by Heinz Rein
‘He’s by the pump on Fruchtstrasse, just on the corner, opposite the post office.’
‘Can’t he walk?’ Dr Böttcher asks, putting his revolver away and picking up his doctor’s jacket.
‘Walk?’ the man says. ‘He’s not walking any more, he’s had it. Just as he was about to fill his bucket it happened, a splinter flew through the air like a butterfly, except a bit harder, and that’s not the sort of thing a person’s head can take.’
‘Come on, we’ve got to go and get him,’ Dr Böttcher says. ‘Come with me, we may find a stretcher of some kind.’
‘You’d be better off digging a hole in the courtyard,’ says the man. ‘He’s dead as a doornail, you’re not going to wake him up again.’
‘Where is he?’ Wiegand asks.
‘I told you,’ the man says, ‘on the right around the corner near the post office. Had a good death, the fat fellow, one minute he was happy as a sandboy, the next he was gone. It’s how I would like to go myself.’
‘Come on,’ Dr Böttcher says, and pushes his way past the man with the leather jacket. ‘Hurry up!’
Lassehn, Wiegand, Schröter and Gregor follow the doctor and run across the courtyard and down the hallway.
‘Even you can’t bring him back to life,’ the man calls after them, ‘however fast you run, death is quicker. Sssssss, bang, and you’re gone.’
Bent-backed, the men run along Strasse Am Schlesischen Bahnhof and then turn right into Fruchtstrasse. They almost trip over a body.
‘That’s Klose,’ calls Lassehn, who is running immediately behind Dr Böttcher.
It is Klose, his legs are stretched out straight in front of him, and his torso leans, as if he is half resting, against the wall of a house, one shoulder slightly twisted, his eyes are unnaturally wide open, one hand is still firmly clamped to a bucket. A few metres away a few women stand by the pump, a man is pumping very quickly, no one looks up or around at the person lying on the step, no one makes a fuss about the fact that a person has just lost his life. In this orgy of destruction and annihilation death has become such an everyday event that their own lives are the only things they are concerned about.
Dr Böttcher kneels down beside Klose. He immediately uncovers the wound, a narrow trickle of blood runs from Klose’s right temple and drips over his jacket. The doctor examines him quickly and then, still crouching beside Klose, looks up.
Lassehn sees a hopeless flicker in Dr Böttcher’s eyes, sees his Adam’s apple springing from his collar and moving up and down.
‘Is he …’ Lassehn begins and looks anxiously at Dr Böttcher. Dr Böttcher doesn’t reply, he straightens slowly as if it is a great effort, bends over Klose and closes his eyes by resting his forefinger gently on the eyelids and pulling them gently down as if spreading a veil over the dead man’s last gaze.
For a few seconds the men stand in a tight group around the corpse. Above them the shells wail and whistle, bursting against the cobblestones around them and tearing lumps of stone from the buildings, a house opposite is on fire, blazing beams fall into the street and send sparks flying in all directions, the endless rattle of machine guns forces its way quite clearly from the east, soldiers run along the road with clanking bayonets, gas masks and canteens, their hobnailed boots crunch on the broken glass, a field gun stands on the corner of Mühlenstrasse and fires at short intervals, a dog, a little black and white brindle terrier, runs whining back and forth, it hops on three legs, the fourth drawn up closely to its body, it tries to creep over to the soldiers but is always irritably chased away, orderlies carry a few wounded men to a car that has stopped in the middle of the street with its engine running, somewhere on the tracks a locomotive lets off steam with a hiss, but the men stand and see nothing of that, they stand there without moving, without saying a word, staring at the ground.
Schröter is the first to move; taking long strides he runs along the middle of the road towards the ambulance, he talks to the driver and then takes a stretcher from the vehicle. Lassehn leaps over to him and gives him a hand, then they put Klose on the stretcher. They both act as if under some kind of compulsion, no one utters a word, their faces have stiffened into the masks of waxworks.
Above them rages the noise of battle, conflagrations blaze around them, smoke and haze billow through the streets, a rain of ash falls down on them like warm, grainy dust, but they slowly put one foot after another. When they have almost reached Klose’s house, a shell explodes in front of them. The blast throws Gregor to his knees, lumps of stone and iron splinters whirl around them and for several seconds everything is veiled in dust.
Lassehn is brushed by a splinter that slices open the skin of his forehead, his blood drips like red tears on the stretcher where Klose lies.
When Gregor is firmly back on his feet, they walk on and set the stretcher down in the hallway.
‘Wait here,’ Dr Böttcher says, and quickly crosses the courtyard with long, clumsy steps. A few minutes later he comes back carrying two spades and hands one of them to Wiegand. ‘Let’s both of us start,’ he says. ‘Come on!’
Dr Böttcher and Wiegand start digging in the narrow strip of earth in the courtyard, they throw up clod after clod, neither saying a word, their faces are tense and deeply serious, their eyes focused rigidly on the earth that is opening up deeper and deeper beneath their feet. Above the little rectangle formed by the walls of the houses there hangs a grey, overcast sky, gusts of wind violently drive black clouds of smoke, a heavy smell of burning penetrates the deep cavity of the courtyard, suffocating the smell of broken earth.
After a few minutes Lassehn and Schröter take over. Even now not a word is spoken, Lassehn and Schröter stand expectantly in front of Dr Böttcher and Wiegand and reach their hands out for the spades. All five now dig in turn, then they lay the dead man in the excavated grave.
They stand there bareheaded for another minute, Wiegand’s face twitching violently. The corners of Dr Böttcher’s mouth are drawn down and his eyes are half closed, Schröter’s hands are clenched into fists and his neck is craned, only Gregor’s face is calm and motionless, shadowed by an expression of painful resignation.
‘Our father which art in Heaven …’ he murmurs.
When he has finished, the men begin to fill the hole. The glowing missiles of the smoke mortars streak above them with eerie wails.
XIV
26 April
The battle for Berlin has reached a stage that will later be described as the Sodom and Gomorrah of a modern city. Dawn breaks, its pale, gloomy light seeps onto the sea of debris: a new day is beginning. The cannon will begin to sound, spreading death and ruin over the city, the planes are darting overhead again like antediluvian pterodactyls and striking at everything alive with their iron beaks, soldiers will again be driven into senseless battle, killed or mutilated, women, desperately concerned about their children, wander the rubble-strewn streets in search of milk and bread, and are mown down by death’s scythe. Millions of people go on cowering in cellars and underground tunnels, freezing, starving, feverish and terrified, buildings are split in two and fires eat through the streets, bridges sink like felled giants into the water of the rivers and canals, the first blossoms of spring are dusted with gunpowder and smoke, prayers, curses, screams, whimpering and death rattles rise into a sky that has pulled a dense wall of smoke over itself and the stars. Even though Berlin, the sea of rubble, has already collapsed into two zones, one part conquered by the Russians and one still defended by the Germans, the terrors for the population, which has already fled the fighting, are no smaller because the German artillery is firing, as it has been ordered to do, at its own city, and the German Luftwaffe is dropping bombs equally on the Bolshevik enemy and on the German national comrades that it was supposedly defending only a short time ago; but while there the last pitiful remains of the former tyrannical order are breathing their last amidst bloody chaos, here one can already make out the first signs of a new order, the first bread is being bake
d again and distributed from the trucks of the Red Army. But the Russian soldiers are not only liberators. Many of them are also looters and rapists.
This is all happening because a hysterical lunatic decided, in his urge to annihilate, ruthlessly to sacrifice the city, to postpone his own end by a few days and then ‘fall in a heroic attitude on the ruins of Berlin’. He cowers in his bunker and remains in contact via radio, telex and telephone with General Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of the Armed Forces, Artillery General Weidling, Military District Commander, Lieutenant-General Reymann, Combat Commander of Berlin, General Braun, Head of Army Intelligence, Field Marshal Schörner, Leader of Army Group Mitte, and General von Henrici, Leader of Army Group Weichsel. Even though the hopelessness of the situation becomes clearer with each new report – in Berlin the Russians have advanced to Gesundbrunnen, from the south to Tempelhof and Friedenau, from the west to Spandau and Charlottenburg, from the east to Silesian Station and Görlitz Station, the Reich Chancellery is under direct fire, around Berlin one division after another is being defeated, Rathenow, Wittenberg, Prenzlau and Stettin are being conquered by the Russians, Regensburg, Ingolstadt and Augsburg by the Americans, Bremen by the British – no one tries to stand up to the lunatic. Between hours of complete apathy and raging delirium he is still every ounce the Führer, he summons General Ritter von Greim from Rechlin in Mecklenburg, who is injured when his Fieseler-Storch plane lands on the Charlottenburger Chaussee, and says to him, ‘I called you because Göring has betrayed me’. He appoints him Supreme Commander of the Air Fleet and promotes him to Field Marshal, he orders and gets signatures, he appoints and dismisses, he receives delegates of troops fighting in Berlin and awards decorations, he moves flags about on a map of Berlin and the surrounding area and directs armies that no longer exist, he draws up a death contract with his confidant Martin Bormann and organizes rehearsals of their planned suicides. Goebbels, in his bunker under the old Reich Chancellery, has been seized by a compulsion to speak incessantly, his children sing the song about ‘Uncle Führer’, Bormann, who has moved from his bunker beneath the Post Ministry to the Führer’s bunker, writes in his diary and constantly enquires about the exact wording of the Führer’s statements, Eva Braun gets on with polishing her fingernails, moving around frequently and saying repeatedly, ‘It’s better for hundreds of thousands of others to die than that He is lost for Germany’.
After a restless night, continually agitated by detonations and the rattle of machine guns, in the early hours of the morning an infernal storm crashes down over the area between Silesian Station and Jannowitz Bridge. When the guns fall silent, the barking of the mortars begins and the rattle of machine guns gets closer. It is no longer just a single rising and falling sound, each shot is now an independent bang.
‘They’re getting closer,’ Wiegand says. ‘Do you hear the machine guns?’
‘Maybe the time has come,’ Schröter says, and paces uneasily back and forth. ‘I’d like to go out into the street to try and assess the situation.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Wiegand says. ‘Or do you want to be put in some kind of formation?’
‘Of course not,’ Schröter replies, ‘but sitting either here in the room or down in the cellar is driving me quite mad. At any rate I’ve had enough.’
‘We all feel like that,’ Dr Böttcher says, ‘but I’ve seen how they do it, Schröter. The military police patrol the streets like a column of dog catchers, and woe betide the man who looks in anyway fit to fight, they drag him off, and it doesn’t matter whether they have papers on them or not, they’re forced to be heroes, or hanged. It goes very quickly, a single derogatory word, a small betrayal, and the rope’s around their necks.’
‘That’s exactly how they treated so-called witches in the Middle Ages,’ Lassehn says. ‘Suspicion was enough …’
‘At least a witch trial was a legal process,’ Dr Böttcher replies, ‘of course it was very questionable, but there was still a court, there was even a book of laws, the Malleus Maleficarum, the judgment was announced by a committee, and besides, the witch trials were a few centuries ago, they were held in an atmosphere of profound superstition, but now, a hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man, in the twentieth century, in a state that organizes every aspect of our lives, which has pressed every part of our bourgeois existence into exact laws and which is now in its death throes, which disregards all of its own principles and is thrashing about furious in all directions like a deer that has just been shot at, now some lout with a few stars or braids on his epaulettes or his collar can make life-or-death decisions and, with a casual gesture, adds one more to the hecatomb of corpses he is standing on, without being answerable to anybody. We are in the very final stage of National Socialism; the systematic contempt for people is becoming barbarous nihilism, legal uncertainty is turning into absolute anarchy.’
‘What you just said is all completely true,’ Gregor says slowly, ‘it gets to the heart of the matter, but it is too intellectually felt, no, not felt, but grasped, because words are not capable of expressing what we feel. I am seized with a kind of impotent contempt, it makes me shudder …’
‘You are intellectually overbred,’ Wiegand says, ‘so that you can barely feel anything more than a kind of scientific or political revulsion, but no hot, searing rage, everything first passes through the filter of the intelligence.’
‘It would be worth discussing whether cool reason and hot hearts do not perhaps complement one another,’ Gregor says, ‘in fact whether they might not even be mutually dependent.’
‘Let’s not have any academic arguments,’ Dr Böttcher says, ‘perhaps with a Social Contract and a Communist Manifesto, first of all because this isn’t the time, and secondly because someone’s knocking at the door.’
Everyone listens.
Someone is knocking, three taps, short pause, then two.
‘That’s our sign,’ Wiegand says and gets to his feet. ‘Who could that be?’
‘You’ll see straight away if you open up,’ Schröter says with an inviting gesture.
Wiegand leaves the room and comes back a moment later with Lieutenant Tolksdorff.
Tolksdorff is somewhat breathless, his face is flushed, his mouth is slightly open and his lips are shivering. ‘Gentlemen,’ he says hastily, ‘you are in danger. The Russians are not far away, and …’
‘The Russians aren’t a danger for us,’ Schröter interrupts him abruptly.
‘I know that,’ the lieutenant replies. ‘Let me finish. The Russians are very close and that’s why the SS are combing all houses from top to bottom and dragging off all the men, they look like men possessed.’
‘You mean we can’t stay here?’ Dr Böttcher asks.
‘That’s how it is,’ Tolksdorff replies. ‘You are five healthy, sprightly men, and that looks damned suspicious. There’s only really one possibility …’
‘So where are the Russians?’ Schröter interrupts.
‘They’re advancing in three groups, one coming down Stralauer Allee and up Mühlenstrasse, the second up Revaler and Memeler Strasse, and the third group is coming up the railway tracks from Warschauer Bridge.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ Gregor says.
‘It matters a lot,’ Schröter disagrees. ‘Because if the Russians are already so close that they could be here at any minute … That’s how it is, Lieutenant, isn’t that right?’
‘That’s impossible to predict with any exactitude,’ the officer replies. ‘Apparently there’s violent resistance on Revaler Strasse and on Stralauer Allee, the Russians will only advance slowly, but the middle group, the one coming up along the railway cutting is faster, the demolition of Warschauer Bridge hasn’t halted them.’
‘And how far away are they? Do you have any idea?’ Schröter presses.
‘These discussions seem pointless to me,’ Dr Böttcher intervenes impatiently. ‘The lieutenant didn’t come here for a briefing. You said just now that th
ere was only one possibility, I assume you mean a possibility of keeping us safe from the SS hordes.’
Tolksdorff nods energetically. ‘Yes, yes. And that one possibility …’
‘… is to stay here and wait!’ Schröter intervenes.
‘No,’ the officer says firmly, with a patient gesture of his hand, ‘the SS will be here much sooner than the Russians, they’re only a few blocks away, on the right from here. No, the only possibility is for you to put on your Volkssturm armbands and join my company (what they now call a company). I think that’s your best protection.’
‘And what happens then?’ Schröter demands.
‘Everything else will emerge from the situation,’ the lieutenant replies. ‘In the streets you always have the possibility of disappearing into the bushes just before the Russians get here, and in all the confusion no one will notice, but here they’ve got you on a plate, and you could easily get shot. The SS here is led by a Hauptsturmführer, he seems possessed, I would never have thought that a person could be like that, and the fellow’s barely in his mid-twenties. I’ve never heard a word out of his mouth that wasn’t roared or hissed like an order, not a word that wasn’t ice-cold cynicism and bloody scorn …’ Tolksdorff shivers. ‘Do you want to find yourselves at the mercy of a monster like that?’
Schröter gesticulates excitedly. ‘Listen, I haven’t waited twelve years for freedom to be exposed to the shells and bullets out there, and to the orders of this SS officer.’
The lieutenant smiles. ‘Not every bullet hits its target,’ he says, and then becomes serious again. ‘But if you want to stay here … It was just a suggestion, a well-intended suggestion, gentlemen …’
‘We’ve got to decide quickly,’ Dr Böttcher says. ‘If the bloodhounds are already in the surrounding houses … Is there any point hiding in one of the flats?’
‘They kick in every door that isn’t open,’ Tolksdorff says.
‘And they steal stuff,’ Schröter adds.
