Europe Central (104 page)

What you want, Frau? Frau no pretty; Frau get out!

I speak Russian, she answered in that language.

He looked astonished. She stood before him, waiting. Suddenly he peeled off a watch, thrust it at her, and said: Take it.

Thank you, Herr Commandant.

All Germans hate Russians. Do you hate Russians?

No.

I hate Germans.

That’s the reality.

Good. Drink with me.

And she did.

All right. Now what do you want?

Then she confided to him her dream. She longed to apply to Germany the progressive legal science of our Eastern mother, the Soviet Union.

3

Go back to 1919, when K. Liebknecht and R. Luxemburg were murdered by rightwing elements. Helene Marie Hildegard Lange, aged seventeen, burst into tears, lost her appetite, and practically stopped speaking to anyone.—But, Hilde, what can one do against such people? demanded her mother. It’s not only dangerous to fight them; it’s useless.

Frau Lange had much on her side: logic, experience, and, above all, love. But at the very moment when the girl had almost been convinced to “go on with her life,” she saw the memorial woodcut to Liebknecht, made by K. Kollwitz from drawings done at the morgue at the invitation of the family. The martyr’s head, thrown back upon the white nothingnesss of the paper, is runneled with the shadows of his final agony. Light shines on his chin and cheekbones. The bulletholes in his forehead have been pitiably concealed, or honored, by red flowers. The mouth’s final grimace is a downcurving semicircular groove. In the half-dozen sketches Kollwitz made, the face is nothing more than what it objectively was: dull, pale, inanimate. In fact, it may well be less. In the very first drawing the flowers have been omitted. Next comes the charcoal study, which retains detail but now, with the same motive and effect of a woman applying makeup, adds the moody smudginess of the medium to the corpse. Here the artist also introduces a line of mourning workers. Old women need more makeup than young; the dead need more still; so this eager-to-please K. Kollwitz next proceeds to an intaglio etching, darkening Liebknecht’s face to such an extent that the ear, eye-socket, cheekbone, hair and forehead are entirely gloomed over. The subsequent lithograph abstracts the scene into lines; the ink wash study, into brush-strokes; finally she settles on the woodcut, whose chisel-marks appear to dissect away every mourner’s face into underlying muscles and tendons; they’re all pale, sorrowing corpses in the darkness around the dead man’s face, a few more planes, crescents and angles of which have been restored to the light but which remain as in those first sketches a portrait of
nothingness,
now solidified into something akin to an ebony idol. What about the most prominent part of the image, the bier itself? It’s white nothingness—more exactly, it’s a long white mummy-shroud with a few straight ripples of blackness across its edges. In 1960, immediately following the premier of “Comrade Berlin,” there was a banquet in honor of the filmmaker, a certain R. L. Karmen, who in between nibbles of our excellent German cheese informed the Red Guillotine that this daring device of blankness in the Liebknecht memorial sheet had inspired him to something similar in his documentary on the opening of our first blast furnace at Krasnogorsk: he’d omitted the ceremony itself!—As for the Red Guillotine, what effect might Kollwitz’s graphic starkness have produced on her? (We Communists say, if it has no practically measurable effect, it’s not people’s art!) Speaking strictly as an aesthetic critic, not as Comrade Alexandrov, I’d have to reply that what this woodcut teaches us is
simplification and abstraction.

And so Fräulein Lange decided to study law at Heidelberg. Her mother asked why. She replied: I believe I will be able to help the victims of injustice.

Please think better of this, darling. It’s one thing to go into law, and entirely another to—

In a steely voice she said: They murdered Liebknecht and his daughter is going into law! That’s why
I’m
going into law.

Her mother could do nothing with her.

The legend informs us that she was one of the best students, and perhaps the best of all. She sometimes dreamed of a golden box which could not be opened. She was searching for the key. Someday she would find it, and then . . .

She did piecework in a metal shop to earn her tuition. As the legend tells it, she was practically a member of the working class. Late one night, having finished at the lathe, she locked up and walked to her tram stop, arriving just as a beggar like a troll or kobold, whose few sodden hairs clung to his wrinkled skull, snatched away an old woman’s purse. Fräulein Lange looked on silently. Even then she had a reputation for impartiality.

On 27.2.26 she married Comrade Georg Benjamin, a physician, whom the legend is quick to remind us
was also Superintendent of Schools in Berlin-Wedding, a working-class quarter.
In 11.27, finally understanding the maxim of Comrade Ulbricht that
Social Democracy equals Social Fascism,
she joined the only legitimate organization of the proletariat, the Communist Party. Two years later she took on the legal defense of our Red Help organization, to which K. Kollwitz also contributed with her poster-propaganda.

Bourgeois historians, romantics and deviants prefer to remember Weimar Berlin as a concretion of the Princess Café’s private niches, where Georg’s brother Walter and Walter’s poet friend Heinle used to meet prostitutes. They commemorate the old men with canes and tophats at the Prussian Academy, last survivors of a dying class, who considered themselves entitled to “reward” Kollwitz’s achievements when objectively speaking they were nothing more than hypocritically rarefied imitations of the lesbians at Schwerinstrasse-13, who couldn’t stop dreaming about a certain Lina’s pretty knees! Well, let the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie remember Berlin any way they please. As Comrade Khruschev promised us,
we will bury them.

From our heroine’s point of view, Berlin was nothing but one chamber after another of the Imperial Labor Court, where she became one of the fieriest accusers of the bourgeois state, inspired by the memory of Comrade Liebknecht. In those days her love for the future was impatient and angry, like the mother’s who brushes her child’s curls a trifle too hard, ignoring its screams, so that it will be perfect for school. She proved particularly uncompromising when she defended strikers against trumped-up charges of disturbing the peace. In the Fourth Criminal Senate, she battled year after year against the malignant Dr. Niedner. The more dissatisfied she became with the world around her, the more convincingly she dreamed. That is why she spoke out so effectively at Party rallies, always advising us to fight the capitalists without compromise; she taught us the slogan
Release the proletarian prisoners!
As Comrade Liebknecht had done, she called for the organs of the Prussian-German bourgeois state to be replaced by workers’ and soldiers’ councils, for the generals and aristocrats to face justice in revolutionary tribunals. Her mother had bad dreams now; she dreaded that Hilde might meet Comrade Liebknecht’s fate. Hilde stood ready. The legend informs us that
in that period, Communist Hilde Benjamin was clear that her most important work was the realization of the Party’s decisions.

In 9.30 she defended the worker whom the class-biased legal system of the Republic had seen fit to charge with murdering that Nazi provocateur Horst Wessel. (He
had
murdered Wessel, but that’s not the point.) The young attorney made a striking picture in the first row of wax-gleaming defendant’s benches in that elegant wood-paneled courtoom, for she was calm, thoughtful and even smiling. The defendant, whose eyes shone with desperation and whose collar was less than clean, whispered another of his anxieties into her ear. Frau Dr. Benjamin’s smile elongated slightly. Unkind observers might have described it as a smile of contempt.—Sit up straight, she said from the side of her mouth. Act like a human being. Look the enemy in the face.

Called upon by the prosecutor, Horst Wessel’s mother held aloft his bloody uniform. She prayed for the day when Germans would take vengeance on the Jews for this and many other crimes. Frau Dr. Benjamin laughed ironically.

The Fascists did not forget her. Their so-called “Führer” was said to have her name on a list. Frau Dr. Benjamin remarked: There must be so many other names on it, I’ll be old by the time he gets to me!—The truth was that every time she saw them marching in the streets, or, worse yet, heard them singing their “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the bottom dropped out of her stomach. But our line in those days was that the quicker those brutes came to power the better, because they would bring capitalism’s contradictions to a head.

Whenever she lost a trial, she had one very particular thing to say to her client. It was not the so-called “consolation” with which a bourgeois lawyer seeks to wash his own hands of what the fired trade unionist or the hungry thief must now suffer—or, if it was, it was consolation sharp as a razor. It inculcated hatred; it simplified and abstracted the case to its socioeconomic essentials; it directed energy toward the future. What she said was this: I’ve come to recognize that questions of law and justice are at the same time questions of power.

4

Like good Communists, we’ll pass over the irrelevantly personal aspects of her marriage to Dr. Georg Benjamin. Their son Michael (born when the Reich absorbed Austria) is likewise of no concern to us; we’ll merely note that in the end he fulfilled their expectations and studied in Moscow.

As soon as the sleepwalker came to power, she found herself in imminent danger of being
taken away.
All the same, she kept bravely defending the workers, following the maxim of Comrade W. Ulbricht that
the Communists must be the ones who know Fascist labor law the best.
Georg feared for her, but she told him what she used to tell her mother:
I myself have a head to think with!
Naturally she soon lost her right to practice her profession.

Her husband was a Jew, and his fate ordinary: arrested in May 1933, sent to KZ-Lichtenburg, released for Christmas, resumed legal and illegal political work, rearrested in 1936, sentenced to six years’ hard labor, which he completed through contact with the electrified barbed wire of Mauthausen.

Do you want to know who stands ready to help us Germans now? There can be but one answer: SMAD, the Sowjetische Militäradministration.

Watching the open boxcars of women, children and old men hoping to escape the Slavs, she bided her time. They had black ruins for their food and grey sky to drink, but they rode the silver rails of hope: If only they could get to the American zone before the Reds crossed the Oder! The widow Benjamin stayed quietly at home.

Then came that visit to the man with four wristwatches, as a result of which (I quote the legend exactly)
she was asked by the commander of the Berlin city precinct Stieglitz to organize the judicial system, and was thus made District Attorney.
That was in May. (She paused to smile on camera for Roman Karmen’s new film, “Berlin.”) By September she was already Director of Cadre Development.
The radical removal of Nazi and reactionary elements was a main focus of her department.

5

The plan of the
zero hour activists:
Since East Germany doesn’t even have trade unions yet, our first task will be to complete the bourgeois revolution of 1848. Then we’ll smash the monopoly capitalists and Junkers who created Nazism.

No elections, of course. Hitler had elections.

Hence we’ll fly in the Ulbricht Group
⁴⁰
from Moscow, form our working committee of the two proletarian parties, then create a broad-based antifascist bloc, which we’ll winnow down bit by bit until only we are included.

Next step: the democratic land reform, commenced in our very first autumn—I mean collectivization, with loudspeakers, searchlights, threats and happy fireworks. After all, the producers of national wealth are the only ones who deserve full citizenship. Whatever mercy we might have possessed was interred beneath the greenish-beige dirt of Auschwitz.

6

A pregnant young woman whose husband SMAD had just
sent East
asked her, perhaps a little wistfully, what she thought of the developments in the American sector, and the new District Attorney contemptuously replied: Over there, it’s not creation of the new, but restoration of the old.

7

Almost every other German avoided that barbed-wire-topped fence at Karlshorst behind which General Zhukov operated. Comrade Ulbricht loved to go there; only then did we see him smile. (The collectivizers beg him to intercede with the Russians, who keep dismantling everything and shipping it eastward, even the machinery we’ll need for collectivization. Comrade Ulbricht replies:
This meeting has nothing to do with dismantling.)
As for the Red Guillotine, she rushed to Karlshorst nearly twice a week. She had a pass. She was pale, shining-eyed, roundheaded—there was something almost deformed about her. She’d come to hasten that decisive moment when the firing squad approaches the stakes, one man bending over each victim with a pistol ready for the
coup de grâce.
Sometimes she failed to get her heart’s desire, but at least she could send them forever or almost forever to one of our Eastern zone’s jails, which we’d begun to call
the yellow misery.

The Fascists kept saying, up against the wall, up against the wall, and after a while one wanted to put them up against the wall, or tie them to chairs at the base of some sunny rubble-hill, the firing squad now in position. Instead of feeling sorry for her country, she was sickened and angered by the myriad pale white upraised arms like antennae from each marching caterpillar of German prisoners.

I myself am reminded of the scene in the
Nibelungenlied
when Kriemhild agreed to dry her tears and marry again only when the envoy promised to take upon himself anything needed to avenge wrongs committed against her.