Crabwalk Page 4

  In January '36, the Hamburg shipbuilding company Blohm and Voss was commissioned to build a passenger ship for the German Labor Front and its subsidiary Strength through Joy, a ship slated to cost 25 million reichsmarks; no one asked where all that money was coming from. At first only statistics were available: 25,484 gross metric tons, a length of 208 meters, and a draft of 6 to 7 meters. The top speed was supposed to be 15.5 knots, and the ship was to carry a crew of 417 and 1,463 passengers. Those were normal figures for ships being built at the time, but in contrast to other passenger ships this new one was supposed to erase class distinctions for the present, having only one passenger class, which, according to Robert Ley s directives, was to set an example for the desired unity of the German Volk.

  The plan called for naming the new ship after the Führer, but as the Reich chancellor sat next to the widow at the memorial service for the Party comrade murdered in Switzerland, he reached the decision that the KDF ship being built should bear the name of the movement's most recent martyr; accordingly, soon after Gustloff s cremation, public squares, streets, and schools were given his name. Even a plant that manufactured weapons and other military hardware, the Simson Works in Suhl, was renamed, after its compulsory Aryanization, so that the Wilhelm Gustloff Works might serve the cause of rearmament and, from '42 on, operate a branch in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

  It would take too long to list all the other things named after him, so I shall mention only the Gustloff Bridge in Nuremberg and the Gustloff House serving the German colony in Brazils Curitiba. Instead I must ask myself the question, which I also posted on the Internet: “What if the ship whose keel was laid in Hamburg on 4 August 1936 had been named after the Führer after all?”

  The answer came promptly: “The Adolf Hitler would never have sunk, because Providence would have…” Etc., etc. This reply set the following train of thought in motion: in that case, I would not have been forced to skulk around as the survivor of a disaster forgotten by the whole world. If I had disembarked at Flensburg perfectly normally, and Mother had given birth to me there, I would not have been an exemplary case, and today would not provide any cause for quibbling.

  “My Paulies something special!” Mother's standard phrase rang in my ears throughout my childhood. It was embarrassing when she rambled on in her broadest Langfuhr idiom to neighbors and even her Party collective about my special qualities: “From the time he was born, I just knew this kid was going to be real famous someday…”

  Don't make me laugh! I know my limitations. I'm a run-of-the-mill journalist, who can do a decent job for short stretches. I used to have big plans — a book that I never got around to writing was supposed to be called “Between Springer and Dutschke” — but for the most part my plans stayed on the drawing board. Then Gabi stopped taking the Pill without telling me, was soon pregnant, undeniably by me, and dragged me off to City Hall to get married. Once the squalling baby was there and the future educator had gone back to her studies, it was clear as day to me: From now on, don't expect much. The best you can do is hold up your end as a house-husband, changing diapers and vacuuming. No more delusions of grandeur! What can you say about a guy who lets himself be saddled with a baby when he's thirty-five and losing his hair? Love? Forget about that till you're past seventy, and by then the parts will have stopped working anyway.

  Gabriele, whom everyone called Gabi, wasn't exactly pretty, but she sure could turn a man on. She was the take-charge type, and in the beginning she thought she could spur me to adopt a more energetic gait — ”Why don't you tackle something with social relevance, like the arms buildup and the peace movement?” — and I managed to grind out a preachy piece on Mutlangen, the stationing of Pershing 2 missiles, and the sit-ins, which was well received even in halfway leftist circles. But then the oomph went out of me again. And at some point she must have decided I was a lost cause.

  Gabi wasn't the only one; Mother, too, saw me as a typical failure. Right after the birth of our son, and when she had made her wish about his name known by telegram — ”Must call him Konrad” — she minced no words in letters to her friend Jenny: “What a fool! For this he went west? To let me down? Is this all he can deliver?”

  She was right. My wife, who was ten years my junior, remained ambitious. She passed all her exams, became a secondary-school teacher, got tenure, while I stayed in my rut. The exhausting fun and games lasted not quite seven years; then it was all over between Gabi and me. She left me the apartment in Kreuzberg, with its coal stove and the stultifying atmosphere of that part of Berlin that nothing can dispel, and moved with little Konrad to Mölln in West Germany, where she had family and soon found a teaching job.

  A peaceful little town, attractively situated on a lake, with the East German border nearby, to all appearances idyllic. That rather pretty part of Germany styles itself pretentiously “the Duchy of Lauenburg.” Like something from a bygone era. In travel guides Mölln is known as the “Eulenspiegel town.” And because Gabi had spent her childhood there, in no time she felt right at home.

  But I continued to go downhill. Was stuck in Berlin. Kept my head above water doing hackwork for a wire service, writing the occasional feature article on the side — ”What's Green about Berlins International Green Week?” and “Turks in Kreuzberg” — for the Protestant Sunday Weekly. Other than that? A couple of relationships, more annoying than anything else, and parking tickets. Oh yes, a year after Gabi left, the divorce went through.

  I saw my son Konrad only on visits, which meant not often and at irregular intervals. A boy in glasses who I thought was shooting up too fast, though in his mothers eyes he was doing fabulously in school, was gifted and sensitive. But when the Wall came down in Berlin and the border opened up near Mustin, just past Ratzeburg, the next town over from Mölln, Konny begged my ex to drive him to Schwerin right away — it was a good hour away — to see his Grandma Tulla.

  That's what he called her. At her request, I assume. It didn't end with that one visit — unfortunately, I would have to say today. The two of them hit it off at once. Even as a ten-year-old Konny had a fairly precocious way about him. I'm sure Mother got him hooked on her stories, which of course weren't confined to the carpentry shop on Eisenstrasse in Langfuhr. She dredged up everything, including her adventures as a streetcar conductor during the last year of the war. The boy must have soaked it up like a sponge. Of course she also poured on the tale of the endlessly sinking ship. From then on, Konny, or “Konradchen,” as Mother called him, was her great hope.

  Around this time she often drove to Berlin in her Trabi. She was retired by now, and seemed to have been bitten by the travel bug. But she really came only to see her friend Jenny; I was an afterthought. What a reunion! Whether in Aunt Jennys dolls house or in my hole-in-the-wall in Kreuzberg, all she could talk about was Konradchen, the joy of her old age. How nice that she had more time to devote to him, now that the Peoples Own Furniture Combine had been dismantled — with her assistance, by the way. She was glad to help the process along any way she could. Her advice was in demand again. As for her grandson, she had all sorts of plans.

  In response to such overabundant energy, Aunt Jenny merely offered her a frozen little smile. Meanwhile I had to listen to remarks such as “My Konradchen s going to be something. Not a failure like you…”

  “Right,” I told her, “I haven't amounted to much, and its too late now. But as you see, Mother, I'm developing — if you can call it that — into a chain-smoker.”

  Like that Jew Frankfurter, I would add today; he, too, lit one cancer stick from the last, and now I really can't help writing about him, because the shots struck their target, and because the building of the ship in Hamburg was moving along nicely, and because a navigator named Marinesko was serving on a seaworthy submarine along the Black Sea coast, and because on 9 December 1936 the trial got under way before the high court of the Swiss canton of Graubünden against the Yugoslav-born murderer of the German citizen Wilhelm Gustloff.
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br />   In Chur three guards in plain clothes stood in front of the judges' bench and the dock, where the defendant was flanked by two police officers. On orders from the cantonal police, the guards kept their eyes on the audience as well as on the journalists from home and abroad; some kind of violence was feared, from one quarter or the other.

  The large crowd of spectators from the German Reich had made it necessary to relocate the proceedings from the cantonal court to the chamber of the Graubünden parliament. An elderly gentleman with a white goatee, Eugen Curti, was the attorney for the defense. As coplaintiff, the widow of the murdered man was represented by the noted law professor Friedrich Grimm, who would cause quite a stir after the war with a work destined to become a classic — Political Justice: The Blight of Our Era. I was not surprised to discover that a new edition of the book was being peddled on the Internet by the German Canadian right-wing extremist Ernst Zündel, but in the meantime this Nazi-inspired work has apparently gone out of print again.

  I am fairly certain, however, that my Schwerin Webmaster ordered a copy while it was still available, for his Internet site bristles with Grimm quotations and polemical retorts to the admittedly long-winded defense offered by Curti. It seems as though the case is being retried, this time on a virtual world stage before an overflow crowd of onlookers.

  Later my research would reveal that my lone combatant owed some of his inside dope to the Völkischer Beobachter. He mentioned in passing, for instance, that when Frau Hedwig Gustloff, dressed in black, entered the courtroom on the second day of the trial, the Germans present, as well as some Swiss sympathizers and the journalists who had come from the Reich, all stood up and greeted her with the Hitler salute; this account was lifted from pages of the “Battle Organ of the National Socialist Movement of Greater Germany.” The VB had a presence not only during the four days of the undeniably historic trial but also on the Internet; the quotations from the stern father's letter to his prodigal son spread by way of the Net also came straight from that Nazi organ, for the rabbis letter — ”I expect nothing more of you. You do not write. Now it will do no good to write…” — was quoted in court by the prosecution as evidence of the defendants heartlessness; the court, however, was probably kind enough to allow the chain-smoker a cigarette or two during breaks in the proceedings.

  While the submarine officer Marinesko was either out to sea or on shore Jeave in the Black Sea port of Sebastopol, and presumably spent his three days on land plastered out of his mind, and while the new ship was rapidly taking shape in Hamburg, with riveting hammers setting the tone day and night, the defendant David Frankfurter sat or stood between the two cantonal police officers. He eagerly confessed to the charges. That robbed the trial of any suspense. He sat and listened, then stood up and said: I made up my mind, purchased, practiced, traveled, found, entered, sat down, shot five times. He made these admissions straightforwardly, with only occasional hesitation. He accepted the verdict, but on the Internet he was characterized as “weeping pathetically.”

  Since capital punishment was not legal in the canton of Graubünden, Professor Grimm regretfully demanded the harshest penalty available: life imprisonment. Up to the announcement of the sentence — eighteen years in the penitentiary, to be followed by deportation — the online account unambiguously favored the martyr, but after that my Webmaster parted company from the Comrades of Schwerin. Or was he no longer alone? Had that caviler and know-it-all returned, the one who had shown up in the chat room once before? At any rate, a kind of quarrelsome role-playing set in.

  The dispute that from now on repeatedly flared up was conducted on a first-name basis: a Wilhelm spoke for the murdered Landesgruppenleiter, and a David assumed the part of the would-be suicide.

  It was as if this exchange of blows were taking place in the hereafter. Yet the attention to detail was very much of this world. Each time the murderer and the murderee met, the deed and the motivation for it were thoroughly chewed over. While one of the parties spewed propaganda, proclaiming, for instance, that at the time of the trial there were 800,000 fewer unemployed in the Reich than in the previous year, and declaring enthusiastically, “This we owe to the Führer alone,” the other party reproachfully enumerated all the Jewish doctors and patients who had been driven out of hospitals and sanatoria, and pointed out that the Nazi regime had called for a boycott of Jews as early as i April 1933, whereupon the windows of Jewish shops had been smeared with the hate slogan “Death to the Jews!” Back and forth it went. If Wilhelm posted quotations from the Führer’s Mein Kampfn on his site to support his thesis of the necessity of preserving the purity of the Aryan race and German blood, David replied with passages from The Moor Soldiers, a report by a former concentration-camp inmate that a Swiss publishing house had issued.

  The battle raged in deadly earnest, with both sides manifesting grim determination. But suddenly the tone lightened, turned chatty in the chat room. When Wilhelm asked, “So why did you fire five shots at me?” David replied, “Sorry, the first shot was a dud. There were only four entry wounds.” To which Wilhelm responded, “True. But who provided the revolver?” David: “I bought the Ballermann myself. For a measly ten Swiss francs.” “Pretty cheap for a weapon a person would have to shell out at least fifty francs for.” “I see what you're driving at. You think someone must have given it to me. Is that it?” “I don't think — I'm positive you didn't act alone,” “Well, that's true! I was acting on behalf of Jews everywhere.”

  This remained the tenor of their Internet dialogue for the next few days. No sooner had they finished each other off than they began bantering back and forth, as if they were friends fooling around. Before they left the chat room, they said, “See you, you cloned Nazi pig,” and, “Take care of yourself, Jewboy!” But the moment a surfer from the Balearic Islands or Oslo tried to elbow his way into their conversation, they would turn on him and drive him away: “Beat it!” or “Come back later!”

  Apparently both of them played Ping-Pong, for they were great fans of the German champion Jörg Rosskopf, who, David mentioned, had even defeated a Chinese champion. Both declared their allegiance to fair play. And both revealed themselves as history mavens, willing to admire each other for newly uncovered information: “Terrific! Where did you find that Gregor Strasser quote?” or, “That's something I didn't know, David — that Hildebrandt was booted out by the Führer for leftist deviation, then reinstalled as Gauleiter when the good old Mecklenburgers stuck up for him.”

  They could have been taken for friends, they went to so much trouble to work off their mutual hatred, like a debt. When Wilhelm lobbed a question into the chat-room — ”If the Führer brought me back to life, would you shoot me again?” — David answered promptly, “No, next time you can blow me away.”

  Something was dawning on me. Already I was letting go of the notion that a lone Webmaster was skillfully engaging in ghostly role-playing. I had fallen into the clutches of two pranksters who were deadly serious.

  Later, when all those involved swore they hadn't had a clue and made a big show of being appalled, I said to Mother, “The whole thing seemed odd to me from the beginning. I was wondering why young people today would be fascinated by this Gustloff and everything connected with him. I realized right away that they weren't a couple of old farts frittering away their time on the Internet, I mean has-beens like you…”

  Mother didn't answer. As always when something came too close for comfort, she made her I'm-not-home face, rolling her eyes to the point of no return. She was convinced in any case that a thing like this could happen only because for years and years “you couldn't bring up the Yustioff. Over here in the East we sure as hell couldn't. And when you in the West talked about the past, it was always about other bad stuff, like Auschwitz and such. Lordy, lordy! You should've seen how they carried on in the Party collective that time I just mentioned something positive about the KDF ships — that the Yustloff was a classless ship…”

  And that brought to mind he
r mama and papa, and their trip to Norway: “My mama just couldn't get over it that the passengers all ate in the same dining room, simple workers like my papa, but also government employees and even top brass in the Party. It must've been almost like what we had in the GDR, only even nicer…”

  The idea of a classless ship was a real hit. I assume that explains why the dockworkers cheered like crazy when the new ship, eight stories high, was launched on 5 May 1937. The funnel, the bridge, and the compass platform had not yet been added. All of Hamburg came out to watch, countless thousands. But for the christening only ten thousand Party members, personally invited by Ley, could get up close.

  Hitler’s special train pulled into Dammtor Station at ten in the morning. From there an open Mercedes drove him, saluting with his arm sometimes outstretched, sometimes flexed, through the streets of Hamburg, to wild cheering, of course. From the Landungsbrücken a motor launch carried him to the shipyard. All the ships in the harbor, including the foreign ones, had hoisted flags. And the entire KDF fleet, made up of chartered vessels, from the Sierra Cordoba to the St. Louis, lay at anchor dressed to the topmast.