George Alec Effinger

LIVE, FROM BERCHTESGADEN

“IN DUSSELDORF, as in certain other Rhinish Hauptstä dten, there is a large, yellow-brick building very close to the railroad terminal. I am told that a great many good German Bü rger make their periodic, Kaabic journey to this yellow institution; inside one is confronted by a bewildering array of charming and less charming photos, blurrily enticing Kodachromes of Mädchen that may be rung up in the manner to which one has become accustomed.

“It is sometimes difficult for the uninitiated to know how to react to this. Europe, by its very nature, is like this, in all ways and throughout its continental extent. The pure geographic propinquity of nations lulls the tourist’s sense of culture. How easy it is to cross a border and find oneself immediately in an entirely different milieu of mores and folkways. It is necessary to change your ethics at the booth while you change your pounds sterling or kronor.

“Do you have inhibitions? Lose them, or be unhappy, for sooner or later you will have one or another offended. No matter how grotesque the practice, how bestial the behavior, if you live Continental long enough you will find the neighborhood where it is merely comme il faut. For some, it is not the superficiality of ‘When in Rome …’ but a matter of survival.”

“Mein Herr Doktor, how is it that she speaks so? What language is it?”

“It is English she speaks, Frau Kämmer. She is delirious; oftentimes they will babble so in another language. But it is strange that she is so coherent. It is almost as if she recites.”

“Aber, Herr Freischütz, my Gretchen knows no English. It cannot be English that she speaks.”

“Far away now, beyond the political and other walls that we have built, beneath the impossible burden of years, look: Unter den Linden. Berlin! The mention of that brightest and most sophisticated of capitals did not always carry with it the indelible tinge of guilt, the subtlest pricks of fear. Unter den Linden: no other avenue in metropolitan Europe quite held the imagination of the literate world to such a degree; no other city’s showplace was ever so rich with the modish, the absolute dernier cri. The broad, shaded way runs from the former Royal Palace down to the Vopos at Checkpoint Charlie. As in any large city, the Unter den Linden of old was frequented by the ubiquitous Strassendirnen; but, whether or not it was merely the effect of the reflection of old Berlin’s loveliness, these easier matches did not offend the grace and charm of the street. It was only after the war that Berlin learned shame.

“This shame was not previously totally unknown. It was, however, unnecessary. Beginning with Carolus Magnus, or Charlemagne, the Germans began their expansion eastward - the notorious Drang nach Osten - late in the eighth century. To this day the land to the west of the River Elbe is known as the ‘old Germany,’ and the land east, the ‘new Germany.’ Thus, historical precedent has given way to shame; the shame is shared by those who know the old Germany, for these are immersed in the most ancient of traditions. The new Germany is comparatively younger, but no one, not the oldest Weisskopf, is able to remember the initial annexation. Whatever shame is felt, therefore, is hereditary in nature. It is false shame.”

“Guten Nachmittag, Herr Doktor.”

“Ja, und auch lhnen.”

“Wie geht es lhnen?”

“Sehr gut, danke. Ihre Tochter hat gut geschlafen. Wie geht’s lhnen?”

“Ach, comme ç i, comme ça. Pas mal.”

“Where is Germany? Do you find Germany in the thousands of Volkswagens on the American highways? Is Germany to be found by searching amongst the sausages and waltzes and Buddenbrooks of the world? Where is Germany? What, now, is Germany?

“Germany has traded Weltschmerz for ethischer Fortschritt. The sensuousness of the Italians, the chauvinism of the French, the snobbery of the British, the unbridled passions of the Danish and the Swedes, the inscrutability of the Finnish, all these are as nothing compared to the sincerity of the German concern for morality. ‘May God punish the sinful French’ is a slogan for the masses; it is also, perhaps, an indication of the direction the German Weltanschauung has taken. It is no longer permissible to allow the nationalities of our continent to squander their precious energies in lustful abandon. It is time for a cleansing.

“But does this mean, I hear you ask, does this mean that a new wave of Puritanism must o’ersweep us, one and all? No, I reply, for extremism does not fit in with our own and exquisitely German idea of Weltpolitik.

“We cannot yet look for Germany in those isolated and expensive places in the sun. The specter of doom rises, and falls, and rises again: such is the natural course of events. It must rise once more like the Unterseeboot, to an economic and social periscope depth. There must be some effectual Curt Jurgens at the helm, and the tubes must be kept cleared for action. ‘Bearing zero five four, two thousand yards … Mark!’ This must be the watchword. ‘Torpedos… Los!’ must be the countersign.”

“What is she saying? Does she still go on in English?”

“Yes, Nurse. But she becomes less coherent. What is this inflammatory rhetoric? Such pseudo-poetry! Ah, such a strange coma.”

“Herr Doktor, can nothing be done? She rambles on so; the other patients complain of the constant disturbance.”

“Naja, then. Give her ein Glas Schnaps.”

“There is no hiding this shame. It hides im Bahnhof, it lurks im Postamt, there is no peeling it from your shaking shoulders. ‘Ich bekenne mich die Anklage, “nicht schuldig.’“ How many of us stop our laughter when we buy soap, when we touch the lampshade? When the SS and the SA march away, whose minds do they take with them, even now? ‘Wenn wir fahren gegen England!’

“ ‘Isn’t the Jew a human being too? Of course he is; none of us ever doubted it,’ wrote Joseph Goebbels. ‘All we doubt is that he is a decent human being.’

“Ich bekenne mich die Anklage, ‘nicht schuldig.’

“ ‘But in all, we can say that we fulfilled this heaviest of tasks in love to our people. And we suffered no harm in our essence, in our soul, in our character… .’ Heinrich Himmler wrote that.

“ ‘Paragraph 1: Jews may receive only those first names which are listed in the directives of the Ministry of the Interior concerning the use of first names.

“ ‘Paragraph 2: If Jews should bear first names other than those permitted to Jews according to Par. 1, they must, as of January 1, 1939, adopt an additional name. For males, that name shall be Israel, for females Sara.’

‘“On May 11, another transport of Jews (1,000 pieces) arrived in Minsk from Vienna, and was taken from the station directly to the above-mentioned ditch . .

“Ich bekenne mich …

“I plead ‘not guilty.’“

“Ah, Frau Kämmer, so good of you to come. I must speak to you about your daughter. Gretchen is a tragic case. Her coma is now nearly a year. She takes little food, she is wasting away; she is but a human skeleton. But, you know, she never ceases to talk. Her voice is anguished, Frau Kämmer, so that it pains one to listen. But what she says? Still delirium.

“But now, our country is at war. We march against the czar. Our Wilhelm takes us against the Russians, and today we are at war also with the French. There has been a general call for doctors, and I must now tell you that the sanatorium is closing. Your Gretchen may be taken home; I had been already considering that recommendation. It may do her more good than this close but impersonal attention …”

“Why am I here? I can’t remember my husband here.

“As I recall, we were driving to Mainz. Our little brown VW. We pronounced it fow-vay in Germany. Driving along the Autobahn. I remember this Mercedes. We had the temerity to pass this black Mercedes. In our little VW.

“This feeling, I’m twisting…

“Here…

“Ich…”

“How is she today?”

“Better, poor thing. She’s just wasted away from being in that awful hospital. She sounds as if she’s just out of her head, pure and simple.”

“And now, what with the war…”

“It is interesting to leaf through the documents that were discovered following the surrender. For instance, this communication: ‘We started with three and a half million Jews here. Of that number, only a few work companies remain. Everybody else has —let us say—emigrated.’

“Where are all those soldiers now? Sousaphone players in the Bratwurst Festival?

“How can I say that I am not guilty?

“I cannot listen anymore. I cannot listen to the charges.

“Please, stop.”

“Mama, does Gretchen know the news?”

“No, Liebchen, she cannot understand.”

“Will you tell her about the Lusitania?”

“Nein, sie wurde es nicht verstehen.”

“We must keep to ourselves. Everyone—the Russians, the French, the English, especially the Americans - they all watch. They hope to catch us, like little boys stealing the pfennigs from Mama’s purse.

“We are here. We know what we have done; it is only left to atone for our deeds, or to justify them.

“We cannot know which course is the more horrible.”

“Ernst. My husband’s name is Ernst. He was born near Gelnhausen. We met in New York, during the Depression. But I can’t remember …”

“Have you heard enough? Then consider the Sonderkommando.

“Little wooden and concrete block outhouses. Signs indicated that they were baths. How thoughtful of the German High Command. The inmates were gathered together; those who could play musical instruments were commandeered to play cheerful tunes from The Merry Widow. Everyone watched as the band played; soon everyone would have their turn for the delousing.

“They got a couple of thousand in one of those buildings. They got their money’s worth out of the hydrogen cyanide.

“Twenty minutes later, after the spasms had stopped, they called in the Sonderkommando. They were male Jews who were promised immunity from execution for their services. They went into the gas chambers and pulled the tangled corpses apart with hooks. They hosed down the walls, cleaning off the blood and fouler material. They extracted the gold teeth of their kinsmen. A week later, they were gassed, too.

“You’ve heard it before, don’t kid yourself.

“It is said that God appeared to Paul Joseph Goebbels dressed in a leather corset, tightly laced high-heeled hip boots, and brandishing a riding crop. To this day the breezes, according to the neighborhood fools around Bayreuth, to this day you may hear gentle whisperings, wind whistles of the Horst Wessel, and you know that it’s just a matter of time before die Fahne is again hoch.

“After reading about Argentine political murders, can you spare some outrage for the merry pranks of thirty years past?

“Picture: It is night. The darkness is made more complete by the storm clouds which obscure the moon and stars. There is nothing to be seen but the light of a small lantern shining through the window of a farmhouse, about a hundred yards away. It is early December near Metz; it is very cold. There is ice on the Moselle, whose banks curve away about three kilometers beyond the farm. The German patrol halts on the rutted dirt road. Two of the six soldiers are sent up to the farmhouse. They knock loudly on the door. There is a long pause before the door is opened; then the light spills out through the narrow crack. Someone inside the house gasps, someone cries, another curses softly. The Germans force their way into the house. Sometimes in this situation there are shots, sounds of breaking glass, objects falling to the floor. At last one vert-de-gris comes to the door. He calls the other four, who still stand in the road, slapping their gloved hands and stamping their jackbooted feet.

“The six Germans are named Gerd, Thomas, Heinrich, Karl, Sigmund, and Gottlob. Their job is to stay in the farmhouse and guard it against the Allies. All over Europe there are similar pockets of Deutschland; this is how the war was fought, from farmhouses. Sometimes they are attacked by Burt Lancaster. Generally Heinrich, stranded hundreds of kilometers from the collaborating dé voreuses of Paris, goes mad and shoots a couple of his mates, or dies of lockjaw. In the end the Allies arrive in force, and the Boche are made to abandon the house, throwing their Lugers on a pile and crying ‘Kamerad!’

“And so, these days, as you take your Polaroid Swinger shots of the Kö lner Dom, you will meet a man. He is selling green and yellow balloons, ice cream and peanuts, plastic novelties. You speak to him in your halting German, ‘Bitte, können Sie mir sagen, wie komme ich zur Bedü rfnisanstalt?’ He smiles at you and answers in flawless English. ‘The public lavatory that you seek is located there, built into the side of the Victory Monument. My name is Sigmund. You must be Americans. How charming; I was a Stormtrooper, myself.’

“This never happens. If you ask a German student about the Nazizeit, he says, ‘Terrible. Simply terrible. It is frightening to believe that an entire nation could be so deluded. It was all like a monstrous dream.’ A dream.

“ ‘Yes,’ you say, ‘but what did your father do during the war?’

“His eyes shift nervously, his tongue licks his full, Aryan lips, and he coughs. ‘My father? Oh, during the war he was taking care of some mining interests in South America. We lived in Sao Paulo then; we never had any actual contact with the Reich.’

“So much for atrocities.

“You must be the conscience for your family: your daughter is busy with ecology, and your husband leads the commuters’ fight with the Long Island Railroad. You must keep these memories alive, before you are seduced away by the plight of the American Indian.”

“We have shown the way. It is always Germany that develops, nicht wahr, it is always Germany that knows its resources, that knows what to do with its people.”

“Ach, what is it now, Herr Müller? In what new and resourceful way are we now superior?”

“You have right, Frau Kämmer, in calling us resourceful. For, indeed, we are the practical nation. How did they fight wars? How did the human race battle previously? Why, by loosing various missiles at the enemy, and hoping that the paths of the projectiles and the opposing soldiery might intersect. Ah, look at the probability. Very low, n’est-ce pas? What we have done, what the German Command has done, April 22, 1915, at Ypres, is to harness the potential of the very air as a weapon! The atmosphere has become our ally, spreading our new and tiny globules of death. We use gas. The new aircraft dispense thick yellow clouds, and the French are overcome, they are disabled, or they die.”

“Perhaps we could drop from those same aircraft a sort of jellied petroleum product. It could be ignited, and those same foes would then have something to contend with, eh?”

“You do not know what you ask, Frau Kämmer. There are still conventions. We do have several sorts of gas, thanks to the Krupps of Essen and to the Interessen Gemeinschaft with their famous German professors. We have such variety; ‘poison gas’ is then a misnomer. We should refer, rather, to ‘chemical warfare.’ That is better, it is more gemü tlich. We have the gas chemicals, and also the liquid chemicals which act in much the same way. Of our asphyxiating substances we have had success with simple chlorine, phosgene, chloropicrin, and others. We have produced lachrymators, vesicant or blistering compounds, sternutatory or sneezing compounds, and toxic compounds such as prussic acid. We have been disappointed so far with the arsenic compounds. Major V. Lefebure documents all this in his jocularly titled volume The Riddle of the Rhine. He discusses the new developments in mustard gas and states that ‘these inherent possibilities of organic chemistry, flexibility in research and production, make chemical warfare the most important war problem in the future reconstruction of the world.’“

“I couldn’t agree more. Though we win, I would still see those canisters thrown into the sea.”

“Yes, and how goes your daughter, Frau Kämmer?”

“My daughter? Gutrune? Why, she begins to go to school soon. It is very kind of you to ask after her.”

“I am sorry. I meant to inquire about your other.”

“My other? Perhaps you mean Gretchen? Ah, she sleeps. We have little to do with her these days. She needs such little attention. She is so thin, she looks like a skeleton. And her eyes! Sometimes they open, and stare … We do not go into her room often these days.”

“I don’t have any idea how I came here. I mean, I don’t even know where I am. No one talks to me. They treat me as if I’m not here at all. I’m paralyzed in this bed; I must have been in an accident, the way they shake their heads when they think I won’t notice. Am I disfigured, startlingly mangled now?

“I don’t know how I got here. Christ, I don’t even remember who I am! Oh, my God. Who am I? What a dumb-ass question.

“Okay, don’t panic. I’m Gretchen Weinraub.

“I’m on vacation. I’m in Europe. Our first trip back to Europe! We’re in Germany, visiting Munich, just finished in Heidelberg and Stuttgart. Going on to Nuremberg next. Ernst and our grandson, Stevie. Where are they? I haven’t seen them at all.

“How long have I been here?

“This isn’t a hospital. I remember a doctor looking at me a few times, but he seemed old and worried, dressed in a funny-smelling old dark suit. The ceiling above me is pointed, as if I were stuck up under the eaves. The mattress I’m lying on is very soft and comfortable. The bed is piled up with lovely hand-sewn quilts: it must be winter.

“It was July in Munich.

“Where am I? What in hell’s happened?

“Where’s Ernst?”

“Weh, how she tosses and turns tonight. She is troubled.”

“Mama, do you think she has dreams all this time? Her long sleep, is it like we have every night?”

“A full year. I pray the good Lord that it has been peaceful for her.”

“Oh, Mama! A full year of nightmare! Oh, how horrible it would be! To be chased, or lost, or falling for a year—”

“Schweigst du, little one. God in Heaven watches her.”

“Does God understand what she says?”

“Yes, Liebchen, God understands what everyone says. Our Gretchen mutters still in English, but she says yet those German words.”

“You can understand then, Mama?”

“Yes, but such silly words they are! ‘Geheime Staatspolizei…’ What good are secret police, police that you can’t even find when you need them? A ‘Gestapo’?”

“Are we winning, Mama?”

“Yes, of course we are. God knows who’s been good and who’s been bad.”

“Has Daddy been good?”

“Yes, dear. He was wounded in the chest just last week. He will win the Iron Cross, Second Class, he thinks. I hope that he does. That will show that landlord of ours in München.”

“Does Gretchen know?”

“No, Liebchen. Poor, poor Gretchen knows nothing of our great struggle.”

“Will you be here when I die too, Mama?”

“Hush, now, Liebchen. Sit down. Watch the war.”

“I could have taken any of several tacks in doing this. Should I instead have stayed only with the contrite and apologetic? Would it have been better, or even believable, to try to persuade that things weren’t really all that bad? Can you believe the canard that seventy-five million Germans were only carrying out their instructions and today can’t even recall that they did? No. The question is too big. There are too many angles, and the extenuating circumstances are too difficult to explain.

“The apology must suffice. A necessary prologue, perhaps, for one in my position; but enough. Also, denn. ‘Hier stehe ich.’

“I borrow those words, of course, from Martin Luther. He knew how it felt to have the responsibility of putting the abstract feelings of a nation, a world, into coherent form. It is for me, having attempted the apology with all the conscience that I can muster, to say, ‘Here we are.’ I am supposed to point into the shadows, into our nation’s superstitious submind, beckoning, saying to my fellows, ‘Come out! It is over. Abierunt ad plures. They are dead, they are dead.’ They are the memories, the guilt-demons that take on almost hallucinatory presence.

“And they should be dead. Why are we guilty no longer? Walk among us now. O felix culpa! Have the vanquished ever found such prosperity in defeat? To despair of forgiveness from God is the gravest of sins: why then should we bear the enmity of nations beyond the reasonable limit? The Fü hrer was a captain who saw himself sinking and, in his perverse logic, thought it necessary to take his ship with him. Of course, the Heimatland suffered, but it was cleansed in its own Iron and Blood.

“No more brownshirts, blackshirts put away, too, with the photos of polished Mussolini, farewell Ade Polenland, ade weisse Hand; jest ist der Tritt, fest ist der Tritt up the steps into the attic, packed away in the trunks with the Hitler Youth badges, die Jugend marschiert, thirty, count ‘em, thirty extermination camps, hundreds of thousands of cheering people.

“Speak of this amazing recovery of the divided German republic. It is remarkable; it would not have been possible, ironically, without Hider’s terrible and unifying nationalistic zeal. The extremities which are his epitaph are the product of his absolute power. But today, and all that counts is today, our country is in a far stronger economic position than before the war. You may go into the Sowjet zone, if you wish, and cluck your tongue at the difference.

“The continued animosity of our former enemies grows a bit silly. Certainly we erred; we have learned from our mistakes. Not, I might add, like more than one of our accusers, to whom the term ‘genocide’ seems, to them, inapplicable because they lack the publicity that attended our Treblinkas and Buchenwalds. I fall into the tu quoque fallacy: you without sin, you be the first to cast the stone.

“We have a land. It is our Vaterland; that term cannot be discredited. If you insist on pulling open your older wounds, we insist on reacting with natural pride in our homes, ourselves, and our accomplishments.

“We still live.”

“Gretchen? We once had a daughter named Gretchen, but last spring we lost her.”

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry. Did she ever regain consciousness?”

“Oh, no. You misunderstand. We have no idea if she is still alive. You see, as time passed we saw less and less of her. She did not produce in us such a great amount of interest. We dusted her features often, and changed the flowers in the vase monthly, but otherwise we rarely thought of her. Then, one day, she was gone.”

“But after so long a confinement to her bed, and in her starved condition, surely she couldn’t have gone off by herself?”

“We think so, too. Perhaps we merely mislaid her. I remember one time, when we had taken her outside for the fresher air, we couldn’t for the life of us recall where we had put her. We have recently written to the Gastwirt at the inn at St. Blasien, to see if we inadvertently left her in our rooms. But, personally, I don’t think we even took her along.”

“I can’t remember who I am.

“Sometimes, like last night, I think I’m still Gretchen Kämmer. Sometimes I’m Gretchen Weinraub. Right now, I don’t have any name at all.

“I can’t remember where I’m from, or where I am now.

“I remember getting here, or there, in a brown Volkswagen. It was the car we rented in Hamburg. I don’t remember who the others who make up the ‘we’ are.

“For some reason I feel absolutely no desire to know, I feel no horror at being totally lost. It’s rather warm and soft, like anesthesia. The only reasonable thing now, I guess, is to start again somewhere. I don’t know which way to head, and I suppose I’ll make mistakes I’ve made before. I forget…

“And I cannot yet forgive, but I forget.”

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