1

I’ve forgotten what my grandmother was wearing the time that nasty word “Asia” got her back on her feet. Why she of all people should be the first to come to mind I can’t say; during her lifetime she was never pushy. I remember all her dresses: the brown one with the crocheted collar, which she wore on Christmas and all family birthdays, her black silk blouse, the checkered apron and the knitted black mottled sweater she wore on winter days while sitting by the stove perusing the Landsberg Gazette. Yet for this trip she had nothing suitable to wear—and this is not just my memory playing tricks with me. Her little button-up boots were useful, though. They hung suspended at the ends of her too short, slightly crooked legs, always two centimeters above the floor, even when she was sitting on the edge of an air-raid cot, even when the floor was nothing but hard earth, as it was on that April day I have chosen to recall here. The bomber squadrons which now passed overhead during broad daylight on their way to Berlin were already out of earshot. Someone had pushed open the door of the air-raid shelter, and in the bright triangle of sunlight at the entrance, three steps from the dangling button-up boots of my grandmother, stood a pair of knee-high black military boots, and in them an SS officer, whose blond brain had registered every single word my grandmother had uttered during the long air-raid alarm: “No, no, I’m not budging from here, I don’t care if they kill me, one old woman more or less won’t matter.” “What?” said the SS officer. “Tired of living? You’d rather fall into the hands of those Asian hordes? Don’t you know that the Russians lop women’s breasts right off?”

That brought my grandmother wheezing to her feet. “Oh God,” she said, “what has humanity done to deserve this?” “Are you starting up again!” bellowed my grandfather. Now I can see them clearly, walking into the courtyard and taking up their positions alongside our handcart: Grandmother in her fine black coat, on her head the light and dark brown striped kerchief which my children still wore when they had a sore throat. She leans with her right hand against the back cross beam of the handcart. Grandfather, wearing a cap with earflaps and a herringbone jacket, is posted next to the drawbar. Time is short, the night is drawing near, closing in along with the enemy, albeit from different directions: night from the west and the enemy from the east. In the south, where they meet and where lies the small town of Nauen, flames rage against the sky. We imagine we can decipher the fiery script; the writing on the sky seems clear and spells out: Go west.

But first we must search for my mother. She is forever disappearing when it’s time to move on; she wants to go back and must go on. On occasion, both urges are equally strong. At such moments, she invents pretexts and runs away, saying, I’ll hang myself; and my brother and I, still dwelling in the realm where such words are taken literally, run into the small forest where my mother has no business being, nor do we wish to have any business there; we catch each other gazing at the treetops, we avoid looking at each other, voicing unutterable speculations is impossible anyway. We also keep silent when my mother, who is getting bonier and thinner with each passing week, comes up from the village, throws a small sack of flour on the handcart, and reproaches us: What did you think you were doing running around and making everyone crazy with worry? And who’s going to get the farmers to cough up some food if not me?

She hitches herself to the front of the cart, my brother and I push from behind, the sky provides eerie fireworks, and once again I hear that delicate sound as the humdrum train Reality veers off the tracks and races crazily out of control right into the wildest “unreality,” and I am shaken with laughter, the impropriety of which I find deeply offensive.

The only thing is, I can’t convince anyone that I’m not laughing at us, God forbid, us settled, proper, respectable people in the two-story house next to the poplar tree, us colorful peep-show people in the vinegar pot; Mannikin, mannikin, timpe te / Flounder, flounder in the sea / My old Missis Ilsebill / Will not have it as I will. But none of us had wanted to become emperor, or Pope for that matter, and most certainly not God. One was quite content selling flour and butter fat and sour pickles and malt coffee in the store downstairs, the other to learn English vocabulary at the table with the black oilcloth and glance from time to time at the town and the river, which lay there quite still and in their proper places and never awakened in me the desire to leave them. With unwavering determination my little brother put together ever-new odd constructions with his Erector set and then insisted on setting them in one senseless motion or another with the aid of twine and wheels, while upstairs in her kitchen, my grandmother made the kind of home fries with onions and marjoram which disappeared from the face of the earth when she died, and my grandfather hung the tar wire up on the window lock, took off his blue cobbler’s apron, and cut a dozen fine notches into each crust of bread on the wooden cutting board at the kitchen table, so that his toothless gums could chew it.

No, I don’t know why they put us in the vinegar pot, and I don’t know for the life of me why that makes me laugh, even though my uncle asks me suspiciously time and again from his place at the head of the second handcart in our tiny caravan: I’d like to know what’s so funny here. Even though I understand how disappointed someone must be that the fear of being laughed at doesn’t even subside once one has finally been promoted to a position of confidentiality in one’s firm. Even though I would have liked to do him the favor of assuring him that I was laughing at myself, I was a bad liar and I distinctly felt that I was absent, although any one of those figures leaning against the wind in the darkness could easily have been mistaken for me. You can’t see yourself when you’re lost within yourself, but I saw all of us just as I see us today, as if someone had lifted me out of my shell and set me down next to it with the command: Take a good look!

That’s what I did, but I didn’t like what I saw.

I saw us straying from the country road, groping about in the darkness on side paths and, finally, coming upon a tree-lined road leading toward a gate, a secluded estate, and a crooked, slightly shaky man who was limping to the stables in the middle of the night. He was not given to wondering at anything and so addressed the desperate, exhausted little troop in his particular, indifferent manner: Well, folks, Sodom and Gomorrah? Never mind. There’s always room in the smallest cabin for a happy, loving couple.

The man is not so bright, my mother said uneasily, as we followed Kalle across the courtyard, and my grandfather, who never said much, declared with satisfaction, He is pretty crazy in his head. And so he was. Kalle called my grandfather boss, he who had held no higher rank in his lifetime than that of private in the Kaiser’s infantry regiment, cobbler’s apprentice under Herr Lebuse in Bromberg, and Signalman for the German Reich in the administrative district of Frankfurt (Oder). Boss, said Kalle, it’s best if you take that cubbyhole back there in the corner. He then disappeared, whistling, “One more drop for the road. Oh, just one more drop for the road . . .” But the people sleeping in the bunk beds had already downed their ration of tea for the night, and the inevitable liverwurst sandwiches had been handed out as well, judging from the smell. I tried to block my nose with my arm while sleeping. My grandfather, who was almost deaf, began saying his prayers at full volume as he did every night, but when he reached “and forgive us our trespasses,” my grandmother shouted into his ear that he was disturbing the others, whereupon they started quarreling. Everyone throughout the hall could hear them, whereas up until then their old creaky wooden beds had been their only witness, along with the black framed likeness of an angel with the inscription: “Even when hope’s last anchor pulls away, do not despair!”

Kalle woke us at daybreak. “I ‘spect you’ll be knowin’ how to man a horse ‘n buggy?” he asked my uncle. “Because Herr Volk, what is the owner hereabouts, wants to move on with bag and baggage, but who’ll drive the oxcart with the feed bags?” “Me,” said my uncle, and he stood fast, even when my aunt nagged repeatedly that oxen were dangerous animals and why should he risk his hide for strangers . . . “Shut your mouth!” he snapped. “And how else are you gonna get all your junk away from here?” We were all allowed to climb aboard and our handcart was lashed to the rear stanchion. “Fine and dandy,” said Kalle, “just don’t think that the oxen will be quicker than your handcart.” Herr Volk showed up in person to hire his new coachman with a handshake; he wore a hunting hat, a loden coat, and knickerbockers. And Frau Volk came to bestow a kind and cultured word on the women who now, in one way or another, numbered among her domestics, but I didn’t like her because she called me by my first name without asking and allowed her dachshund bitch, Suzie, to sniff at our legs, which presumably reeked of liverwurst sandwiches. My aunt could see now that these were high-class people; my uncle wouldn’t have gone into service with some nobody anyway. Then the shooting began right behind us and we headed off at a quick pace. “God takes care of his own”, said my grandmother.

The night before, however, I had dreamed for the last time that recurring child’s dream: I’m not my parents’ child at all, the babies got mixed up and I belong to the shopkeeper Rambow in Friedrichstadt, who is much too clever to openly claim his rights, although he has seen through it all and has measures in reserve, so that I’m ultimately forced to stay out of the street where he lies in wait for me in the doorway of his shop, lollipops in hand. That night in my dream, I had been able to tell him point-blank that I had lost all fear of him, even the memory of that fear of him, that his power over me was at an end, and from then on, I would come to his shop every day and pick up two bars of chocolate. Rambow the shopkeeper had meekly accepted my conditions.

He was finished, without a doubt, for he was no longer needed. The babies hadn’t been mixed up, but I was no longer myself either. I would never forget when the stranger who had taken hold of me since and did with me as he pleased had entered me. It was on that cold January morning, when I was hurrying out of my town toward Kustrin on board a truck, greatly surprised at how gray indeed was that town in which I had always found all the light and all the colors I needed. Then someone inside me said slowly and clearly, You’ll never see this again.

My horror was indescribable. The sentence was irreversible. All I could do was keep that which I knew to myself, truthfully and faithfully; watch the ebb and flow of rumors and hopes swell and fall; carry on for the time being, which I owed the others, to say what they wanted me to say. But the stranger in me ate at my insides and grew, and possibly he would soon refuse to obey in my stead. Already he had begun to nudge me from time to time, and the others were casting sidelong glances in my direction. Now she’s laughing again. If we only knew what at.

2

This is supposed to be a report on liberation, the hour of liberation, and I thought, Nothing is easier than that. That hour has been clearly focused in my mind’s eye all these years, it has lain ready and waiting, fully completed in my memory. And even if there have been reasons to let it lie until now, twenty-five years should surely have erased, or at least faded, those reasons. I need only say the word and the machine will start running, and everything will appear on the paper as if of its own accord—a series of accurate, highly defined pictures. Against all expectations, I got caught up in the question of what clothes my grandmother was wearing on the road, at which point I happened upon that stranger who, one day, had turned me into herself and now has become yet another, pronouncing other sentences, and ultimately I must accept that the series of images will not add up to anything, memory is not a photo album, and liberation depends not only on a date and the coincidental movements of the Allied troops but also on certain difficult and prolonged movements within oneself. And while time may erase reasons, it also continuously creates new ones, rendering rather more difficult the selection of one particular hour; the need arises to specify what one has been liberated from, and if one is conscientious, perhaps to what purpose as well. Which brings to mind the passing of a childhood fear, the shopkeeper Rainbow, who surely was a respectable man, and so one searches for a new approach, which only succeeds in bringing one a little closer and no more. The passing of my fear of low-flying fighter planes. You made your bed, now lie in it, as Kalle would say if he were still alive, but I assume he is dead, like so many of the cast of characters (yes, death erases reasons).

Dead like Wilhelm Grund, the foreman, after the strafers shot him in the belly. That’s how I saw my first corpse at the age of sixteen; rather late for those years, I must say. (I can’t count the infant I handed in a stiff bundle from a truck to a refugee woman; I didn’t see him, I only heard his mother scream and ran away.) Chance had it that Wilhelm Grund was lying there instead of me, for pure chance alone had occupied my uncle with a sick horse in the barn that morning, so that we weren’t ahead of the others heading toward the country road alongside Grund’s oxcart as usual. Here, I had to say to myself, was also where we should have been, and not where it was safe, although we could hear the gunfire, and the fifteen horses were wild with fear. I have been afraid of horses ever since. But what I have feared even more ever since that moment are the faces of people forced to see what no person should have to see. The young farmhand Gerhard Grund had such a face as he burst through the barn door, managed a few steps, and then collapsed: Herr Volk, what have they done to my father!

He was my age. His father lay in the dust at the side of the road next to his oxen, eyes staring upward, one could say heavenward if one absolutely insisted. I saw that nothing could lower that gaze, not his wife’s wailing or the whining of his three other children. This time around, they forgot to tell us that this was not a sight for us children. “Quick,” said Herr Volk. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
They would have grabbed me the same way they grabbed the corpse by the shoulders and legs and dragged him to the edge of the woods. Just as the tarpaulins from the granary of the estate served as his coffin, so would they have served any of us, myself included. I, too, would have gone to the grave without words and without song, just like Wilhelm Grund the farmhand. Their wailing would have followed me down, and then they would have pushed on like us, because we couldn’t stay. For a long time they would have had no desire to speak, just as we remained silent, and then they would have had to ask themselves what they could do to stay alive themselves, and they would have torn off large birch branches, just as we did now, and covered the handcarts with them, as if the foreign pilots would let themselves be fooled by a little wandering birch grove. Everything, everything would be like now, only I would no longer be one of them. And the difference which was everything to me meant hardly anything to most of the others here. Gerhard Grund was already sitting in his father’s seat and drove the oxen forward with his very whip, and Herr Volk nodded to him: “Good boy. Your father died a soldier’s death.”

I didn’t really believe this. It wasn’t the way a soldier’s death had been described in the textbooks and newspapers, and I told that authority with whom I was continuously in touch and whom I labeled with the name of God—albeit against my own scruples and reservations—that, in my opinion, a man and father of four children did not deserve an end such as this. War is war, said Herr Volk, and certainly it was and had to be, yet I claimed that this deviated from the ideal of death for Fuhrer and Reich, and I didn’t ask whom my mother meant when she hugged Frau Grund and said aloud, “Damn them. Those damned criminals.”

Since I happened to be on guard at the time, it was my job to report by whistle signal the next series of attacks, two American fighters. Just as I had figured, the birch grove came to a halt clearly visible from afar and easy prey on the desolate country road. Everything that had legs jumped out of the handcarts and threw itself in the ditch, myself included. The only difference was that this time around I did not bury my head in the sand but lay on my back and continued eating my sandwich. I did not want to die and I certainly was not up to defying death and I knew fear better than I cared to.

But one does not die twice in one day. I wanted to see the one who dared shoot at me, for I had the odd idea that in every plane there sat a few individual people. First I saw the white stars under the wings, but then, as they broke away for a new approach, the helmet-covered heads of the pilots and, finally, even the naked white spots of their faces. Prisoners I had seen, but this was the attacking enemy face to face; I knew that I was supposed to hate him and it seemed unnatural that I found myself wondering for the space of a second whether they were having fun with whatever they were doing. They soon stopped, though.

When we got back to the wagons, one of our oxen, the one they called Heinrich, sank to its knees. Blood spurted from its throat. My uncle and grandfather unharnessed it. My grandfather, who had stood alongside the dead Wilhelm Grund without uttering a word, now hurled curses from his toothless mouth. “The innocent creature,” he said hoarsely. “These bastards, damned, confounded dogs, every one of them.” I was afraid he might begin to cry and hoped he would get everything off his chest by cursing. I forced myself to look at the animal for an entire minute. It couldn’ be reproach that I detected in its gaze, so why did I feel guilty? Herr Volk handed his hunting rifle to my uncle and pointed to a spot behind the ox’s ear. We were sent away. At the sound of the shot, I looked back. The ox dropped heavily onto its side. All evening the women were occupied with cooking the meat. By the time we sat in the straw eating the broth, it was already dark. Kalle, who had bitterly complained about being hungry, greedily slurped from his bowl, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and began to sing croakingly with contentment, “All dogs bite, all dogs bite, but only hot dogs get bitten . . ,” “To hell with you, you crazy fella,” my grandfather went at him furiously. Kalle let himself drop onto the straw and stuck his head under his jacket.

3

One need not be afraid when everyone else is afraid. To know this is certainly liberating, but liberation was still to come, and I want to record what today’s memory is prepared to yield on the subject. It was the morning of the fifth of May, a beautiful day, and once more panic broke out when we heard that we were encircled by Soviet armored tank troops. Then word came down: By forced march to Schwerin, where the Americans are, and anyone who was still capable of asking himself questions would have had to find it quite strange how everyone was surging forward toward that enemy which had been after our lives for days now. Of all that was now still possible I found nothing desirable, or even bearable, for that matter, but the world stubbornly refused to end and we were not prepared to cope after a messed-up end of the world. Therefore I understood the horrific words uttered by one woman when told that the miracle weapon longed for by the Fuhrer could only exterminate everyone, both the enemy and the Germans. Let them go ahead and use it, is what she said.

We moved past the last houses of the village along a sandy road. A soldier was washing up at a pump next to a red Mecklenburg farmhouse. He stood there, legs apart, with the sleeves of his white undershirt rolled up, and called out to us, “The Fuhrer is dead,” the same way one says, “Nice weather today.” I was more stunned at his tone of voice than at the realization that the man was speaking the truth.

I trudged on alongside our cart, heard the coachmen’s hoarse shouts, the groaning of the exhausted horses, saw the small fires by the side of the road wherein smoldered the papers of the officers of the Wehrmacht, saw heaps of guns and antitank grenade launchers sprouting ghostlike from the ditches, saw typewriters, suitcases, radios, and all manner of precious war equipment senselessly lining our way, and could not help recalling the sound of that sentence over and over again, which, instead of being one everyday sentence among others, should, I felt, have echoed frightfully between Heaven and earth.

Then came the paper. The street was suddenly flooded with paper; they were still throwing it out of the Wehrmacht vehicles in wild anger—forms, induction orders, files, proceedings, documents from the headquarters of a military district, banal routine letters as well as secret commando affairs, and the statistics of the dead fallen from doubly secured safes, whose contents piqued no one’s curiosity now that they lay thrown at our feet. As if there were something repulsive about the paper trash, I did not stoop to pick up a page either, which I felt sorry about later. I did, however, catch the canned food which a truck driver threw to me. The swing of his arm reminded me of the movement, often performed, with which, in the summer of ’39, I had thrown cigarette packs onto the dusty convoys which rolled eastward past our house, day and night. In the six-year interim I had stopped being a child; summer was coming again, but I had no idea how I would spend it.

The supply convoy of a Wehrmacht unit had been abandoned by its escort on a side road. All those who passed by took as much as they could carry. The order of the column dissolved, many were beside themselves, where before out of fear, now out of greed. Only Kalle laughed, dragging a large block of butter to our cart, clapping his hands, and shouting happily, “Well, I’ll be damned! Look at them getting all worked up!”

Then we saw the prisoners from the concentration camp. The rumor that the Oranienburgers were being driven right behind us had haunted us like a ghost. The suspicion that we were fleeing from them as well did not occur to me back then. They stood at the edge of the forest and gazed questioningly at us. We could have given them a sign that the air was clear, but nobody did. Cautiously, they approached the street. They looked different from all the people I had seen up to then, and I wasn’t surprised that we automatically shrank back from them. But it betrayed us, this shrinking back, it showed that, in spite of what we protested to each other and ourselves, we knew. All we unhappy ones who had been driven away from all our possessions, from our farms and our manors, from our shops and musty bedrooms and brightly polished parlors with the picture of the Fuhrer on the wall—we knew: these people, who had been declared animals and who were now slowly coming toward us to take revenge—we had dropped them. Now the ragged would put on our clothes and stick their bloody feet in our shoes, now the starved would seize hold of the Hour and the sausage we had just snatched. And to my horror I felt, It is just, and I was horrified to feel that it was just, and knew for a fraction of a second that we were guilty. I forgot it again.

The prisoners pounced not on the bread but on the guns by the side of the road. They loaded up on ammunition, crossed the road without paying any attention to us, struggled up the opposite slope, and mounted sentry there.

Silently, they looked down at us. I couldn’t bear looking at them. Why don’t they scream, I thought, or shoot into the air, or shoot at us, goddamnit! But they stood there peacefully, I saw that some of them were reeling and could barely bring themselves to hold their guns and stand up. Perhaps they had been praying for this moment day and night. I couldn’t help them and they couldn’t help me; I didn’t understand them and I didn’t need them, and everything about them was completely foreign to me.

There came a call from the front that everybody except the drivers should dismount. This was an order. A deep breath went through the convoy, for this could mean only one thing: the final steps toward freedom lay ahead. Before we could move on, the Polish drivers jumped off, coiled the reins around the stanchion of the wagon, put the whip on the seat, formed a small squad, and set about going back, eastward. Herr Volk, immediately turning a bluish-red color, blocked their way. At first he spoke quietly to them, but soon he began to scream. Conspiracy, foul play, refusal to work, he shouted. That’s when I saw a Polish migrant worker push aside a German estate farmer. Now the world had truly turned topsy-turvy, only Herr Volk hadn’t noticed yet; he automatically reached for his whip, but his lash was stopped in midair, someone was holding his arm, the whip dropped to the ground and the Poles walked on. His hand pressed against his heart, Herr Volk leaned heavily against the cart and let himself be comforted by his thin-lipped wife and the silly dachshund Suzie, while Kalle railed at him from above, shouting, Bastard, bastard. The French people, who stayed with us, called out greetings to the departing Poles, who understood those greetings no more than I did, but understood their sound, and so did I, and it hurt being so strictly excluded from their shouting, waving, and the tossing of their caps, from their joy and their language. But it had to be that way. The world consisted of the victors and the defeated. The former were free to express their emotions. The latter—us—had to lock them inside ourselves from now on. The enemy should not see us weak.

There he was, by the way. I would have preferred a fire-breathing dragon to this light Jeep with its gumchewing driver and the three casual officers who, out of bottomless condescension, had not even uncovered their holsters. I tried to make an expressionless face and look right through them, and told myself that their unconstrained laughter, their clean uniforms, their indifferent glances, the whole damned victor’s pose had probably been ordered for our special humiliation.

The people around me began to hide watches and rings. I, too, took my watch off my wrist and carelessly put it in my coat pocket. The guard at the end of the line, a lanky, hulking man beneath an impossible steel helmet, which had made us burst out laughing whenever we saw it in the newsreels, pointed out with one hand to the few people carrying arms where to throw their weapons, while his other hand frisked us civilians with a few firm, routine police motions. Petrified with indignation but secretly proud that they believed me capable of carrying a weapon, I let myself be searched. At which point my overworked sentry routinely asked, “Your watch?” So he wanted my watch, the victor, but he didn’t get it, for I succeeded in fooling him with the statement that the other one, “your comrade,” his brother officer, had already pocketed it. I escaped unscathed as far as the watch was concerned, at which point my heightened sense of hearing signaled once more the rising sound of an airplane engine. Despite the fact that this was no longer any of my business, I kept an eye on its approach route out of habit and threw myself to the ground by reflex as it swooped down; once more the horrid dark shadow flitting quickly across grass and trees, once more the atrocious sound of bullets pounding into soil. Still? I thought to myself in astonishment, realizing that one can get used to the feeling of being out of danger in a second. With malicious glee I saw American artillerymen bringing an American gun into position and firing it at an American plane, which hurriedly zoomed up and disappeared beyond the forest.

Now, one should be capable of saying how it felt when it became quiet. I stayed put for a while behind the tree. I believe I didn’t care about the fact that, from that minute on, possibly no bomb or MG shrapnel would ever again be dropped down on me. I wasn’t curious as to what would happen now. I didn’t know what use there was for a dragon once it stops breathing fire. I had no idea how the horned Siegfried is supposed to act if the dragon asks him for his watch rather than gobbling him up, hair and hide. I didn’t feel like watching how Herr Siegfried and Herr Dragon would get along as private citizens. And I certainly didn’t feel like going to the Americans in the occupied mansions for every bucket of water, and I most definitely didn’t feel like entering into a fight with black-haired Lieutenant Davidson from Ohio, at the end of which I saw myself obliged to declare that now my pride absolutely demanded that I hate him.

And I felt even less up to the talk with the concentration-camp prisoner who sat with us by the fire at night wearing a pair of bent wire-frame spectacles and mentioned in passing the word “Communism” as if it were a permitted, household word such as “hatred” or “war” or “extermination.” No. And least of all did I feel like knowing about the sadness and the dismay which were in his voice when he asked us, “Where, then, have you lived all these years?”

I didn’t feel up to liberation. I was lying under my tree, all was quiet. I was lost and I reflected that I wanted to make a note of the branches against that very beautiful May sky. Then my lanky, off-duty sergeant came up the slope, a squealing German girl hanging on each arm. All three moved in the direction of the mansion, and finally I had a reason to turn away a little and cry.