Crabwalk Read online

  I was unable to determine whether this police investigation, not ordered until two years after the alleged incident, employed any coercion. At any rate, David went back to Berne, and must have been in despair on a number of counts. For one thing, he was supposed to resume his studies, hitherto completely unsuccessful, and for another, to his chronic physical pain had been added grief over his mothers death. Furthermore, his impressions from his brief visit to Berlin became even more depressing when he read reports in the local and foreign newspapers about concentration camps in Oranienburg, Dachau, and elsewhere.

  Suicidal thoughts must have come to him toward the end of '35, and repeatedly thereafter. Later, when the trial was under way, a psychological evaluation commissioned by the defense noted: “As a result of psychological factors of a personal nature, Frankfurter found himself in an untenable emotional situation, from which he felt he had to escape. His depression gave rise to the idea of suicide. But the instinct for self-preservation innate to every human being deflected the bullet from himself onto another victim.”

  The Internet carried no nit-picking commentaries on this evaluation. Nonetheless, I had a growing suspicion that what lurked behind the URL www.blutzeuge.de was no skinhead group calling itself the Comrades of Schwerin but a solitary clever young fanatic. Someone scuttling crabwise like me, sniffing for the scents and similar exudations of history.

  A shiftless student? That was me, when I decided that German literature was too boring and media studies at the Otto Suhr Institute too theoretical.

  Initially, when I left Schwerin and then migrated from East to West Berlin by S-Bahn, shortly before the Wall went up, I made a real effort, as I had promised Mother when we parted. Worked my tail off in school. Was sixteen and a half when I got my first whiff of freedom. Lived in Schmargendorf, near Roseneck, with Mother's old schoolmate Jenny, who had supposedly shared a bunch of crazy experiences with her. Had my own room, with a skylight. A nice time that was, actually.

  Aunt Jennys attic apartment on Karlsbader Strasse looked like a doll's house. Everywhere, on side tables and wall brackets, she had porcelain figurines under glass. Dancers in tutus on pointę. Some of them balancing in daring arabesques, all with delicate little heads and long necks. As a young woman, Jenny had been a ballerina, and quite well known, but then, during one of the many air raids that were reducing the Reich capital to rubble, both her feet were crushed, with the result that she hobbled when she brought me an assortment of snacks for afternoon tea, though her arm gestures remained fluid. And like the fragile figurines in her oh-so-sweet little attic, the small face atop her now gaunt but agile neck bore a smile that seemed frozen in place. She often had the shivers, and drank a good deal of hot lemonade.

  I enjoyed living there. She pampered me. And when she talked about her old girlfriend — ”My darling Tulla slipped a note to me a little while ago” — I would be tempted for a few minutes to feel some fondness for Mother, that tough old bitch; but soon she would get on my nerves again. The messages she managed to smuggle out of Schwerin to Karlsbader Strasse bristled with admonitions, underlined to the point of no contradiction and intended to “pester” me into compliance, to use Mothers word: “The boys got to study, study, study. That's the only reason why I sent him to the West — so he could amount to something…”

  As I read that, I could hear the words Mother would have used in her native Langfuhr idiom: “That's all I live for — so's my son can bear witness one of these days.” Speaking for her girlfriend, Aunt Jenny would admonish me, too, in her gentle but pointed tone. I had no choice but to work my tail off in school.

  My class included a bunch of other kids who'd escaped from the East. I had a lot of catching up to do on subjects such as democracy and the rule of law. In addition to English I had to take French — Russian was a thing of the past. I also began to see how capitalism worked, the whole business of structural unemployment. I was no star, but I passed the university entrance exams, as Mother had demanded.

  In other respects I held my own, when it came to girls, for instance, and didn't even have to pinch pennies, because when I went over to the enemy of the working class, with her blessing, Mother slipped me another address in the West: “This guy's your father, or could be. A cousin of mine. He knocked me up shortly before he had to go in the service. That's what he thinks. Send him a note to let him know how you're doing, once you're settled over there…”

  Comparisons are odious. Yet where finances were concerned, I soon found myself in the same situation as David Frankfurter in Berne, whose distant father deposited a tidy sum in his Swiss bank account every month. Mothers cousin Harry Liebenau — God rest his soul — was the son of the master carpenter back on Eisenstrasse, and had been living in Baden-Baden since the late fifties. As the cultural editor for Southwest German Radio, he was responsible for late-night programming: poetry around midnight, when only the pines in the Black Forest were still listening.

  Since I didn't want to be hitting up Mothers girlfriend for money all the time, I fired off a rather nice letter, if I do say so myself, and after the closing flourish, “Your unknown son,” I made sure to include my bank account number, in my most legible handwriting. Apparently he was too happily married to write back, but every month without fail he came through with far more than the minimum child support, the sum of two hundred marks, a small fortune at the time. Aunt Jenny knew nothing about this arrangement, but apparently she had been acquainted with Mothers cousin Harry, if only fleetingly, as she let on rather than actually said, a faint flush coloring her dolls face.

  In early '67, not long after I had extricated myself from Karlsbader Strasse and moved to Kreuzberg, where I soon dropped my studies and clambered aboard at Springers Morgenpost as a cub reporter, the money supply dried up. From then on I never wrote to my sugar daddy, or at most a Christmas card. Why should I have? In one of her smuggled messages, Mother had made it clear how things stood: “No need to fall all over yourself thanking him. He knows well enough why he has to pay up…”

  She couldn't write to me openly, because by now she had become the head of a carpentry brigade in a large state-owned plant that produced bedroom furniture on the Five-Year Plan. As a Party member, she could not have contacts in the West, and certainly not with her son, a GDR deserter who was writing for the capitalist propaganda press, first short pieces, then longer ones, taking aim at a Communist system that couldn't hold its own without walls and barbed wire; that created problems enough for her.

  I assumed that Mothers cousin had cut me off because I was writing for Springers tabloids instead of finishing my studies. He was right, too, in a way, the frigging liberal. And soon after the attack on Rudi Dutschke, I said good-bye to Springer. Kept pretty much to the left from then on. Wrote for a bunch of halfway progressive papers next, because there was a lot going on at the time, and kept my head above water fairly well, even without three times the minimum child support. Herr Liebenau wasn't my real father anyway. Mother had just used him as a stand-in. It was from her that I learned, later on, that the director of midnight programming died of heart failure in the late seventies, before I was even married. He was about Mother's age, a little past fifty.

  As substitutes she offered me the names of various other men, who, she said, should be considered possible father candidates One of them, who disappeared, was supposedly called Joachim or Jochen, and another, older one, who allegedly poisoned the watchdog Harras, was Walter

  No, I never did have a proper father, just interchangeable phantoms In that respect the three heroes I've been instructed to focus on were better off. It's clear, at any rate, that Mother really had no idea by whom she was pregnant when she set out on that morning of 30 January 1945 with her parents, leaving the Gotenhafen-Oxhoft pier as passenger number seven thousand such-and-such. The man for whom the ship had been named could identify a businessman, Hermann Gustloff, as his father And as a boy in Odessa, the man who succeeded in sinking the overcrowded ship had received fairl
y regular beatings from Papa Mannesko — tangible proof of paternal solicitude — for belonging to a band of thieves, reportedly known as blatnye And David Frankfurter, who traveled from Berne to Davos to set in motion the process by which the ship came to be named for a martyr, had an honest-to-good ness rabbi as his father. Even I, fatherless though I was, would eventually become a father

  What would he have smoked? Junos, those famously round cigarettes? Or flat Orients? Maybe the fashionable ones with gold tips? There are no photos of him smoking, except a newspaper picture from the late sixties that shows him with a glow stuck in his mouth during the brief stopover in Switzerland that he was finally allowed to make as an older gentleman, his civil service career soon to be behind him Anyway, he puffed away constantly, like me, and for that reason took a seat in a smoking car of the Swiss National Railway

  Both of them traveled by train Around the time that David Frankfurter was making his way from Berne to Davos, Wilhelm Gustloff was on the road organizing. In the course of his trip he visited several local chapters of the Nazi Party, and established new troops of the Hitler Youth and the BDM, the League of German Girls. Because this trip took place at the end of January, he no doubt gave speeches in Berne and Zurich, Glarus and Zug, marking the third anniversary of the takeover, speeches enthusiastically received by audiences of Germans and Austnans abroad. Since his employer, the observatory, succumbing to pressure from Social Democratic deputies, had relieved him of his post the previous year, he had complete control over his schedule. Although there were numerous Swiss demonstrations against his activities as an agitator — leftist papers called him “the dictator of Davos” — and a national MP named Bringolf demanded his expulsion, in the canton of Graubunden and throughout the Swiss confederation he also found plenty of politicians and officials who supported him, and not only financially In Davos the management of the resort saw to it that he regularly received the lists of newly arrived guests, whereupon he would get in touch with those who were German citizens, not merely inviting but summoning them to Party events; unexcused absences were recorded and the names passed on to the appropriate offices in the Reich.

  Around the time the smoking student took his train trip, having asked for a one-way ticket in Berne, and the martyr-to-be was proving himself in the service of his party, ships mate Aleksandr Marinesko had already switched from the merchant marine to the Black Sea Red Banner Fleet, in whose training division he received instruction in navigation and was then groomed to be a U-boat helmsman. At the same time he belonged to the Komsomol youth organization and turned out to be a formidable off-duty drinker — for which he compensated with particular diligence while on duty; on board he never touched a drop. Soon Marinesko was assigned to a U-boat, the SC-306 Pifyja, as navigational officer; after the war began, this unit of the fleet, only recently brought into service, ran over a mine and went down with its entire crew, but by that time Marinesko had become an officer on another submarine.

  From Berne by way of Zurich, and then past various lakes. In his book, Party member Diewerge did not bother with landscape descriptions as he traced the path of the traveling medical student. And the chain-smoker, now in the seventh year of his studies, probably took little notice of the mountain ranges drawing ever nearer and eventually closing in the horizon; at most he may have registered the snow that blanketed houses, trees, and mountainsides, and the change in the light each time the train plunged into a tunnel.

  David Frankfurter set out on 31 January 1936. He read the newspaper and smoked. Under the heading “Miscellaneous” he found several items on the activities of Landesgruppenleiter Gustloff. The daily papers, among them the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Basler Nationalzeitung, documented that date, reporting on everything happening at the time or likely to happen in the future. At the beginning of this year, destined to go down in history as the year of the Olympic Games in Berlin, fascist Italy had not yet conquered Abyssinia, the distant kingdom of Haile Selassie, and in Spain war was looming. In the German Reich, construction of the Autobahn was progressing nicely, and in Langfuhr Mother was eight and a half. Two summers earlier her brother Konrad, the deaf-mute with curly locks, had drowned swimming in the Baltic. He was her favorite brother. That explained why, when my son was born forty-six years later, he had to be christened Konrad; but most people call him Konny, and his girlfriend Rosi addresses him in her letters as “Conny.”

  Diewerge tells us that the Landesgruppenleiter came home on 3 February, tired from a successful trip through the Swiss cantons. Frankfurter knew he would arrive in Davos on the third. In addition to the daily papers, David regularly read Der Reichsdeutsche, the Party newsletter Gustloff issued, which listed the dates of all his appearances. David knew almost everything about his chosen target. He had inhaled as many particulars as he could hold. But was he also aware that the previous year the Gustloffs had used their savings to have a solid house built in Schwerin, of glazed brick, even furnished in anticipation of their planned return to the Reich? And that both of them fervently wished for a son?

  When the medical student reached Davos, fresh snow had just fallen. The sun was shining, and the resort looked just as it did on postcards. He had set out without luggage, but with his mind made up. From the Basier Nationalzeitung he had ripped a photograph of Gustloff in uniform: a tall man with an expression of strained determination and a high forehead, which he owed to his receding hairline.

  Frankfurter billeted himself in the Lion. He had to wait until Tuesday, 4 February. In Genesis, on this day of the week the expression “Ki tov,” indicating that God saw that the Creation was good, appears twice, for which reason Jews consider Tuesday a lucky day — I picked this up on the Internet. On the home page, by now so familiar, this date was dedicated to the memory of the martyr.

  Smoking in the sun on hard-crusted snow. Every step crunched. Monday was spent on seeing the town. Back and forth, back and forth along the main promenade. Watching an ice hockey game, an unobtrusive spectator among other spectators. Casual conversations with visitors to the resort. His breath forming a white cloud. Avoid arousing suspicion! Not a word too many. Nice and easy. Everything was prepared. He had bought a revolver without the slightest difficulty and had practiced at the Ostermundingen shooting range, near Berne — all perfectly legal. Sickly though he was, his hand had proved steady.

  On Tuesday, close to his destination a weatherproof sign, wilhelm GUSTLOFF NSDAP, came to his aid: from the main promenade a street called Am Kurpark, branched off, leading to house number 3. A watery blue stuccoed building with a flat roof, its gutters garnished with icicles. Few streetlights to hold the gathering darkness at bay. No snow falling.

  So much for the scene from outside. Additional details held no significance. How the deed itself unfolded, only the perpetrator and the widow could say later on. I accessed the interior of the portion of the house in question with the help of a photograph inserted beside the indented text on the aforementioned home page. The photo was apparently taken after the crime, for three fresh bouquets of flowers on various tables and a dresser, along with a blooming flowerpot, lend the room the air of a shrine.

  When the bell rang, Hedwig Gustloff opened the door. A young man, whose “nice eyes” she mentioned in her testimony, asked to see the Landesgruppenleiter. He was standing in the corridor, speaking on the telephone with Party member Dr. Habermann from the local office in Thun. As he passed him, Frankfurter allegedly heard him saying “Foul Jews,” which Frau Gustloff later disputed: she averred that such terms were foreign to her husband, although he did consider the solution of the Jewish Question urgent.

  She escorted the visitor into her husbands study and invited him to have a seat. No suspicion. Petitioners often came unannounced, including fellow Nazis in financial difficulties.

  As the medical student sat there in his armchair, still in his coat and with his hat on his knees, he could see the desk, on it a clock in a slightly curved wooden case, and on the wall above it the honorary SA da
gger. Above and to the side of the dagger hung an assortment of pictures of the Führer/Reich chancellor, room decor in black and white and color. No picture of Gustloff s mentor, Gregor Strasser, murdered two years earlier. To one side a model sailing ship, probably the training vessel Gorch Foch.

  As he waited, the visitor, who forbade himself to smoke, would also have been able to see the radio on a chest of drawers next to the desk, and beside it a bust of the Führer, in either bronze or plaster painted to look like bronze. The cut flowers on the desk that appear in the photograph may have filled a vase before the deed, lovingly arranged by Frau Gustloff to welcome her husband home after a strenuous journey, also as a belated birthday greeting.

  On the desk, odds and ends and loosely stacked papers: perhaps reports from the cantonal Party chapters, doubtless also correspondence with offices in the Reich, probably a few threatening letters, which had been arriving frequently of late; but Gustloff had refused police protection.

  He strode into the study without his wife. Straight-backed and robust, having shaken off his tuberculosis years before, he advanced in civilian dress toward his visitor, who did not rise from the armchair but fired from a seated position only seconds after he drew the revolver from his overcoat pocket. Well-aimed shots made four holes in the Landesgruppenleiters chest, neck, and head. He collapsed, without crying out, under the framed pictures of his Führer. In no time his wife was in the room, first catching sight of the revolver still aimed at its target, then seeing her fallen husband, who, as she bent over him, was bleeding to death from all the wounds.

  David Frankfurter, the traveler with a one-way ticket, put on his hat and left the site of his premeditated deed, without being detained by the building's other residents, who by this time had become aware that something was going on. He wandered around in the snow for a while, slipping and falling several times, had the emergency number memorized, named himself as the perpetrator from a telephone booth, eventually located the nearest police station, and turned himself in to the cantonal police.