by Heinz Rein
‘Don’t talk so much,’ the Gestapo officer interrupts him gruffly, and flicks through his military passbook. ‘Is that all?’ he asks. ‘This is my indispensability certificate,’ Lassehn replies, and hands him the pink piece of paper.
The Gestapo officer reads it through and opens the passbook again. ‘What’s your name?’ he says immediately.
‘It’s all in there,’ Lassehn replies. It’s lucky that Dr Böttcher insisted on my learning the contents of the papers by heart, he thinks. Good papers aren’t enough on their own, he said, you also have to know their content very precisely, or do you think the bloodhounds aren’t aware that lots of fake papers, or even real papers, fall into the wrong hands?
‘Answer my question!’ the Gestapo officer orders.
‘Horst Winter,’ Lassehn says.
‘When were you born?’
‘18 May 1920, in Strasburg, Uckermark.’
‘Where is your time book?’
‘The company has it.’
‘Which company?’
‘It’s all in the document,’ Lassehn says with feigned impatience.
‘Which company?’ the Gestapo officer insists.
‘Argus Engines in Reinickendorf.’
The Gestapo officer growls something to himself and closes the passbook. ‘Clear off,’ he says irritably, and gives Lassehn back the passbook and the document, then he walks along the platform with a questing look and climbs down the stairs to platform E, where a train to Mahlsdorf is just pulling in.
Lassehn has passed the test, and he is seized by a feeling half of pride and half of relief, like the one he felt after doing his school-leaving certificate. He looks at his watch and establishes that he still has plenty of time, he stays away from the crowd and only now does he see where he is. He is standing on interchange platform D of Ostkreuz S-Bahn station, which rises like the central gallery of a theatre above the vista of railway tracks that seems to have been poured into the middle of the cityscape and is surrounded by houses in all directions, the side rows are formed by the twin curves of the Ringbahn leading to platforms A and B, the stalls are the two platforms for trains to Erkner and Hahsldorf, the railway tracks and the sidings, then it spreads out towards Warsaw Bridge, before running eastward for two four-track stretches that lead out of the city.
Lassehn stops by a noticeboard with a single weathered, tattered poster hanging from it, and starts reading, more out of boredom than interest.
Announcement.
On the orders of the Führer, in agreement with the Reich Minister and the Head of the Reich Chancellery, the Reich Minister of the Interior and the Director of the Party Chancellery it is hereby decreed:
I. Drumhead Courts Martial are to be instituted in Reich Defence Districts.
II. The Drumhead Court Martial consists of a criminal judge as chairman as well as a political leader of the NSDAP and an officer of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen SS or the police as assessors.
III. Drumhead Courts Martial are responsible for all crimes through which German fighting power or determination to fight is endangered.
IV. The outcome of the Drumhead Court Martial may be the death sentence, acquittal or a transfer to the ordinary judiciary. Confirmation is required from the Reich Defence Commissioner, who will immediately determine the time and manner of enforcement. If the Reich Defence Commissioner is impossible to contact and immediate enforcement is unavoidable, prosecuting counsel will assume responsibility for the task.
That’s another real Nazi law, Lassehn thinks, all so much waffle. What does ‘endangering German fighting power or determination to fight’ mean? A dismissive remark, neglect to pass on information, refusal to dig a trench, failure to use a weapon? And if the Reich Defence Minister is unavailable – and how often will he not be? – then the judge is also an executioner, and no appeal procedure is provided for.
‘So, hasn’t your bad uncle done anything for you?’ a voice crows suddenly beside Lassehn.
Lassehn looks to the side and smiles at the little man, who stands grinning beside him. ‘There you are again,’ he says. ‘Speed isn’t sorcery.’
‘… said the Mosquito bomber and flew from England to Berlin and back in a few hours,’ the little man adds, and pushes himself through a gap in the human wall. ‘Here comes the next train. Let’s get aboard, come on.’
This time getting onto the train is quite straightforward, it isn’t too crowded.
Lassehn leans against the wall of the train between the seats and the door, the little man stands next to him and looks carefully into his face. ‘Your papers must be perfectly in order,’ he says, ‘or that fellow wouldn’t have let you go. Or maybe not?’
‘Of course they’re in order,’ Lassehn replies confidently. ‘Did you doubt it?’
The little man shrugs. ‘With young lads like you …’ He doesn’t finish his sentence, and clicks his fingers a few times. ‘There are all kinds of soldiers on the move. Or maybe not?’
‘On the move?’ Lassehn asks.
‘Come on, don’t be so slow,’ the little man says and nudges Lassehn with his shoulder. ‘They’ve run away, not from the enemy, but from their own units, they’ve fled the swastika, they have no desire to die a hero’s death at the eleventh hour.’
Of course, I’m not the only one, Lassehn thinks, and looks out of the window. For a second he has a view of the Rummelsburger See with the bleak-looking jetties that stick out into the murky water like toothless black stumps, then the train crosses Stralauer Allee with the Osthafen, its giant cranes and the coal depots, and immediately after that he is crossing the big Spree Bridge with a dull rumble.
‘You’d rather think than speak,’ the little man says. ‘Such people must exist. What do you do for a living?’
‘I’m a music student,’ Lassehn answers absently. ‘Don’t we change here?’
The little man nods and looks quizzically at Lassehn. ‘Music student?’ he asks as they get out and walk to the other side of the platform. ‘Does such a thing exist in total war?’
Lassehn thinks of his new papers. ‘You asked my profession,’ he replies, ‘not what I’m working at now.’
‘So, what are you doing now?’ the little man asks.
‘I’m doing labour service at Argus,’ Lassehn replies with some indignation. ‘Is there anything else you want to know?’
The little man laughs. ‘You’re as sensitive as a virgin at her first time,’ he giggles. ‘You’ll have to wean yourself off that one, my friend, these days you need a hide like the shell of a tortoise that everything bounces off. Or maybe not?’
Lassehn leaves his answer dangling.
‘I’ve become completely insensitive,’ the little man goes on, ‘if it doesn’t actually pierce the skin I don’t feel it, I don’t let it get to me.’
‘Not everyone can do that,’ Lassehn disagrees, ‘it’s a question of temperament.’
‘Nonsense,’ the little man says contemptuously. ‘You’re a queer fellow if you still have feelings after six years of war. Feelings are a luxury, we can’t afford that kind of thing, with our poor health. Or maybe not?’
‘You mean …’
‘Listen to me, music man,’ the little man continues benevolently. ‘Just now, when I got out of that sweat-room of ours, an old man was run over, on the corner of Pettenkoferstrasse. Do you think a single soul cared that an old man was lying in the road with blood pouring over his face and white beard? “Why didn’t the old fool look where he was going?” a woman said as she passed. And another murmured, “What was he doing round here anyway?” They all gave him a wide berth.’
‘And what did you say?’ Lassehn asks.
‘Nothing at all,’ the little man replies calmly, ‘but what I thought was: one more food card down. And so partly by way of consolation I added: maybe the old man would have been killed tonight anyway when the Mosquitoes pay their evening visit. That’s just how it is these days. Or maybe not?’
Lassehn breathes heavily. ‘D
id the old man die on the spot?’
‘I don’t know,’ the little man says casually, ‘I have no time to worry about such things. You know, I’m glad if I get home before the warning. These days everyone’s next. Or maybe not?’
Lassehn shakes his head wearily.
‘Now you’re probably thinking: Christ, what kind of beast have we got here. And perhaps I really am, I could sometimes spit in my own face, but if you want to emerge more or less safe and sound in the middle of all this brown shit, that’s how you have to be. Or maybe not?’
Lassehn is growing tired of his companion’s uninterrupted chit-chat, he just shrugs and looks at the sparse greenery of Treptow Park, which reaches the edge of the S-Bahn line. Treptow – the name awakens memories of his childhood, the door opens hesitantly onto a time that seems worlds away. Treptow, it sounds like a gentle, melancholy tune that one might hum in memory of a loved one who had passed away, and who had suddenly reappeared in all their majestic grandeur.
‘Do you live in Eichwalde?’ the little man presses stubbornly.
Lassehn irritably shakes the question away, he tries to find a pretext for getting rid of the little man, but nothing occurs to him so he frowns forbiddingly, he wants to cling to his memory undisturbed. Treptow meant Zenner’s beer garden, the observatory and the Plänterwald, it meant the abbey, the big playground and the Altes Eierhaus, and it meant the carp pond, the Hellas rowing club and the Spree tunnel; Treptow was surging, foaming life. On wide expanses of green the working people of Berlin camped out, sleeping, eating, chatting, playing, laughing, cursing, singing, playing music. Under a cloud of cries, squeals, cheers, shouts, giggles, among the outspread blankets on which the families sat as if on islands, naked children tumbled around, skimpily dressed girls with swaying hips strutted about, dignified men strolled in serious dark suits. With a bright sun shining down on everything, Treptow, that is a scrap of youth, carefree and protected, a Sunday symphony of joy and expectation, of open light-heartedness. There were the giant pots and cups carved in stone, as if made for all eternity. There were the bags of cakes which contained a favourite for everyone, sponge cake for his father, millefeuille for his mother, Bienenstich for him. There were the thrilling trips on the steamer to the Liebesinsel, one of the few occasions when his father came out of himself and gave a sense that he too had once been young. Then at last there was the big Wednesday event, Treptow in flames, huge fireworks, stars shooting up from the earth, opening up in every colour of the rainbow and magically creating whole pictures against the dark background of the sky, exploding and sinking back into the night.
Lassehn is overwhelmed by emotion, it chokes him and forces his thoughts back into the past. Here he is, standing in the middle of the unsettled, cursing crowd on a platform of Treptow S-Bahn station, the terrible backdrop of war rises all around him, but Lassehn sees none of it. The present is blanked out by the past, his mother’s kindly face appears in front of him, the happy little wrinkles constantly around her eyes and mouth, which she could never quite banish even if she seemed to be angry. The serious, almost always rather severe face of his father appears in front of him, that face that seldom relaxed because it wasn’t given to taking life easy. Now he studies the features of Ursula, his mother’s younger sister, who was only a few years older than him and had lived at their house for a while. Her girlish face appears in front of him, clean and serene, under a shock of dark-blonde hair with a centre parting; and he sees himself, a slightly shy and awkward boy in whom his father’s gloom predominates, his mother’s cheerful nature shining through only rarely, in whom quite early on everything becomes music which drowns out anything else …
‘Watch out, the Grünau train is coming,’ the little man says and nudges him.
Lassehn surfaces back to the present, he stands close to the little man, because he is still a little dazed. It’s strange how we manage to encapsulate the past and carry it around with us, without realizing, like a photograph in a wallet, and how it only takes a chance association to bring it back to life and allow the characters to step living from the picture.
‘You were miles away,’ the little man says when they have boarded the train and the doors have closed automatically.
Lassehn nods. ‘Treptow brings back all kinds of memories from my youth,’ he says.
The little man laughs brightly. ‘Good heavens, you’re talking about youth? Are you an old man or something, to talk about youth? You can’t be more than twenty-five. Or maybe not?’
Lassehn looks over little man’s shoulder, the train is just coming around the bend, and running along the track that goes to Görlitz. ‘You’re right, and then again you aren’t right,’ he says slowly, ‘in years I am still a young man, but my youth is still far behind me, it is over once and for all, there has been too much in between, and nothing remains but memories.’ My parents lie in a mass grave, he continues in his mind, music is a distant dream, women a disappointment …
The little man rests a hand on his arm. ‘You seem to have been through all sorts of things,’ he says. ‘You owe it all to our Führer. But I won’t ask you any more questions, you don’t seem to like it.’
The train is now running along the railway embankment amidst wide expanses of allotments and anti-aircraft placements, sports grounds and new housing estates. Here the city has transformed its severe traits, but it no longer bears the cautiously smiling features of petty-bourgeois ambition, proletarian industry and the carefree delight in the body, the war has brutally invaded, debasing the sports grounds for military purposes. Beyond the allotments the silhouette of the city, with its factory chimneys, cranes, towers and gasometers, stands out against the darkening sky of evening.
When the train pulls in to Baumschulenweg Station, the little man says, ‘Ruins wherever you spit, and more and more of it going to hell every day. And still it won’t end …’
‘Not until …’ Until those dogs themselves have been brought low, Lassehn wants to say, but he holds back the words, the little man might be genuine, in fact he probably is, but Klose has dinned into him that he should never be lured into saying anything that might bring him under any kind of suspicion. The activity of the undercover operator, Klose said, doesn’t consist of constantly opening your trap, because your word goes up in ineffectual smoke in an instant, but your flyer raises doubts, it penetrates people’s certainties and gives heart to the waverers.
The little man is about to launch into a new question when the door is thrown open and a few young men noisily enter the compartment, wearing blue-grey uniforms and ski-caps and the red, white and red swastika armbands of the Hitler Youth, their caps set crookedly on their ears. They immediately fill the carriage with their conversations, less concerned with the words than with the volume, and they constantly laugh, but there is no real merriment spilling from their young mouths, only the desire to draw attention at all costs, the awareness that they are allowed to be loud and noisy without being told off. The uniform, which on the one hand commits them to strict discipline, on the other grants them an unhampered coarseness which everyone else has to put up with. They look around to check on the impression that their behaviour is making, not caring whether that impression is a good or a bad one, whether they are prompting admiration or revulsion, their only concern is to exploit this rare opportunity to rise above the mass and to test their superiority over everyone not wearing a uniform.
Lassehn whispers to the little man to ask what sort of young people these are, he has never encountered the uniform before.
The little man laughs. ‘These are the new German heroes of the Luftwaffe,’ he answers, not keeping his voice down, ‘a mixture of heroism and pant-shitting cowardice. Or maybe not?’
‘Are you talking about us?’ asks one of the Luftwaffe assistants, coming and standing menacingly in front of the little man.
‘I don’t have to say a word to you, you brat,’ the little man says dismissively, and turns back to Lassehn. ‘What time is it, by the way
?’
Lassehn tells him and tries to look as indifferent as possible. The new conflict that is already beginning is unpleasant, he wants to have nothing to do with it, he just doesn’t want his mission to be endangered by anything.
When the train pulls in to Schöneweide Station shortly afterwards, and the little man gets off, saying, ‘See you, pal,’ he sighs with relief.
XVIII
16 April, 5.30 p.m.
A dark-grey limousine is driving along Köpenicker Strasse, constantly accelerating, ignoring the simplest rules of the highway code, overtaking on the right or driving up to the far-left side of the opposite carriageway, not stopping for the outstretched arm of the traffic policeman or for red traffic lights.
Past Schlesiches Tor the city begins to thin out, it shakes the grim expression from its features, running it through with the hopeful green of the parks and the rust-red and slate grey of the trees. When the car reaches the straight section of Strasse Am Treptower Park it starts driving at great speed, roaring along the S-Bahn underpass at Treptow Station, darting past the old trees of the park like shadows, and then turns into Köpenicker Landstrasse. For a few minutes it gets caught up on Berliner Strasse in Niederschöneweide, where the city once again contracts into a compact mass and lies like a clenched fist in the open expanse of the landscape. But where once dark smoke rose from the chimneys into the sky, and everything was covered in the sulphurous fumes of the chemical industry and the sickly vapour of treated hops, there is now deadly silence and a smell of burning, only rows of ruins and half-derelict workshops, Carbonated Drinks Company, German Brass Factory, Kali Chemicals, Shultheiss-Patzenhofer Brewery, Telephone and Cable Works.
At Schöneweide Station, where a tank is buried by the freight outlet, its gun barrel extending menacingly towards the east, the car turns into Grünauer Strasse and then dashes, engine wailing, under the railway bridge of the branch line to Spindlersfeld, and into the main eastward artery, Berlin’s longest road, the Adlergestell. The car devours the straight segment of that road, racing against the S-Bahn, which runs to the right beside the railway embankment, a red, green and yellow flash clattering over the gaps in the track with a hum of electric engines, then following the Adlergestell as it pulls away from the S-Bahn with a slight northward turn.
