Eva, Michael’s mother. The Arkadina of the play is forty three years old. Eva’s exact age, the year that Michael played Trepliov. What is more, Trepliov misses his father, a well-known actor, who is perpetually ‘away’. As is the case with Michael, Trepliov’s father’s absence creates a void in his life.

  When he awakes from his nap, it all seems strangely familiar. It’s uncanny. More than a decade later, Michael can cite the stage manager’s traffic directions, which precisely mark his own physical whereabouts for the duration of the action of the play.

  Between Acts 1 & 2 exit left, wait for curtain fall, open door to warn Nina, then change costume. 12 minutes.

  Between Acts 2 & 3 wait stage left: bandage applied to the head by
Paulina.

  Between Acts 3 & 4 once more wait stage left, be patient: young Masha will change you.

  End of Act 4, remain offstage when the gunshot is fired, and wait for curtains and applause. Trepliov, you’ve taken your life.

  I lean my head against the glass. I don’t want a suicide for an ending. I don’t think it was.

  1 There could be something else going on here under the skin. Though his father contends Michael was most interested in making it in the theatre, he and others, including Michael’s cousin Sybille, have stated that Michael might have looked at the movies as a ‘fast track’. The nuance here is that having success in the movies is crass and was frowned upon. So perhaps Michael here, knowing his father is watching along with the whole world, is feeling sheepish. Shamefaced because he is appearing in a Hollywood movie and not even in a leading role, but as an uncredited hack. And then there is the fact of playing the part of a blond bimbo.

  Waldfriedhof

  THE TRAM PASSES OSTFRIEDHOF, then Tegerseher Platz. Waldfriedhof, the cemetery at the end of the line, is a thirty minute ride. The Bavariafilmstadt three stops before that. There’s a transit map by the sagging exit doors.