Berlin Finale (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Heinz Rein

  But nothing had happened. When their lungs had calmed, the silence had engulfed them entirely. They didn’t know how long they had crouched there when they got back up, and they had no time to think about it, their lives had just been returned to them, and required immediate decisions. They had left the garden and walked along a few streets. At Zeuthen Station only two carbide lamps were burning because of the electricity blackout, and beneath one of them Lassehn had looked into the woman’s face. It was almost motionless, the corners of her mouth fluttered slightly, but otherwise there was nothing in her face but courage and resolution.

  After that everything had gone smoothly. The journey on the steam train to Grünau and changing to the S-Bahn went without a hitch. In Schöneweide there was an interruption because of an air-raid warning, the usual evening flight of Mosquito bombers that forced them into the high-rise bunker at Schöneweide Station for an hour, but then there was nothing, they had done it.

  Lassehn had registered the details with excessive clarity: stepping with Lucie Wiegand into Klose’s back room, where Dr Böttcher, Wiegand and a few other men he doesn’t know are sitting, setting down the heavy cases, exhausted and infinitely happy, Wiegand leaping to his feet and pulling his wife to him with a delicate, gentle movement, the conversations falling silent all of a sudden and everyone looking only at the couple, embracing in silence for a few seconds, her head resting against his chest and Wiegand’s hands around her twitching back and reassuringly stroking her hair, the men turning away or busying themselves embarrassedly with something, Wiegand leading his wife to the sofa at last, asking questions and receiving answers, walking up to Lassehn and shaking his hand firmly, Lassehn feeling as though with that handshake he had been accepted into a community as a member deserving equal rights and equal respect, Lucie Wiegand, now that she knew she was in safety, losing her composure and weeping out all her past torments, a little man with a sea-lion moustache coming up to him, looking at him insistently for a long time, shaking his hand brusquely and saying, ‘Comrade’, then Klose, in his bluff way, bringing the scene to an end with a joke and everyone getting back to their business …

  Suddenly it occurs to Lassehn that he isn’t travelling on the S-Bahn to dream and follow memories, but that he has a goal and a task to fulfil on the way. The train crosses the Humboldthafen and pulls into Lehrter Station. Lassehn takes a few flyers out of his coat pocket, looks around carefully and slips them onto the seat beside him, then he leaves the compartment, immediately disappears into the crowd and boards another carriage. At Bellevue and Savignyplatz he repeats the manoeuvre, and everything goes wonderfully smoothly. When he leaves the train for good in Charlottenburg there are a few more flyers lying around.

  A soldier calls to him: ‘Hey, you’ve left your newspaper!’

  But Lassehn waves his words generously away. ‘I’ve read them, Comrade, you can keep them!’ After all, they’re meant for you, he adds to himself.

  As Lassehn leaves Charlottenburg Station and crosses Stuttgarter Platz, his thoughts run ahead of him, as if to show him the way. Now he must put a section of his life in order, or at least give it some kind of concrete meaning, it is no longer quite as urgent and important as it seemed two days before, but it still has to do with that bit of his life that is not entirely unimportant, and even though no one is interested in people’s destinies these days, since everyone is sufficiently preoccupied with themselves and no one has time to address his own destiny, being focused entirely on the problems of the moment that he is living through, even though amidst the general chaos any order would stand out like a calm, still patch of water amidst foaming waves, Lassehn still wants to try.

  As he goes down Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse again, he feels as if he walked here not exactly two days ago, but a long time in the past, because in those two days many crucial things have changed in him, and it is good that chance has granted him those two days of respite. If he had confronted Irmgard the day before yesterday, he would have done it like someone requesting help and indulgence, tottering along uncertainly and without a goal, and determined to take any opportunity to pull himself back up again. During these two days, however, he has not only found support and a goal, but also achieved a self-confidence that he had lacked for a very long time.

  Lassehn doesn’t even try to talk to Mrs Buschkamp, he doesn’t want anything to hold him up, neither does he have a plan in mind, he strides quickly down the hallway, glances at the door of the concierge’s lodge and resolutely climbs the stairs. The stairwell is as dark as a barn, the windows are boarded up with untreated planks, and sparse daylight pierces the cracks.

  Then he is standing outside the door to the flat, which bears only the sign ‘Niedermeyer’. For a moment bitterness wells up in Lassehn. As a rule, young women tend to be proud of their new names, but with Irmgard that doesn’t seem to be the case, she hasn’t yet considered it necessary to put up her new name, his name, on the door.

  For a few minutes Lassehn pauses outside the flat. This is the moment for which he has been waiting for a year and a half, the moment he has desperately yearned for, which sparkled like a bright star in the dark night, unattainably high above him, and which then became a distant shadow, fading until it could barely be perceived. This moment was a single goal, and was supposed to compensate him for all the suffering and misery, for all the harshness and cruelty of war, which cut him off from everything that made his life worth living, which suppressed all that was good and allowed all that was bad and evil to spill to the surface, this moment was supposed to let him forget his nights of torment, in which a nightmare filled with blood and filth, corpses and destruction rolled over his chest like an enormous weight, or in which despair squatted on him like a nightmare, making him hold his breath with horror, not daring to move. Just a few minutes previously he had thought he had dealt with the memory once and for all. But now it grabs him and trickles into his blood with painful sweetness, the memory of that night, when his inner self, which had almost died, fled from the desert of loneliness and despair into communion with the opposite sex, when he drowned for the first time in a woman’s blood, her body arching before him, drawing him in and violently taking possession of him, his consciousness extinguished leaving only warmth and softness, madness and intoxication. He remembered how weariness and new desire had come along, how lust and melting had followed one another, and everything had drowned again in the woman’s mouth and her body.

  Lassehn shakes the memory away and, like a swimmer rising to the surface with a few powerful thrusts, pushes the button of the doorbell violently three times. The sound of the bright bell brings him sharply back to the present.

  The door only opens a tiny crack. ‘Can I help you?’ a woman’s voice asks.

  The aunt, Lassehn thinks. He can’t make her out, as the stairwell is in complete darkness. ‘I’d like to speak to Mrs Lassehn,’ he says. Why don’t I say my wife? he thinks with surprise.

  ‘Who was that again?’ The woman’s voice is astonished and forbidding at the same time.

  ‘Mrs Lassehn,’ Lassehn repeats, and turns on the light on the stairs, having finally discovered the switch. ‘Mrs Irmgard Lassehn.’ My name doesn’t seem to be very familiar in this house, not even my wife’s aunt seems to know it. I’m not even sure my wife does. ‘She lives here, doesn’t she?’ he adds.

  ‘Cer-tain-ly, of course,’ the woman’s voice drawls. ‘Who are you?’

  Irmgard’s husband! Don’t you recognize me? Lassehn wants to say, but he says something quite different, words that force themselves upon him and seem to spring from some dark instinct. ‘I’ve brought a message from her husband.’

  The door is opened fully. ‘Please, come in.’

  Now Lassehn recognizes Mrs Niedermeyer, but it is more of an intellectual than a visual recognition. It is only the fact that this tall, slightly haggard woman with the thin hair parted in the middle and the dark horn-rimmed glasses is coming towards him here in the doorway of her flat that identi
fies her, in any other surroundings Lassehn wouldn’t have recognized her.

  ‘Is Mrs Lassehn at home?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Mrs Niedermeyer says, ‘she’s just lying down for a bit, as she’s on the early shift.’

  ‘I’m sorry …’, Lassehn says with an apologetic gesture. A curious feeling, walking along this corridor again.

  ‘Take a seat for a moment,’ Mrs Niedermyer says, and opens a door. ‘I’ll just call my niece.’

  Lassehn steps into the dining room and sits down on a chair. He is effectively visiting himself, he sits calmly here in the dining room and waits for his wife, even though he would have every right to go and see her in her bedroom. Lassehn shrugs to himself, he watches things developing with a mixture of excitement and indifference.

  His eye moves around the room as if searching for something. Everything is unchanged, almost unchanged, it’s all exactly in its place, even the picture of Hitler is still hanging on the wall, not a cheap little photograph hanging as a kind of alibi in the event of a visit from the block warden, but a big oil painting that shows the Führer in his loose brown coat with the collar open, without a cap and with that artfully contrived lock of hair over his forehead. Only the room itself reveals some small changes. There are a few cracks in the wall, stretching from the ceiling to the floor like thick, black brushstrokes, the stucco and plaster have fallen from the ceiling to reveal the bright-yellow straw of the false ceiling, the windows are nailed up with cardboard, and in one corner a pair of large air-raid suitcases stand ready to be grabbed. Lassehn gives a start when the door opens, but it isn’t Irmgard. ‘My niece will be right with you,’ Mrs Niedermeyer says. ‘I’ll turn on the radio, it should be the news in a moment.’

  Lassehn nods. ‘Very kind of you,’ he says.

  ‘We’re going through a crisis,’ Mrs Niedermeyer says almost with a hint of anxiety, ‘but we will survive it, because survive it we must.’

  You’ve borrowed that from Goebbels, Lassehn thinks and bites his lip to keep from smiling. ‘Yes, of course,’ he says.

  ‘Even in the seven-year war things looked very dangerous for Prussia,’ Mrs Niedermeyer continues, ‘even then the Russians had reached Berlin, but Prussia still won.’

  That’s not true, Lassehn thinks, Hubertusburg was at best a setback.

  ‘God is with us,’ Mrs Niedermeyer says, raising her voice, ‘he swept away the Tsarina Elisabeth …’

  Now it’s Roosevelt’s turn, Lassehn thinks, or you aren’t a real Nazi cow browsing in the field of the Völkischer Beobachter.

  ‘… and now the war criminal Roosevelt has died just in time. That is the hand of God!’

  Lassehn is by no means a believer, the notion of God has not found a place in his vision of the world, but there is still something in him that refuses to allow the name of God to be dragged down into the depths of such a discussion. He wants to leap up and throw his mockery like pepper in the woman’s face. He doesn’t do it, he can’t do it, but it is still fermenting away inside him too much for him to take everything calmly and without objecting.

  ‘You are leaving out one important difference, madam,’ he says. ‘Russia at the time was an absolutist state in which the Tsarina’s will, her sympathies and her antipathies, were all-defining, just as she decided on the merits of war or peace. The United States, on the other hand, is a democracy, and its president is merely the executive organ of the popular will, so Roosevelt’s death will not change anything about the politics of the United States, and hence the psychological effect of his death is greatly overestimated.’

  At Lassehn’s first words, Mrs Niedermeyer looks up in surprise. Admittedly her voice still wears an expression of conventional courtesy, but with the addition of a slightly sour trait like mildew. Someone casting doubt on an official interpretation of things is something so unusual that it almost takes her breath away, particularly since she isn’t prepared for critical objections. She doesn’t reply, and half turns towards the radio.

  ‘… time for the report on the current situation.

  The main event of the last twenty-four hours on our fronts is the major attack by the Soviets which began on Monday morning. On the lower Oder between Fürstenberg and Schwedt, and particularly on either side of Küstrin, severe fighting has broken out after heavy artillery fire with the oncoming Soviet infantry and tank squadrons. The main attacks are currently directed against the Seelow Heights. By conquering these the enemy will attempt to merge into a single bridgehead the previously separate deployment locations of Kienitz and Lebus. But the enemy has so far managed only local incursions, suffering very heavy losses.’

  The previous day’s Wehrmacht report had settled only for the general term of a major attack, but the complementary report is much more substantial. Lebus, Kienitz, Seelow, Lassehn knows the Oderbruch, these places are more than names to him, he has hiked through that area twice. Seelow is almost fifteen kilometres west of the Oder, from there it is only about thirty-five kilometres to the edge of the city and there is no chance of exploiting the space operationally or retreating, any backward step would give the Soviet tank armies further chances to advance and open the floodgates to their bridgeheads.

  The speaker’s voice emerges monotonously from the speaker, always uttering the phrases which have been used time and again, and which became threadbare a long time ago.

  ‘… our grenadiers, engineers and tank gunners resisted the charge with all their might …’

  ‘… only local incursions …’

  ‘… defensive battle with a constant exchange of thrust and counter-thrust …’

  ‘… some small breakthroughs …’

  ‘… our tanks thwarted the breach …’

  ‘… caught in the counter-attack …’

  From the western front the same tired phrases, the same stereotypical reports which, in spite of some supposed successes on the German side, allow the enemy to press deeper and deeper into the country.

  ‘… Saale estuary eastward thrusts have so far only had limited success …’

  ‘… pressure from the Americans between Bernburg and Chemnitz strong again …’

  ‘… at Bitterfeld the enemy is pushing towards the Freiberger Mulde …’

  ‘… Jena-Hainichen road small advances by the Americans …’

  ‘… failed attempts to advance any further into the territory around Brocken …’

  My God, Lassehn, who can listen to all of this without fury rising into his face like a hot flame, without his hands twitching for the speaker’s throat? Is there a single person in Germany who takes this literally? Haven’t they always said: attack averted, incursions thwarted, advances held, resilient defence, nimble avoidance and successful counter-attack? Who still believes any of that, when it’s no longer Tobruk and Benghazi, Leningrad and Kharkov, Caen and Le Havre, but Leipzig and Magdeburg, Frankfurt an der Oder and Stettin, Vienna and Bayreuth? Is there still a single person …

  Yes, there is such a person, she’s sitting opposite him, the one with the triangular badge of the NS Women’s League on her dried-up chest, which heaves with a sigh at every favourable-sounding phrase, as if the danger has been seen off because our grenadiers are resisting the Soviet attack at Küstrin with all their might, because our troops are bloodily repelling the assaults of our arched fronts between the Ems and the lower Weser.

  Lassehn would like to press his hands to his forehead in despair. He could understand someone – paralysed by horror – expecting disaster and willingly bowing their head to receive the annihilating blow, or someone dashing wildly into the fire to be consumed by the flames, but that someone – like this woman – should still be sitting there and sighing with relief goes beyond all comprehension, that is the true myth of the twentieth century.

  My God, Lassehn thinks in despair, and now this music, the ‘Glow-Worm Idyll’ by Paul Lincke, the German master of note-daubing … And I lived here for eight days!

  ‘This time the Bolshevik ass
ault will come to nothing,’ Mrs Niedermeyer says confidently, ‘our best troops are in good positions between the Oder and Berlin, our leaders expected the attack.’

  Lassehn can no longer contain himself.

  ‘I admire your short memory, madam,’ he says sarcastically.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Mrs Niedermeyer asks, slightly piqued.

  ‘Didn’t you take exactly the same tranquillizers before and after the last major Russian offensive?’ Lassehn asks. ‘I have the newspaper here, it’s the Völkischer Beobachter from December 1944, a famous war reporter wrote from the Vistula front:

  Hard work has been done since the end of the Bolshevik summer offensive. The result is a network of fortresses and anti-tank obstacles of a depth and extent that we have never known in the east.

  ‘And about the East Prussian front another propaganda corps man wrote:

  They are the best regiments ever seen in the east. The anti-tank ditches alone, which run up and down the hills on the East Prussian border territory, have a total length of many thousands of kilometres. The second Soviet offensive against East Prussia is coming. It will be an offensive without surprises.

  ‘On 16 January, four days after the start of the major offensive, Wehrmacht High Command established:

  The assault did not come as a surprise to our troops. The attacking Bolsheviks ran quickly into our defence zones.

  ‘But within only a few days the Russians were standing at the Oder and had encircled the whole of Eastern Prussia. Why should it be any different this time, madam?’

  While Lassehn speaks and unfolds the newspapers, Mrs Niedermeyer has risen to her feet and nervously moved some chairs back and forth. ‘This is mere pedantry. What are you trying to achieve, young man?’