Crabwalk Read online

  He made the following confession to the officer on duty and later repeated it in court without changing a word: “I fired the shots because I am a Jew. I am fully aware of what I have done and have no regrets.”

  After that a great deal appeared in print. What Wolfgang Diewerge characterized as “a cowardly murder” turned in the hands of the novelist Emil Ludwig into “Davids struggle with Goliath.”These diametrically opposed assessments have survived into the digitally networked present. Before long everything that followed, including the trial, outgrew the perpetrator and his victim and assumed mythic significance. The hero of biblical proportions, who hoped his clear-cut act of defiance would summon his tormented people to resistance, was juxtaposed with the martyr for the National Socialist movement. Both were supposed to find their places in the book of history, figures larger than life. The perpetrator, however, soon sank into obscurity; even Mother, when she was a child and was called Tulla, never heard anything about a murder and a murderer, only fairy tales of a gleaming white ship that took loads of merry folk on long and short cruises for an organization calling itself Strength through Joy.

  * * *

  While i was still a foot-dragging student living off the generosity of others, I attended the lectures given by Professor Höllerer at Berlins Technical University. He captivated the overflowing crowd in the lecture hall with his piercing birdlike voice. His subject matter was the dramatists Kleist, Grabbe, and Büchner, all geniuses on the run. One of his courses was called Between Classicism and Modernism. I liked hanging out in the Waitzkeller among the young literary types and still younger girls, booksellers' apprentices. Here unpolished literary attempts were read aloud and critiqued. At the Literary Colloquiums branch on Carmerstrasse I even took a course based on the American notion of teaching creative writing. A good dozen promising fellow students, some with actual talent. I didn't have the right stuff, I was told firmly by one of the instructors, who was trying to prod us beginners with topics like Spiritual Help Line into taking epic leaps. The best I could hope to produce was trashy novels. But now he has hauled me out of the pit into which he cast me back then, declaring that my botched life has its origin in a unique event, an exemplary event, an event worthy of being told.

  Some of the talents from that era are already dead. Two or three of them made a name for themselves. My old instructor, however, seems to have written himself dry; otherwise he would hardly have pressed me into service as a ghostwriter. But I've had enough of this crab-walk. I keep getting stuck. I tell him its not worth it. Both of those fellows were nutcases, one no better than the other. Sacrificing himself to give his people an example of heroic resistance — don't make me laugh. The Jews weren't one iota better off after the murder. On the contrary! Terror was the law of the land. And two years later, when the Jew Herszel Grynszpan shot the German diplomat Ernst von Rath in Paris, the Nazis' response was the Night of Broken Glass. And what good did another martyr do the Nazis, I wonder. Well, all right, they named a ship after him.

  And already I'm back on track. Not because the old man is breathing down my neck, but because Mother has never eased up. Even when I was a boy in Schwerin, where I had to hop around like a puppet on a string in my blue shirt and neckerchief every time some dedication took place, she would hammer away at me: “That sea there full of ice, and them poor little ones all floating head down. You've got to write about it. That much you owe us, seeing as how you were one of the lucky ones and survived. Someday I'll tell you the whole story, exactly what happened, and you'll write it all down…”

  But I wasn't willing. No one wanted to hear the story, not here in the West, and certainly not in the East. For decades the Gustlqff and its awful fate were taboo, on a pan-German basis, so to speak. Yet Mother continued to badger me, now by secret courier. When I dropped out of the university and went to work for Springer, listing fairly far to the right, she saw an opportunity even there: “That man's a revanchist. He sides with us expellees. He'll print it in installments, for however many weeks it takes…”

  And later, when the 'Tageszeitung and my various other left-leaning headstands were making me dizzy, Aunt Jenny would invite me to join her for asparagus and new potatoes at Habel's near Roseneck and serve up Mothers admonitions for dessert: “My girlfriend Tulla still places great hopes in you. She wants me to let you know that it's your filial duty to tell the whole world…”

  But I didn't let myself be pressured. All those years when I was freelancing, writing long pieces for nature publications, on organic vegetables and the effects of acid rain on Germany's forests, for instance, also breast-beating stuff along the lines of “Auschwitz: Never Again,” I managed to leave the circumstances of my birth out of it — until that fateful day at the end of January '96 when I first clicked my way to the right-wing extremist Stormfront home page, and from there followed some Gustloff links until I landed on the www. blutzeuge.de site and made the acquaintance of the Comrades of Schwerin.

  Took some initial notes. Was amazed. Wanted to understand how this provincial celebrity, who owed his fame to those four shots in Davos, had all of a sudden begun to attract surfers. The site was skillfully done. Photos of key locales in Schwerin, interspersed with little come-ons: “Would you like to learn more about our martyr? Should we offer his story piece by piece?”

  What's all this “we” business? This “comrades” business? I was willing to bet that the creator of the site was flying solo out there in cyberspace. One mind was the dung heap where these seeds were sending up Nazi-brown shoots, and one alone. What this fellow had posted on the Net about Strength through Joy looked attractive, and wasn't even all that idiotic. Snapshots of vacationers smiling on board ship, or cavorting on the beaches of Rügen Island.

  Of course Mother didn't really know much about all this. She always referred to Strength through Joy as KDF, for “Kraft durch Freude.” As a ten-year-old she had seen bits and pieces in Fox's Movietone News, the newsreel shown at the Langfuhr cinema, among them the maiden voyage of “our KDF boat.” And Father and Mother Pokriefke had actually had a chance to take a cruise on the Gustloff in the summer of '39, he as a worker and Party member, she as a member of the Nazi Women's League. A little group from Danzig — at that time still a free state — was allowed to participate under a special dispensation for German citizens abroad — in the nick of time, so to speak. The destination in mid-August was the Norwegian fjords, too late in the season for the bonus of midnight sun.

  During my childhood, whenever Mother brought up her inevitable Sunday topic of the ships sinking, she would always emphasize her fathers enthusiasm for a Norwegian folk-dancing group in colorful costumes who had performed on the sundeck of the KDF ship. “And my mama just loved that swimming pool, with them colorful pictures all done in tiles — that was where those poor naval auxiliary girls was squeezed in like sardines until that Russki blew the poor young things to bits with his second torpedo…”

  But at this point the Gustloff hasn't even had its keel laid, let alone been launched. Besides, I have to backtrack, because right after the fatal shots were fired, the judges, prosecutor, and defense attorney in the Swiss canton of Graubünden began to prepare for the trial of David Frankfurter. The proceedings were supposed to take place in Chur. Since the perpetrator had confessed, a speedy trial could be expected. But in Schwerin solemn observances were being organized, on orders from the very highest level, to be staged as soon as the body was brought back, and designed to leave a lasting impression on the memory of the German Volk.

  What a scene a few well-aimed shots had set in motion: columns of goose-stepping storm troopers, aisles of honor, color guards, uniformed wreath and torch bearers. To muffled drumbeats, the Wehrmacht marched by at a funereal pace, past sidewalks lined with residents of Schwerin, who were paralyzed by grief or merely craning their necks to see the spectacle.

  Before his assassination, this Party member had been largely unknown in his native Mecklenburg, just one regional Gruppenleiter
among many in the Nazi organizations abroad; but in death Wilhelm Gustloff was inflated into a figure who seemed to render several speakers helpless as they searched for comparable greatness; all that occurred to them was Horst Wessel, that top martyr who had written and lent his name to a song always played and sung on official occasions — of which there were plenty — right after “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles”: “Raise high the flag…”

  In Davos the solemnities took place on a more modest scale. The resorts Protestant church, actually a mere chapel, set certain limitations. In front of the altar, draped with a swastika flag, stood the coffin. On top of it lay the deceaseds honorary dagger, armband, and SA cap, arranged in a still life. Some two hundred Party members from all the cantons had gathered. In addition, Swiss citizens, both outside and inside the chapel, were there to express their views. The mountains forming a backdrop.

  Portions of the rather simple memorial service held in this resort famous the world over for its TB sanatoria were broadcast to all German radio stations. Announcers called upon the listeners to hold their breath. But in all the commentaries and in all the speeches delivered later in other locations, David Frankfurters name was not mentioned once. From then on he was referred to only as the “treacherous Jewish murderer.” When the opposition tried to force-feed the sickly medical student into a hero, placing him because of his Serbian origins on a pedestal as the “Yugoslav Wilhelm Tell,” Swiss patriots objected in outraged stage German, but these attempts also spawned questions about possible backers of the young shooter; soon Jewish organizations came under suspicion of pulling his strings. The world Jewish conspiracy was alleged to have ordered the “cowardly murder.”

  Meanwhile the special train for the coffin stood waiting in Davos. As it pulled out of the station, church bells clanged. The train took from Sunday morning to Monday evening to complete its journey, making its first stop on German soil in Singen, followed by brief, solemn stops in Stuttgart, Würzburg, Erfurt, Halle, Magdeburg, and Wittenberg, where the local Gauleiters and Party honor guards “presented the last salute” to the corpse in the coffin.

  I came across this expression, drawn from the glossary of pretentiousness, on the Internet. On the Web site where contemporary reports were posted in their original wording, salutes were not “given” with the raised right hand, in the manner customary at the time and borrowed from the Italian Fascists; no, on all the railroad platforms and at all the observances, people gathered to “present” the final salute; and for that reason at the site www.blutzeuge.de the dead man was memorialized not only with quotations from the Führers speech and descriptions of the service in Schwerins festival hall, but also with the German salute, “presented” from that newest dimension known as cyberspace. Only then could the Comrades of Schwerin move on to mention Beethoven's Eroica symphony, struck up by the local orchestra

  Yet a carping voice chimed in to challenge this fatuous nonsense being disseminated to the entire world A chatter corrected the report in the Völkischer Beobachter that a Wehrmacht detachment had saluted the war hero Wilhelm Gustloff; he pointed out that because of his weak lungs the honoree had not qualified to participate in the Great War, to demonstrate his courage at the front, and to earn an Iron Cross, whether first or second class

  He seemed pedantic, this lone adversary disrupting the virtual solemnities He also pointed out that in his speech Mecklenburgs Gauleiter Hildebrandt had failed to mention the “nationalist-Bolshevist influence” Gregor Strasser had exercised over the martyr One might have expected that the Gauleiter, a onetime farmhand who had hated the big landowners since childhood and had therefore hoped that after the Führers seizure of power the gentry's estates would be systematically dismantled, would use the occasion to salvage the murdered Strassers honor, at least by implication This was the general tenor of the chatters kvetching He had a comeback for everything, which gave rise to wrangling in the chat room.

  Back on the Web site, the funeral procession got under way, untroubled by the possible outcome of the debate The scene was brought to life by pictures In variable weather it wound its way from the festival hall down Gutenbergstrasse and Wismarsche Strasse, then by way of Totendamm and along Wallstrasse to the crematorium. Mounted on a gun carriage, the coffin traversed the distance of four kilometers, passing through an aisle of honor, until it was unloaded, to the roll of drums, for the purpose of incineration, and, after receiving a pastor's blessing, was slid down a shaft into the flames. A command rang out, and the flags were dipped on either side of the vanishing coffin Columns of soldiers standing at attention struck up Uhland's song about the dead comrade and extended their right arms to present the very last salute The Wehrmacht detachment again fired salvos in honor of a combat veteran who, as has already been brought to light, did not experience trench warfare, and thus was spared all the shelling, or, as Ernst Junger dubbed it in his eponymous war diary, the “hail of steel “ Ah, if only he had been at Verdun, and had bit the dust in a shell crater when the time was right'

  Having grown up in the town of the seven lakes, I know the spot where the urn was later buried in a concrete foundation on the southern shore of Lake Schwerin On top was placed a four-meter-high piece of granite, whose chiseled cuneiform inscription waxed eloquent. Together with the gravestones of other early members of the movement, it formed the memorial grove around a hall of honor built for the occasion I don't recall, but I'm sure Mother knows exactly when in the postwar period they cleared away everything that might have reminded the townspeople of the martyr — and not only on orders from the Soviet occupying power. But my networked nemesis insisted that a new monument should be erected in the same location; he persisted in calling Schwerin the “Wilhelm Gustloff city.”

  All past, gone with the wind! Who still recalls the name of the leader of the German Labor Front? Along with Hitler, those whom people mention nowadays as all-powerful are Goebbels, Goring, Hess. On a television quiz show, if questions came up about Himmler or Eichmann, some contestants might have heard of them, but most would draw a total historical blank, and with a little smirk the perky quizmaster would tally up the loss of so-and-so many thousands in prize money.

  But who today, besides my Webmaster, bouncing around in the Net, knows anything about Robert Ley? Yet it was he who dissolved all the labor unions right after the takeover, emptied their coffers, dispatched squads to confiscate everything at their headquarters, and forced all their members, who numbered in the millions, to join the German Labor Front. It was he, this moon face with a cowlick, who had the inspiration to require all state employees, then all teachers and pupils, and finally the workers in all industries to use “Heil Hitler” as their daily greeting. And it was he who came up with the idea of organizing the way workers and white-collar employees spent their holidays. He provided inexpensive trips to the Bavarian Alps and the Erzgebirge, to the North Sea and Baltic coasts, and, last but not least, ocean cruises of shorter or longer duration — all under the motto of “Strength through Joy.”

  Clearly a man who got things done, for all these measures were carried out with lightning speed and without delay, while other things were happening at the same time and the concentration camps were filling, batch after batch. Early in '34 Ley chartered the passenger ship Monte Olivia and the four-thousand-ton steamer Dresden for his planned Strength through Joy fleet. Together these ships could accommodate just about three thousand passengers. But the Dresden was on only its eighth ocean cruise, intended to put the beauty of the Norwegian fjords on display again, when it encountered an underwater granite ledge in the Karmsund that tore a thirty-meter gash in the ship's hull, whereupon the Dresden began to sink. Although all the passengers were saved, except for two women who died of heart failure, the loss of the ship threatened to scuttle the entire Strength through Joy project.

  But Ley would have none of that. A week later he chartered four more passenger ships and now had at his disposal a fleet capable of expansion; over the following year it would ha
ndle 135,000 vacationers, most of them taking five-day cruises to Norway, but soon some could also book Atlantic journeys to the favored destination of Madeira. It cost only forty reichsmarks to achieve joy through strength, plus ten for a special excursion train to the Hamburg harbor.

  As a journalist leafing through the source materials available to me, I asked myself: How did this state, legitimized by a questionable enabling act and the sole political party left in existence, manage within such a short time to induce all the workers and salaried employees organized into the German Labor Front not only not to protest but even to cooperate, and soon to engage in mass rejoicing on command? Partial credit can go to the activities of the Nazi organization Strength through Joy, about which many survivors of those years continued to rave in private; Mother even did so openly: “Suddenly everything was changing. My papa — he was only a carpenters helper and didn't really believe in anything anymore — he just couldn't say enough about that KDF ship. See, that was the first chance he ever had in his whole life to go on a trip with my mama…”

  Here I should mention that Mother has always had this tendency to speak her mind too loudly and at just the wrong moment. She either rejects things or hangs on to them for dear life. When she heard in March '53 that Stalin had died — I was eight and in bed with tonsillitis, German measles, or measles — she lit candles in our kitchen and cried her eyes out. I never saw her cry that way again. Years later, when Ulbricht was forced off the stage, I heard that she mocked his successor as “that roofer.” Although a declared antifascist, she bewailed the destruction in the early '50s of the monument to Wilhelm Gustloff, cursing the “scum” who had desecrated the grave. Later, when we in the West were experiencing terrorism, I gathered from one of her messages smuggled from Schwerin that she believed “Baadermeinhof,” whom she pictured as one person, had fallen in the fight against fascism. It remained impossible to tell whose side she would take in any given situation. When Jenny heard about Mothers apodictic statements, she just smiled: “That's always been Tullas way. She says things other people don't wish to hear. Of course she sometimes exaggerates just a bit…” To give another example, at a meeting of her collective, Mother apparently once declared in front of all her comrades that she was “Stalin's last faithful follower,” and in the next breath held up the classless KDF society as the model for every true Communist.