Crabwalk Page 15

  On 10 September 1949, when the dismantling of the grove of honor and the relocation of the corpses and urns was as good as complete, the mayor wrote on his de-Nazified letterhead to the regional government, revealing that this operation had been less costly: “Expenditures of 6,096.75 marks are hereby reported to the regional government for purposes of reimbursement…”

  One also discovers that the “residual ashes of Wilhelm Gustloff” could not be transferred to the municipal burial ground: “According to the statement of master mason Kröpelin, G. s urn is located in the foundation of the stone memorial. Removal of the urn is not possible at this time…”

  The removal did not take place until the early fifties, shortly before the youth hostel was built and named in memory of the antifascist Kurt Bürger, recently deceased. Around this time, the U-boat hero Marinesko had already spent three years in Siberia. Right after S-/5 sailed into the Finnish harbor of Turku, and the crew went ashore, trouble began for the man who wanted to be celebrated as a hero. Although the NKVD file and the misconduct that had not yet been dealt with in court continued to hang over him, he did not cease, whether cold sober or disinhibited by vodka, to demand recognition for his deeds. Although S-13 was designated a Distinguished Red Banner Boat, and all the crew members received the Order of the War for the Fatherland to pin on their chests, as well another medal, that of the Red Flag, whose motif was the star, hammer, and sickle, Aleksandr Marinesko was not declared a Hero of the Soviet Union. Worse yet, the official bulletins of the Baltic Red Banner Fleet continued to make absolutely no mention of the sinking of the twenty-five-thousand-ton Wilhelm Gustloff, and not a word testified to the rapid sinking of the General von Steuben.

  It was as if the tubes in the bow and stern of the submarine had fired phantom torpedoes at nonexistent targets. The twelve thousand or more dead registered to his account didn't count. Was the naval high command embarrassed because of the only roughly calculable number of drowned children, women, and severely wounded soldiers? Or had Marineskos successes got lost in the intoxication of victory that characterized the last months of the war, with their surfeit of heroic deeds? But now his loud insistence could not be ignored. Nothing could deter him from playing up his successes whenever the occasion presented itself. He became a nuisance.

  In September 1945 he was relieved of the command of his submarine, and soon thereafter he was degraded to the rank of lieutenant. In October he was discharged from the Soviet navy. The justification given for this three-stage dishonorable discharge was “an indifferent and negligent attitude toward his duties.”

  When his application to the merchant marine was rejected — on the pretext that he was nearsighted in one eye — Marinesko found employment as the administrator of a supply depot responsible for the distribution of building materials. Before long he saw fit to accuse the director of the collective — with insufficient evidence — of having taken bribes, paid kickbacks to Party functionaries, and trafficked in materials, whereupon Marinesko came under suspicion of violating the law himself by being too generous in giving away only slightly damaged building materials. A special court sentenced him to three years at hard labor. He was deported to Kolyma on the East Siberian Sea, a place that belonged to the Gulag Archipelago, whose daily routine has been written about. Not until two years after Stalin's death did he put Siberia behind him, in a topographical sense. He came back ill. But it wasn't until the early sixties that the damaged U-boat hero was rehabilitated. He was restored to the rank of captain third class, retired and entitled to a pension.

  Now I must repeat myself by reverting to something already mentioned. That is why I write here: when Stalin's death was reported in the East and West, I saw Mother cry. She even lit candles. Eight years old at the time, I was standing at the kitchen table and didn't have to be in school, having just got over the measles or something else that itched, was peeling potatoes, which were supposed to go on the table with margarine and curd cheese, and saw Mother crying behind burning candles over Stalin's death. Potatoes, candles, and tears were scarce in those days. Throughout my childhood on Lehmstrasse, and as long as I was in secondary school in Schwerin, I never saw her cry again. When Mother had cried her eyes out, her face took on an absent expression, her I'm-not-home look, which Aunt Jenny remembered from their early years. At the carpentry shop on Langfuhr's Eisenstrasse they would comment, “Tulla's gone and bashed in the windows again.”

  After she had cried long enough for the death of the great comrade Stalin, and then had no expression for a while, we ate the boiled potatoes she had fixed, with curd cheese and a pat of margarine.

  Around this time Mother took her masters test and soon became the leader of a carpentry brigade in the Schwerin furniture plant, which produced bedroom furniture according to quota, with instructions to deliver it to the Soviet Union in the spirit of friendship between our peoples. Blurry though her image may have been at the time, to tell the truth, Mother has remained a Stalinist to this day, though when I bring this up in an argument, she tries to downplay her hero to appease his critics: “He was just a human being, you know…”

  And around this time, while Marinesko remained at the mercy of the Siberian climate and conditions in the Soviet penal camps, while Mother kept faith with Stalin, and I took pride in my Young Pioneers' neckerchief,

  David Frankfurter, cured in the penitentiary of his supposedly chronic osteomyelitis, was making himself useful as an official in Israel s defense ministry. In the meantime he had married. Later two children came along.

  And something else happened during these years: Hedwig Gustloff, the widow of the murdered Wilhelm, left Schwerin. From then on she lived west of the border separating the two Germanys, in Lübeck. The glazed-brick house at 14 Sebastian-Bach-Strasse, which the couple built shortly before the murder, had been expropriated soon after the war. I saw a picture of the building, a typical solid single-family house, on the Internet. My son went so far as to post on his Web site the demand that the illegally expropriated house be turned into a “Gustloff Museum” and opened to the interested public. Far beyond Schwerin the need existed for expertly displayed factual information. For all he cared, a bronze plaque could be mounted to the left of the window of the enclosed balcony, announcing that from 1945 to 1951 the first prime minister of Mecklenburg, a certain Wilhelm Höcker, had lived in the expropriated house. He would have no objection to including wording such as “after the crushing of Hitler-fascism.” That was a fact, after all, as the martyrs murder remained a fact.

  My son was clever at positioning pictures and icons, tables and documents. Thus one could view on his Web site not only the front but also the back of the mighty granite boulder erected on the southern shore of Lake Schwerin. He had gone to the trouble of providing an enlargement of the chiseled inscription that was barely legible on the photograph showing the entire stone from the rear. Three lines, one above the other: lived for the movement — murdered by a jew — died for germany.

  Since the middle line not only suppressed the name of the perpetrator but explicitly characterized Jews generically as murderers, it could be assumed that in zeroing in on this detail — the interpretation offered later — Konny revealed that he had overcome his fixation on the historical David Frankfurter and wanted to demonstrate his hatred for “Jewry in toto.”

  Yet this explanation, as well as further searches for a motive, hardly shed any light on what occurred on the afternoon of 20 April 1997. In front of the youth hostel, closed at this time of year and seemingly lifeless, something happened that was not predestined yet played itself out on the mossy foundation of the former memorial hall as if rehearsed.

  Whatever had induced the virtual David to respond to a vague invitation and travel, in the flesh, by train all the way from Karlsruhe, where the eighteen-year-old schoolboy lived with his parents, the eldest of three sons? And what had got into Konny to make him seek an actual encounter that would convert into a reality a bosom-enemy relationship that had developed
over the Internet and was essentially a fiction? The invitation to the meeting had been slipped so surreptitiously into the rubbish that constituted their communication that it could have been picked up only by the intimate adversary who signed himself David.

  Once the youth hostel was rejected as a meeting place, the two of them accepted a compromise. They would meet where the martyr had been born. A good question for a quiz, because my son's Web site named neither a city, nor a street, nor a house number. Nonetheless, the reference presented no problem to someone familiar with the material; and David, like Konny, who called himself Wilhelm online, knew even the most banal details of the damned Gustloff story. As would become apparent during the visit, he even knew that the secondary school Wilhelm Gustloff had attended and that had been named for him after his death was called Peace School since GDR times. My son not only respected his adversary's comprehensive expertise; he also admired him for being a “perfectionist.”

  And so they met, on a beautiful spring day, on Martinstrasse, in front of number 2, at the corner of Wismarsche Strasse. David had accepted without comment the particular date Wilhelm chose. Their meeting took place in front of a recently restored stucco facade, intended to make one forget the years and years of decay. They are said to have greeted each other with a handshake, after which David introduced himself to the tall, lanky Konrad Pokriefke as David Stremplin.

  The next item on the agenda was a stroll through the town, on Konny s suggestion. During their visit to the Schelfstadt, whose name recalls the reeds that once grew thickly along the banks of the lake on which it borders, the visitor was even shown, as if it were a special attraction, the brick shack with a tar-paper roof, located in a rear courtyard on Lehmstrasse, where Mother and I lived after the war; he was also shown the still crumbling and the already renovated half-timber houses in that picturesque quarter. Konny led David to all the sites and secret hiding places of my youth, as unerringly as though they had been his own.

  After St. Nicholas's, the Schelfstadt church, which they viewed from the inside and outside, they of course had to take in the castle on Castle Island. There was no rush. My son made no attempt to hurry things along. He even suggested that they visit the museum next to the castle, but his guest showed no interest, grew impatient, was now intent on seeing the site in front of the youth hostel.

  Nonetheless they took a break during their stroll through the town. At a Italian ice cream cafe each of them downed a good-sized portion of gelato. As the host, Konny picked up the tab. And David Stremplin is said to have talked amiably, but with ironic detachment, about his parents, a nuclear physicist and a music teacher. I am willing to bet that my son said not a word about his father and mother; but no doubt the tale of his grandmother's miraculous survival was important enough to be brought up.

  Then the two bosom enemies, unequal in height — David tended more toward the horizontal, and was a head shorter — made their way through the castle park, passed the grinding mill, walked along Schlossgarten-allee, which had become an exclusive address, with villas spruced up in gleaming white, and then by way of Waldschulweg approached the scene of the crime, a fairly level area under trees. Initially there was no tension. David Stremplin is said to have praised the view of the lake. If a ball and rackets had been lying on the Ping-Pong table in front of the youth hostel, they might have played; Konny and David were both passionate about table tennis and would hardly have missed such an opportunity. Perhaps a quick volley over the net would have proved relaxing, and the afternoon might have taken a different course.

  Then they were standing on historic ground, so to speak. Yet even the moss-covered blocks of granite and the fragment of the boulder with the chiseled rune and traces of a name did not provide sufficient pretext for a quarrel. The two even laughed in two-part harmony at a squirrel leaping from beech tree to beech tree. Not until they were standing on the foundation of the old hall of honor, and my son explained to his guest exactly where the large memorial stone had stood — behind the youth hostel, which had not been there in those days — only then, when he indicated the sight line for the granite boulder, and recited the martyrs name on the front of the stone and then, word for word, the three lines inscribed on the back, did David Stremplin allegedly say, “As a Jew, I have only this to say,” whereupon he spat three times on the mossy foundation — thereby, as my son later testified, “desecrating” the memorial site.

  Right after that, shots were fired. In spite of the sunny day, Konny was wearing a parka. From one of its roomy pockets, the one on the right, he pulled the weapon and fired four times. It was a Russian-made pistol. The first shot struck the stomach, the following ones the head. David Stremplin tumbled backward without a word. Later my son made a point of saying that he had struck his victim as many times as the Jew Frankfurter, long ago in Davos. And like him, he went to the nearest telephone booth, dialed the emergency number, and reported his crime. Without returning to the scene, he set out for the police station, where he turned himself in with the words, “I fired because I am a German.”

  On his way there, he saw a patrol car and an ambulance approaching, blue lights flashing. But help arrived too late for David Stremplin.

  * * *

  He, who claims to know me, contends that I don't know my own flesh and blood. Maybe it is true that I had no access to his innermost torture chambers. That I was not smart enough to decipher my son's secrets. Not until the trial began did I get closer to Konny — if not an arm's length away, at least within shouting distance — but I couldn't bring myself to call out to him on the witness stand helpful things like, “Your father stands by you!” or, “Don't lecture them, son. Cut it short!”

  That's probably why a certain someone insists on calling me a “Johnny-come-lately father.” Everything that I try to crabwalk away from, or admit to in relative proximity to the truth, or reveal as if under duress, comes out, as he sees it, “after the fact and from a guilty conscience.”

  And now that all my efforts have been stamped too late, he is combing through my messy piles of documents, this hodgepodge of note cards, and wants to know what became of Mother's fox stole. This postscript I still owe him seems particularly important to him, the boss; he tells me not to withhold any of the details I know, but to tell the story of Tulla's fox blow by blow, no matter how I hate that now unfashionable piece of clothing.

  It's true. Mother owned one from the beginning, and still wears it. She was about sixteen, a streetcar conductor with a two-pointed cap and a block of tickets, doing her shift on lines 5 and 2, when, at the Hochstriess stop, she received a gift from a corporal who is another of my possible fathers: the complete fox pelt, already prepared by the furrier. “He came back wounded from the Arctic front, and now he was in Oliva on leave to recuperate,” was and is her shorthand depiction of the man who may have fathered me, for neither the sinister Harry Liebe-nau nor some immature Luftwaffe auxiliary could have come up with the idea of giving Mother a fox stole.

  It was with this warm stole around her neck that she boarded the Gustloff when the Pokriefkes were allowed to get on. Shortly after the ship cast off, when the pregnant girl, leaning on a dreadfully young naval recruit, ventured onto the ice-coated sundeck, taking one step at a time, she was wearing the fur. The fox was close at hand, next to the life jacket, as she lay in the maternity ward and Dr. Richter gave her an injection, right after the third torpedo struck and the contractions began. And with nothing else — the rucksack was left behind — but the life jacket buckled on and the fox around her neck, Mother — who wasn't Mother yet — scrambled into the lifeboat and claims she had reached for the fox before the life jacket.

  That was how she came on board the torpedo boat Löwe, shoeless but warmed by the fur. And only during the birth, which began soon afterward, that is, at the very minute when the Gustloff sank, first the bow and then capsizing to the port side, whereupon the cry of the countless thousands blended with my first cry, only then did the fur again lie next to her, rol
led up. But when she left the torpedo boat in Kolberg, her hair having turned white at one blow, Mother might have been wearing only stockings as she carried her baby, but she had the fox, which no shock had bleached, wound around her neck like a choker.

  She claims that during the long flight from the Russians she wrapped me in the fur to protect me against the bitter cold. Without the fox I would certainly have frozen to death in the horde of refugees backed up at the bridge over the Oder. I owe my life to the fox alone — not to the women with surplus milk. “Without that there you'd've been a lump of ice…” And the corporal who had conferred the fur on her — allegedly the work of a furrier in Warsaw — is said to have remarked in parting, “Who knows what it'll be good for someday, girl.”

  In peacetime, however, when we no longer had to freeze, the fox-red fur belonged only to her, lay in the wardrobe in a shoe box. She wore it on suitable and unsuitable occasions. For instance, when she received her masters diploma, then when she earned recognition as a “deserving activist,” even at company celebrations, when “evening entertainment” was on the schedule. And when I had had my fill of the Workers' and Peasants' State and wanted to go to the West by way of East Berlin, she came with me to the station with the fox around her neck. Later, much later, when, after a small eternity, the border was gone and Mother was receiving her pension, she appeared at the survivors' reunion in the Baltic coastal resort of Damp with her always-well-cared-for fox; she certainly looked unusual among the other women her age, who were rigged out in the latest styles.

  And on the first day of the trial, when all that happened was that the charges were read and my son admitted everything without reservation, but saw himself as beyond guilt — ”I did what I had to do!” — and Mother did not join Gabi and me, who had to sit together, willy-nilly, but made a show of going to sit with the parents of David, mortally wounded by four shots, she was of course wearing the fox nestled around her neck like a noose. Its pointed little snout had its teeth buried in the skin above the root of the tail, and the deceptively real glass eyes, one of which had been lost during the flight and had to be replaced, lay at an oblique angle to Mothers light gray eyes, with the result that a double gaze fastened on the accused or the judge's bench.