Berlin Finale (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Heinz Rein

  ‘Of course,’ Corporal Schumann replies. ‘My need for freedom has been completely filled, at least I didn’t feel a lack of it.’

  Ruppert throws his coat aside and is about to stand up, shaken convulsively with agitation. ‘Is that part of your freedom too, twelve-year-olds running around with rifles?’ he shouts.

  ‘Don’t talk twaddle, you old scarecrow,’ the corporal says contemptuously.

  Ruppert pushes himself up with both hands. ‘I have seen that with my own eyes, I swear on God’s name,’ he says, raising his voice, and turns back to Lassehn. ‘It was in Greifenberg in Silesia, a transport of women being taken from the prison in Jauer, on foot, of course, in the cold and snow, and twelve-year-old and fourteen-year-old Hitler youths with rifles were there as guards, and they shot a few of the women as well.’

  ‘Christ alive, Ruppert,’ the corporal says with a dismissive wave of the hand, ‘don’t get so het up about a few women, thieves, abortionists and all kinds of whores.’

  ‘No,’ Ruppert says furiously, ‘they weren’t criminals, they were political prisoners.’

  ‘And you’re getting worked up over riff-raff like that?’ Corporal Schumann asks, and laughs scornfully. ‘A shame they didn’t all cop it. I can imagine what sort of women they were, communists, race defilers, nuns, Jehovah’s witnesses and twentieth of July plotters, they’re worse than murderers and arsonists.’

  Ruppert’s face turns purple, and a vein throbs menacingly on his neck. ‘You stupid brat,’ he hisses between clenched teeth, ‘you’re still wet behind the ears.’

  ‘And you’re old, and still stupid,’ Schumann says dismissively. ‘Have you ever thought, Ruppert, that the best people are dying at the front, and you’re troubling your head over a few women?’

  ‘A few?’ Ruppert says furiously. ‘It was a few hundred.’

  ‘Either way,’ Schumann says, raising his hand in the air and letting it fall again. ‘Better off rid of them!’

  Ruppert tries to get to his feet. ‘You little whippersnapper …’

  Lassehn grabs his hand. ‘Calm down, Comrade,’ he says. ‘Lie down again.’

  ‘Leave me alone!’ Private Ruppert shouts, pulls away and is on his feet in an instant. ‘That was your freedom, Corporal Winfried Schumann,’ he shouts, and stands in front of Schumann with his legs apart, ‘striding about like a Great Mogul among the intimidated population by day, and at night taking one of their women to bed, a different one every night, as if everything belonged to you and you were allowed to do whatever you liked and everyone cowered away from you like dogs, that was your freedom!’

  ‘Damn it all, Ruppert, stop getting on my nerves!’ Schumann says calmly. ‘That was freedom for me, it was the only one I needed. Just a shame everything has ended up like this. Bad luck!’

  ‘You be quiet now, Ruppert,’ Tolksdorff intervenes. ‘Let’s not make life harder than it is already.’

  ‘Freedom is like mountain air,’ Dr Böttcher says, ‘by unanimous consensus, mountain air is purer and healthier, and yet the lowlander can’t simply endure it readily. When he stands on his balcony in the smoky city, he thinks he is breathing pure ozone. It’s exactly the same with you lads and freedom, you can’t take it, you have to get used to it first. Living the nomadic life as a mercenary isn’t freedom, my dear Corporal.’

  ‘But standing behind the counter in the cigar shop and pulling friendly faces for every Tom, Dick and Harry!’ Corporal Schumann mocks. ‘And always sleeping with the same woman, that’s freedom too! No thank you to dried fruit, to freedom that smells mouldy, like mothballs, like nappies … You’re boring conformists, you’re ossified, you don’t understand the new freedom at all!’

  Beside Dr Böttcher the tall, gaunt private stands up, the round shape of his head making his thin cheeks look particularly hollow. ‘Well, then let me tell you something too, you worldly-wise twenty-year-old philosopher, because you seem to identify freedom by following your nose,’ he says loudly, almost threateningly, ‘your freedom, which you are now mourning, stinks of blood and burning and swims in a sea of tears!’

  ‘Damn it, Schumann,’ says a young tank gunner beside the corporal, ‘you’re no match for the old ones. If we won the war they’d all be cock-a-hoop, they’d all want to cut themselves a slice of victory cake, even if it was baked on a funeral pyre.’

  ‘Yes,’ Schumann cuts in quickly, ‘now that we’re all up to our necks in shit, you suddenly discover your consciences, the stench of war suddenly rises into your sensitive noses. Is it so unusual for things to smell of blood and burning in a war?’

  ‘And why is there war?’ Schröter exclaims.

  ‘Because the others don’t want to let us live,’ the corporal replies, ‘because they envied us our rise to power. That much is clear …’

  ‘Is it also clear to you,’ Dr Böttcher says, ‘that the steps on which this rise occurred are made of hecatombs of corpses?’

  ‘Stop complaining all the time,’ Gregor says with a placatory hand gesture. ‘The corporal knows no better, he doesn’t know that even before the war his Führer said: “I will never grant the same right to other peoples as I do to the German. It is our task to subjugate other peoples. The German people are called upon to become the new ruling stratum in the world.”’

  ‘That’s completely fine,’ the corporal says.

  ‘Really?’ Gregor says, raising his eyebrows. ‘Do you think this is right too: “We need space that makes us independent of every political arrangement. In the east we need dominance as far as the Caucasus or Iran, in the west the French coast, Flanders and Holland. Above all we need Sweden and Norway.”’

  ‘I don’t know what objections you could have to that,’ the corporal says calmly, ‘those are all territories that have been fertilized for years with German blood, and which even today bear the mark of German culture. It is our right to rule these territories politically as well.’

  ‘The conquering expeditions of hordes of Teutonic nomads and the foundation of Hanseatic bank branches: is that what you call your right?’ Gregor calls excitedly.

  ‘Oh, give me a break,’ the corporal says, disgruntled. ‘You old people and us young people don’t understand each other any more, we probably never did. Because you old people have closed yourselves off to the new consciousness, because you always have reservations, because you’re trapped in your traditional ways of thinking, that’s why everything went wrong in the end.’

  ‘Since you seem to agree with the aims of your great Führer, don’t let me deprive you of some more of his remarks,’ Gregor says, clearly struggling to contain himself. ‘How, for example, do you like this one: “If we want to achieve this, I am willing to assume responsibility for the blood sacrifice of the whole of German youth. I will not hesitate to take the deaths of two or three million Germans on my conscience.”’

  ‘Where did you get that one from?’ the tank gunner asks.

  ‘From a book published in Switzerland five years ago, whose author is no less a figure than the President of the Senate, Dr Rauschning,’ Gregor replies. ‘Listen carefully, Corporal, and you too, young soldier. Your great Führer, the patron of all civilization and the great friend of German youth, also said the following: “If I send the bloom of German youth into the storm of steel of the coming war without feeling the slightest regret, do I not have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?” What do you have to say to that?’

  The corporal shrugs. ‘Adolf Hitler can’t be measured according to the standards of your conformist bourgeois morality,’ he says arrogantly. ‘He’s the right man, except that you old people … Well, see above!’

  ‘You still believe in him?’ Schröter asks.

  ‘Of course,’ the corporal replies quickly. ‘And why not? Because he’s run into difficulties?’

  ‘You idiot!’ Schröter says furiously. ‘Why has he run into difficulties? Have a think about that one.’

  Corporal Schumann waves
his hand casually and stretches out again.

  ‘You’ve run out of answers?’ Schröter asks. ‘All of a sudden your slobbering mouth is shut.’

  ‘Oh, just bugger off …’ the corporal says, and turns onto his side. ‘None of it matters a damn any more in any case.’

  The cellar sinks back into silence, with only the breathing of the men and the thin, flickering light of the candle.

  Tolksdorff sits on a case by the entrance to the cellar, his elbows propped on his knees and his chin resting in his hands, staring at the small, guttering flame of the Hindenburg light. Pale, gloomy, grey daylight shimmers through the cellar door, which has been blocked with a twisted, rusting iron grille. Outside the guns thunder at longer and shorter intervals, the mortars hiss, a roaring hail of steel comes down on the city, a volley gun, wailing and booming, rains its projectiles over Jannowitz Bridge, the falling shells shake the cellar and send dust and plaster up into the air like geysers.

  The blast from a shell falling nearby shoots deep into the cellar passageway and overturns the iron grille.

  The sleepers wake with a start. ‘Are the Russians here at last?’ one asks drowsily.

  ‘I heard a little birdie!’ says the young tank gunner lying next to Schumann.

  ‘Hellwig, check on the sentry and take over from him,’ Tolksdorff commands flatly.

  A young soldier gets to his feet straight away. ‘Yes, sir!’ As he lifts the iron grille to put it back in place, Lassehn jumps up to join him. ‘I’ll come outside with you,’ he says, ‘and get some fresh air.’

  They climb the broken steps of the cellar stairs and take over from the sentry, who is leaning in an alcove smoking a cigarette.

  ‘The Russkies are just over there,’ the sentry says, pointing at the ruins on Alexanderstrasse, from where the tracer fire from a machine gun sweeps low over the ground, whips the tarmac and bounces back up again.

  Lassehn and the young soldier stand in the alcove and look along the street. It is morning by now, but the flaming torches of the burning houses have formed a black wall of cloud that weighs heavy and dark over the bright blue of the spring sky.

  ‘It looks like Stalingrad,’ the young soldier says.

  ‘Yes,’ Lassehn says, ‘like Stalingrad. Curious how our thoughts keep returning to Stalingrad. Stalingrad, it’s as if the name is branded onto us …’

  The young soldier Hellwig looks Lassehn quizzically in the face. ‘Yes, Stalingrad.’ The words drop heavy from his lips. ‘Stalingrad, that gave us the first push, the crucial push, it threw us to the ground, psychically perhaps more than militarily, at the time we’d actually been beaten groggy, but we weren’t out for the count and got up again at seven or eight, we still thought we might have a chance at least to go the distance, but now …’

  ‘But now it’s the KO,’ Lassehn completes his sentence.

  ‘Yes, the KO.’

  ‘Not only of the war,’ Lassehn adds, ‘but of our whole existence.’

  The young soldier gulps violently, he pulls his coat tighter around his hips and leans against the wall with his eyes closed. Sharp, manly features are already appearing in his young, almost boyish face.

  ‘It’s all pointless,’ he says quietly, ‘sentry duty, the war, life generally, sometimes you feel like firing a bullet into your head. What’s going to become of us? Do you have a clue, Comrade?’

  Lassehn nods.

  ‘I do have a clue,’ he replies.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I mean what we can become, what we must become: human beings.’

  The young soldier laughs briefly. ‘After being reduced to animals, we’re supposed to become human beings? Never going to happen, Comrade. You can turn an animal into a creature that’s like a human being, but never an actual human being.’

  ‘Are you an animal, Comrade?’ Lassehn asks insistently.

  ‘I only exercise the functions of an animal, eating, drinking, digesting and sex, fight for life, shelter and warmth, that has swallowed up all our thoughts,’ the young soldier replies. ‘Those are the poles around which my whole life has been turning for years. Disgusting!’

  ‘What do you do for a living?’ Lassehn asks.

  The other man opens his eyes and looks gloomily at Lassehn. ‘A living? Machine-gunner, soldier, hero, aspiring mass-grave candidate.’

  ‘Seriously!’

  ‘That is serious!’

  ‘So how old are you?’

  ‘Supposedly I’m twenty-two, but I must be older, a lot older, our generation is old, ancient.’

  ‘Twenty-two?’ Lassehn asks. ‘And you’ve never had a job? Did you become a soldier straight from school?’

  ‘Yes, I even volunteered!’

  ‘Volunteered?’

  ‘Yes, volunteered, you’re amazed aren’t you? When I’d done my middle-school leaving exam and my labour service, I was just seventeen, and wanted to become a dentist. My old man even had an apprenticeship ready for me.’

  ‘And why didn’t you take the apprenticeship and volunteer instead?’

  ‘Because I had to!’

  ‘You had to? I thought you volunteered …’

  ‘I did,’ the young soldier says impatiently, ‘it sounds crazy, but it’s the truth. It’s like that everywhere, voluntary compulsion. Or haven’t you noticed that? Voluntary compulsion, with moral pressure or massive blackmail.’

  ‘You’ll have to explain it to me.’

  ‘There’s not much to explain,’ the young soldier replies. ‘When we’d done our year of labour service, the lieutenant turned up and delivered this big speech about the fatherland, a war that had been forced upon us and so on, and at the end he asked … Yes, not something like: who’s going to volunteer for the Wehrmacht?, but: is there anyone who doesn’t want to volunteer?’

  Lassehn nods. ‘So that’s how it was!’

  ‘Yes, exactly like that. Could you step forward and say: I’m not volunteering? You couldn’t, even if you wanted to. Well, and that’s how it was, you were half pushed, you half fell. And then the war impels you ruthlessly onward or backward or sideways, you’re only staggering now, you can clearly see the abyss in front of you, very clearly, but you’re too tired, too apathetic, too submissive to pull yourself back or change direction, you go on obeying because it’s the easiest thing.’

  ‘The war that was supposed to bring you freedom made you its prisoner,’ Lassehn says.

  The young soldier nods. ‘That’s exactly how it is. It was never so clear to me as when I had to guard some prisoners for a few days; in essence I had no more freedom of movement than the prisoners did, I was chained to an order just as they were, and actually the only difference was that I was in front of the barbed wire and they were behind it.’

  ‘Although the terms in front of and behind are only relative,’ Lassehn adds.

  The young soldier nods again. ‘Of course, you’re right, Comrade. The concept of inescapability has finally rendered me completely apathetic, you obey, march, fight, and it no longer matters in the slightest whether it’s at Lake Ilmen or the Müggelsee, in the Valdai mountains or the Rehberge, whether I’m patrolling the streets of Minsk or on sentry duty here in a bombed house in Berlin right now … What’s the name of the street?’

  ‘Stralauer Strasse,’ Lassehn replies.

  ‘… on Stralauer Strasse, Berlin, house number unknown, the Russians are two hundred or three hundred metres away … Damn it, we’ve been dead for ages!’ He stands up and strikes his chest. ‘Everything in here died long ago, even if the heart is still beating and the lungs still breathing, we’re just wandering around like shades. You too, Comrade!’

  He’s reached the point where we were standing until a week ago, Lassehn thinks, he’s still trying to discern a meaning in the frenzy of meaninglessness, he is still looking for a spot of light in the thicket of darkness, he hasn’t yet found the goal that lifts him above his own small self. He takes two cigarettes from his pocket. ‘Have a smoke first, Hellwig. That’s
your name, isn’t it?’

  The young soldier nods and flips open a lighter. ‘How do you know … Oh yes, the lieutenant addressed me by my name. Allow me to introduce myself: Erhard Hellwig from Poggendorf in the district of Greifswald, twenty-two years old, machine gunner by profession. You?’

  Lassehn replies.

  ‘Music student?’ says the young soldier. ‘You’re a music student as much as I’m a dentist. It’s utter crap! What that soldier was saying just now, that stogie salesman from Neukölln, had something going for it.’

  ‘You mean …’

  ‘Yes, all we’ve ever done is military service. Work? We don’t know it at all. A goal? We haven’t got one. I understand that old guy very well, he wants to stand behind his counter like others at their workbench or threshing machine. We alone, if we are ever to survive this war, will be standing there with empty hands that can do nothing but shoot, load, stab, aim, drop bombs. We have learned to fire a sticky bomb, put a belt into a machine gun, we know what a wind correction angle is, and a dismounted line of sight, but what else do we know, and what else have we learned? One day we come back and only then are we supposed to start learning?’ He shakes his head.

  ‘How do you imagine your future life?’ Lassehn asks.

  ‘Not at all,’ young Private Hellwig replies, ‘I can’t imagine anything at all, I just let myself drift, like a piece of wood in water. Perhaps I’ll fetch up somewhere, then it’ll be fine, but perhaps the stream will lead me to the sea, and I’ll float around for the rest of my life, that’s fine too, but perhaps a bullet will get me first, and I’m all right with that as well. I’m all right with everything. Anyone who survives this war will have done it by himself, an old soldier once said to me. That’s exactly so.’

  ‘No, you mustn’t think that way,’ Lassehn says helplessly, and he himself feels that his objection is weak and ineffectual.

  ‘You mustn’t,’ the young soldier says and laughs briefly. ‘Let me tell you something, Comrade,’ he goes on seriously. ‘I’m just frightened.’