My fiancée Luise

Luise is living proof that the near panic in magazines and other official and unofficial organs regarding the preponderance of females is justified. I never thought it would be so hard to find a mate for a normal female creature. For almost a year now I’ve been deeply and futilely in search of a good solid husband for her. One might suppose that Luise doesn’t need a husband because she has one in prospect already. Namely me. But that’s just it. Luise has me. If Luise didn’t have me, I wouldn’t be seeking one so desperately.

Luise is a nice girl, and I’ve got nothing against her, but her presence has something oppressive about it for me. I have examined myself and established that this feeling of oppression is not love, and is no prerequisite for marriage, not even an unhappy one. I suppose I should tell her. But I can’t.

There are three items that Luise managed to hang on to throughout the war: a stove, an electric iron, and me. All three of us are a little impaired, and not quite good as new. But Luise is hanging tenaciously, not to say grimly, on to all of us. Her favorite is the stove, and next, even ahead of the iron, is me. I would never deprive Luise of her inferior iron without offering her another, better one. How then am I going to take myself away from her if I rank higher than the iron?

I have trouble fitting into Luise’s family life.

This morning I am so tired of people, I don’t even feel like getting up.

I would like to be perfectly alone for a while. If you have no money and nowhere to live, you can never be alone. I’m not a misanthrope, and I don’t want to be alone forever either, but just for a while I would. For many years I’ve been longing for such a time, and the longing has grown stronger, sometimes it even feels like a passion.

When I was a soldier, I could never be alone, when I was a prisoner of war I was never alone, and as a wretched returnee, still less so. Nothing against the Widow Stabhorn, who lets me live in her passage, and nothing against her thousand grandchildren either. They are splendid, optimistic people full of the will to succeed, and I am lucky to be in their midst. Only when I am with them, I am not alone. I am living in a sort of family association, and I would like just for once, and not necessarily for long, not to be living in any association. No family association, no provisional association, no national association, no professional association—not in any kind of association at all.

I had some nice comrades during the war, and some nice comrades in the POW camp. Only it didn’t do me any good that they were nice, because the day came when I no longer found them nice and no longer counted myself lucky.

In POW camp pretty much everyone got on my nerves. I felt horrible on account of it, and people who make you feel guilty you of course try and avoid like the plague.

Albert, for instance, was a decent fellow and notoriously helpful, but I had moments I almost killed him with a billycan because he was sitting in front of me the whole time, picking his challengingly small nose.

Hildebrandt had backbone and a sense of humor. I admired him, and then forgot my admiration because Hildebrandt snored. He slept any time he had a chance to, even in the day, and he would always snore. He had a sophisticated and idiosyncratic way of snoring—willful, surprising, and unmelodious as the music of Bartók. Hildebrandt was a progressive snorer, and compulsive listening.

Hellmut never did me any harm, but he would eat with such an animal avidity that I felt the impulse to smash my canteen in his face.

Ludwig was an intelligent, sensitive soul. I knew that. But after he’d told me the same moronic dirty joke for the fifteenth time, I could only see him as a loathsome swine.

Some didn’t tell dirty jokes, didn’t snore, ate discreetly, didn’t talk about women (or about men either), or about food, or politics, or about their release date, home, or the future. I didn’t know them well, and I didn’t think ill of them. And? I’d never have thought it—they annoyed me as well. They annoyed me by not annoying me. I was chronically unfair, and sometimes I knew it, and it made me sad.

Hence the relief of those individuals who were nasty pieces of work. I felt positively grateful to them because my rage for once was justifiable. Though God knows if it was always justified. I suppose I ought to thank those guys retrospectively for making it possible for me to be angry. When I think about it, bad people are actually martyrs. At their expense, you can find yourself virtuous, and give free rein to all your stopped-up feelings of rage. Where others are ugly, it’s an easy matter to seem beautiful.

Back then, in POW camp, I came to thoroughly dislike myself. I got a grip and tried to appear cheerful and comradely to others. But privately my thoughts were tangled and ugly. My only comfort was the hope that I was just as infuriating to others as they to me. And I always, always wanted to be alone.

Even if I could afford to live in a hotel, that wouldn’t be sufficient solitude. I’d have to greet the doorman, and the chambermaid would come to make the bed in the morning. They would wonder about me if I spent all day and all night shut up in my room. Their thoughts would come crawling to me through cracks, they would knock on my door, they wouldn’t leave me properly alone.

I’m imagining a little room attached to a balloon high up in the sky. There would be a bed with me lying on it. Next to it a few essentials, drinks, cigarettes, and food. No one can get to me. Nothing around me but clouds. I have time. I could start to order my thoughts. Sometimes I think my brain is like an old bedside drawer, stuffed with all kinds of things I don’t need. Maybe there is the odd useful item among all that junk. Maybe I’ll sort it through one day. Or I’d be too lazy, and just jettison the lot. Maybe I’d do nothing but sleep. I might stay up there for weeks on end; then again, I might be ready to come down after a couple of days and find people charming and kind.

For the moment, my dream of solitude can’t be realized—probably not in fact before I’m dead, and then I won’t be able to enjoy it.

Now I need to go and see Luise and my in-laws. Oh, Christ. Luise happens to be my fiancée and in for a penny, in for a pound. (Idiotic saying. Why in for a pound if you’re in for a penny? You could be in for a penny a thousand times over and never be in for a pound.)

I have yet to put up proper resistance to Luise. It’s not really in me to be rough with mild-mannered girls in flowered frocks. Also, when I first met Luise, I was still less normal than I am today.

I was a young recruit in a small Moselle village in the early autumn, undergoing military training. When I was drafted, I resolved not to let anything get to me, to maintain an inner resistance, and remain dignified and independent. They can kill you, I thought, all cool and manly, but they can’t do anything about your thoughts and feelings. Oh, but they could. After a fortnight, my brain was no more capable of thought than an ancient cowpat. The only thing I was sure about was that I was going about everything the wrong way. My only feeling was fear. I was swimming in an ocean of fear. I still don’t know why I had such irrational fear. It wasn’t that I was afraid of dying, I sometimes wished I could have died. I was afraid of the NCOs, headquarters, uniforms, barracks, corporals, the officers’ voices—the whole massive machinery of it.

I no longer saw human beings, all I saw were the mechanical manifestations of a force that hypnotized me to the point of crippling despair. Sometimes I had the feeling that the world was split in two: one half was me and the other was a huge mass of things, animals, humans, whose sole objective was to harry and torture and mock me. I was numb, I couldn’t understand that others could have such an influence on me. It was hopeless. I was so terrorized I couldn’t even cry anymore. Otherwise, believe me, I would have. I was used to so much freedom from when I was a boy, colorful, tender freedom. I knew that poverty had edges, and life had rough edges that you make yourself. But even they can be good. I knew forces for good and ill, but I didn’t know what force was.

I couldn’t understand either that here were people who weren’t asking me to do things but telling me. That I had to lie in the dirt when others said so, get up when they said so, lie down in the dirt again, run, stand at attention. I didn’t understand it, I couldn’t get it into my head.

I still can’t. I don’t know if other men felt and feel the way I do. When I did speak, I tried to speak like the others, it was a sort of camo language. Perhaps the others did too. Or am I a one-off, an anomaly, a psychopath festooned with neuroses who ought to be in a clinic somewhere? Damnit, I don’t think I’m that unusual, and I don’t think I’m crazy either. Which of course doesn’t prove anything. Where’s the madman who thinks he’s mad?

It ought to be sufficient for me that my aversions are normal. They live in my emotions, and my reason says “very well” to them. Someone tells me he has a bad hand and needs my help. I would carry the coal up from the cellar and sew his buttons and empty his chamber pot and wash the dishes to the best of my ability. But if he started telling me to lie down in the dirt, jump up, do press-ups—then I’d smack him in the face, bad hand or no. Or I would suppose his brain was affected and start looking around for professional help. And when people start to tell me that military discipline is necessary for the preservation of a state, then I tell them where they can put their state. And if they tell me wars are necessary, then I am disgusted by whatever it is makes them so. Cross my heart, any power that forces me to fight, I hope they lose their shitty war.

I felt humiliated then, humiliated almost to the point of annihilation. I obeyed without love and saw no sense in my obedience. There is nothing so humiliating as obedience without willingness and without love.

I wasn’t a rebel. Good God, me a rebel. Then! I was waiting in fascination for the moment when they would next do something to me, when they just happened not to be doing anything. How was I going to be able to do anything to anyone else? I wasn’t even capable of hating another individual. They were all so impersonal to me—the NCOs, the officers, the corporals, the pay sergeants. They all shared one face, the angry face of the machine.

One time, a sergeant in the orderly room showed me a photograph of his three-month-old baby. The man was friendly. Not long ago I happened to run into him near Johanna’s lending library. “Willi Konte,” he said, “remember? And you’re Ferdinand—Christ, man, I knew you right away.” He was happy. I felt awkward, because I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t afraid anymore of the sergeant creature who now bore the name Willi Konte. I was just afraid of hurting the rumpled, friendly, grinning man. In my heart of hearts I’m a coward. I didn’t want to take him up to see my cousin Johanna, who might have adopted him into her collection. So I let him drag me to the corner pub instead.

We drank beer and gin. The sergeant is working for a roofer and is nostalgic for the old days. “It were great, weren’t it,” he said, “let’s drink to those days.” The pub was freshly painted. The landlord had a new belly, which he was pushing along ahead of him shyly and proudly.

I remembered the baby photograph. I was bothered when the sergeant showed it to me. I thought: Is he playing a trick? Do I have to say, oh, he’s adorable! Or am I allowed to say he’s adorable? We’re talking about a baby sergeant, after all. “You’re a clever chap,” said the sergeant in the orderly room, and held the picture under my nose and grinned all over his face. “You’ll understand. Right? Yes?”

“Yes, sir, sergeant!” I replied, and hoped I’d done the right thing. The sergeant disgusted me because he was a sergeant. The product of his loins in the photograph was just as disgusting to me. The most disgusting thing of all was that someone was turning to me for human sympathy when he was part of the machine and represented the machine that was abusing me and violating me.

And now we were drinking pals, I was calling him Willi, and he was telling me he wasn’t doing too well. “How’s the kid?” I asked.

“I’m divorced,” he said, “the kid’s with his mum in Munich, she’s about to get married again, anyway, what kid do you mean?”

I had no interest in Willi Konte and his divorces and his children. I remember him as a sergeant first class. He was a nice guy who wanted to show me the human touch. But I’d been with the army for four weeks and I didn’t have any feelings anymore. I was growing scales. No nice guy was going to scratch my scales and stop their growth.

Sometimes I thought I should have committed suicide. I found my behavior inferior. “You’re sick of life,” I said to myself a lot. My still being around is proof that one is never as sick of life as one might think. One loves it. And what’s with the “one” anyway? Who is “one”? One is neither I nor you. “One” is a copout for someone who doesn’t have the guts to write “I.” For instance, “One falls in love but rarely,” someone says or writes. He doesn’t want to say, I fall in love rarely. Or, you fall in love rarely. He wants to say I and you, everything and nothing, be vague and definite. The little word “one” is a eunuch word, you write it lowercase and take the decisive consonant away from it.^* I resolve to try and say “I” more often.

Now then, I was honestly convinced I didn’t love life anymore. But under mounds of dismalness my little life continued, wooed and worked for me and for itself. I wished I was dead, but I didn’t kill myself.

I don’t think I thought anything during my time as a recruit. Various terrors wipe out one’s capacity to think, and hence one’s capacity to suffer as well. One can’t feel without thinking—and one doesn’t suffer without thinking. One! There we are again. Poor castrate that I am. I take a huge run-up, puff myself up front and back, race off with élan, and wind up in cliché. From now on I won’t say “one” again. I’ll give myself one more chance.

When I think of my time as a recruit, I ask myself sometimes: How could all that happen? How was it possible? I wasn’t polite, but anxious to please. Not a servant, but a lackey. I was the lowest and most abject son of a bitch. A twenty-year-old lieutenant patted me on the back and said, “You carry on like that, man.” I felt liberated and even honored by being patted on the back by my benevolent young superior. I smiled gratefully, flattered.

Then one evening I was sitting on the banks of the Moselle. Opposite me fluffy green hills intruded into my view. The banks were crumbly, and I was a laughable figure. My head was shaved, and my reservist’s uniform was evilly ill-fitting. If I wore it today, I would reap the laughter of thousands at the Cologne Carnival. Back then I was funny because I had to be. Not because I wanted to be.

Next to me on the bank sat a girl who wasn’t laughing at me. Her name was Luise, and she was wearing a flowered frock. I spoke to her, and she spoke to me. I was tired and dull-witted and was relieved that I didn’t have to kiss her. The fact that I wasn’t kissing her spoke in my favor. I wonder how many relationships came about similarly, through such misunderstandings.

Luise wore a flowered frock, and she wasn’t laughing at me. When I met her for the third time on the river-bank, the hills on the other side looked less fluffy and hostile, and I gratefully kissed her hand. It was a tough, willful little hand. I stared into space, the way I always did, and all I saw was maybe a bit of her knee and a scrap of her jolly flowered frock.

Once, I may have stroked Luise’s knee, and another time I stroked her hair. Luise took that to mean that I desired her. And since I didn’t do more than stroke her knee and hair once, quickly, she was convinced I was in love with her.

Her mother had misinformed her about love. “Men are only ever after one thing,” she said, and “Only a man who knows restraint is capable of real love.” At the time I didn’t know anything about these lessons, and I allowed the decisive misunderstandings to come about.

I don’t know when Luise began to view me as her fiancé. At the time I had a three-week furlough in that bloody little village on the Moselle. I expect it’s perfectly charming, but for me it’s a nightmare, even now. Even a paradise in which I was that unhappy is hell in the memory.

Luise was going to stay with her parents in Cologne Bayenthal. Before I went up the line with my company, I was in Cologne for a couple of days too. I still owned the little bookstore in the old town, my inheritance from my drunken old uncle. Later, three big fat bombs fell on it. It wasn’t really necessary. Along with the rest of the building it was so rickety, a dud would have done the job. While I was living there, I only ever spoke softly, breathed quietly, and when I needed to sneeze, I went outside. All for fear of the place collapsing.

During my furlough, I once visited Luise at her parents’, a courtesy call, no more. Luise had sent me parcels of some of her strangely tough homebaked cookies. I chewed on them, and then felt ungrateful because they were so bad.

Yes, and next thing I was sitting at her parents’ place, at their coffee table, and I was her fiancé. I couldn’t understand why these strangers were nice to me and seemed to like me. I could have run off, but I didn’t want to give offense. Also, I was thinking, what does it matter, you might as well say yes to everything, you’re about to go, and before long you’ll be dead.

My father-in-law was an elderly gentleman who looked somehow plucked, with a dull, yellow forehead and mobile little eyes. He used to call me “our brave defender of the fatherland.” He would say “we men” and “these are historic times.”

He’s a middle-ranking official. I don’t know at what point one ceases to be middle-ranking and becomes a senior official, and whether a senior official is more or less than a top official.

His name is Leo Klatte, and the day before yesterday he was de-Nazified. “Re-classified as a fellow traveler,” he told me proudly. I wonder who thought of the word “re-classified”? Can it satisfy the ambition of a proud German man to be a re-classified fellow traveler?

Luise is the Klattes’ only child. Herr Klatte is a domestic tyrant. Tyrants resemble one another as drinkers resemble one another and vary as drinkers vary. What they have in common is the compulsion. Tyrants seek the intoxication of power, drinkers the intoxication of alcohol. To the unintoxicated, all intoxicated people look alike. They either avert their gaze, or they make way for him, as for a force of nature. Many people have a great yearning for a force of nature in human form. It’s more than they can do at times, to continue to pray to the invisible and incomprehensible. They want God in a human body and wandering over the earth.

My father-in-law Leo Klatte is an amiable enough dictator. My mother-in-law Emmi is a gently weathered, slightly dippy blonde. She is afraid she will lose the respect of her fellow-beings if her lemon pudding fails to rise, and she feels violated if her carpet is stained. She has experienced everything, war and bombing and the destruction of her flat. Fortunately, she was able to move into the ground floor of the same building. During air raids she would sit in the shelter and knit. When it got to be very bad, she would lie down on the basement floor with her knitting, and wail and pray. When the raid was over, she would go upstairs and give the floor a much-needed waxing.

She too had her great time. It is possible she may have been a pirate wench in another lifetime and then degenerated in the course of subsequent incarnations.

Shortly before the end of the war, Klatte was given the rank of captain in an administrative position. For the whole family that meant military glory and reaching their social pinnacle.

As the war ended mother and daughter were by themselves in Cologne. They had stayed behind in their flat to look after their handful of inferior junk. God knows, they must have experienced some terrific bombing. If someone had told me years back that a pale, forget-me-not-blue woman like my mother-in-law wouldn’t simply die of fright during a bombardment that felt like the end of the world, I wouldn’t have believed it. I would have bet all my future happiness on it. Just as well I didn’t.

The war finished, and Emmi Klatte took to thieving. The bombing had stopped, the artillery had packed it in. The city seemed wiped out, destroyed. But some things weren’t. In the midst of the ruins there were a few intact, abandoned houses and flats in pallid, ghostly glory. Everything belonged to everyone. Insatiable and obsessed, my forget-me-not-blue mother-in-law went on the prowl, and snaffled among other things a sewing machine, various typewriters, four rugs, seventeen eggcups, a gilt frame, a bombproof door, a poultry cage, and a pompous drawing-room painting depicting a voluptuous woman lying prone in pink, puffy nudity, a blue moth teetering on the end of her pink index finger, and the whole thing somehow casual.

Before the currency reform the Klattes didn’t know what to do for food. If a poor neighbor happened to receive a CARE package, the Klattes would have happily bitten her throat before the little wretch got anything down her, and it might have been worth it. Through my friend Liebezahl I took a hand. He bought the painting for some fantastic sum in reichsmark, before selling it on for some still more fantastic sum to a racketeer who put it up in his bar.

Whores cut up distinctly rough when you call them a whore. They don’t even take it from other whores. Profiteers don’t care to be hailed “Hey, profiteer.” I know that from my cousin Magnesius. He is a periodic elementary profiteer. What he wants is to be called a businessman. I have no idea what the difference is between a businessman and a profiteer. It’s possible that people who have come by money have at the same time acquired sensitivity and care about labels. Perhaps it’s all in the way it’s said, and it’s down to me if some future Rockefeller feels flattered or offended if I say to him, “How’s it hanging, you old crook?”

My mother-in-law was reluctantly parted from the painting. She wasn’t even pretending when, with tears coursing down her cheeks, she told Liebezahl that it was an old heirloom that had been in the family for generations. Since then, the former owners have appeared. “Awful people,” said Frau Klatte, “not even properly married. People who own such a vulgar piece are bound to be suspicious—and the fact that they want it back, well, doesn’t that say everything.” The fight over the painting has been going on for more than a year, and no end in sight.

For five days my mother-in-law went on the rampage. She slaved away like a coolie and developed the muscles of a removal man or a prizefighter. Novels teach us that when faced with adversity or opportunity, women are capable of developing uncommon strength.

Emergencies, though, by their nature, don’t last, and Frau Klatte lapsed back into her housewifely existence.

Herr Klatte reappeared on the domestic scene, stripped of his heathen glory, looking, in fact, rather bedraggled, like a cock that has had its tail feathers plucked. He was wearing the timeless mufti of the middle-ranking official. Previously the narrow waist and the splendid epaulettes of the officer’s uniform had lent him a breath of intoxicating virility. Not long ago, he hinted to me, “man-to-man,” that he had cast a powerful spell on the widow of a stationmaster. Later, the rail widow had offered her favors to an American sergeant who was still in victorious possession of his uniform splendor. “Don’t talk to me about German womanhood, I know all about it,” said Klatte bitterly. “I’ve had it up to here with politics.”

He settled down among the spoils of his wife and pouted. His wife and daughter waited on him, the household was his to command, and gradually he clambered back up to the temporarily vacant throne of the family dictator, and everyone tried to be as satisfied and dissatisfied as they’d been previously, in the good old days.

I never understood why some of my erstwhile comrades were so angry with women and girls who liked Allied soldiers. My God, hadn’t they dinned it into the poor creatures that the uniformed, powerful, victorious hero had to be the woman’s highest ideal? What was promulgated was this: the German wins, and whoever wins is German.

In a Rhineland village I talked to the owner of a haberdashery—a woman whose understanding enabled her to cope with her life.

The Americans marched into the village. Slowly, reluctantly, but victoriously. The woman was full of joy. The victors gave her Camels, and she gave them the victory palm. In a manner of speaking. After all, this is Germany, not the Sahara. “The Americans won,” she said, “so they must be German, and we must show our gratitude to the gallant victors. The general’s name is Eisenhower, which is almost a German name.”

What was I to say to her? You can’t make women support a war without enthusing them about heroes and fighters. They were supposed to love the smiling victor, and they did. Many women who had been successfully trained to be enthusiasts for the war and worship the heroes later degenerated surprisingly quickly in their national feeling. They couldn’t help whooping at the victor. The pacifist’s sexual compassion for the defeated had failed to develop in them. The infantile joy of the woman at material things enabled her to bloom for the victor in heart and senses.

My bride Luise is among those girls whose virtue could not be impressed by Nescafé or chewing gum. She didn’t fall for the charms of the alien conqueror or for the continual siren song “Hello, Baby!” that rang out through the ruins of the postwar months in Germany.

“I have remained faithful to you,” Luise said to me just at the moment I was going to suggest ending our engagement and parting as friends. “I have remained faithful to you, Ferdinand, you can be proud of me.”

“Thank you, Luise,” I said, and I felt mean and low, because I wasn’t in the least grateful. To lighten my bad conscience, I threw myself on her old stove, to repair it. I didn’t dare suggest breaking our engagement.

A girl like Luise deserves a better man than me. I haven’t given up hope of finding her one. Thus far, I have felt obliged to go on painting the walls in Luise’s flat, fetching firewood and coal, repairing wiring and toilets, looking after the allotment, fitting cellar doors and windowpanes, knocking together furniture, and pickling cabbage. Something new every day.

More than every mountain in the world I love the sea. I often plan to go to some fishing village. Maybe I could help some old fisherman fix his nets and bring in the catch. I think I could. I once lived in Brittany for three months, without a penny.

I told Luise of my plan, and that such a rough and uncertain existence was unsuitable for a sensitive woman like her. “I will go with you,” said Luise, “I will share your burden.” We had seen a film together a few days previously in which the hero throws himself at the violent bosom of a still-unspoilt nature. The doting heroine follows him. Leaving behind her the world of nylons, beauty contests, and New Look, she waded through the storm-tossed dunes to an almost naked collapse. And everything came up roses. She was carried into a handy fisherman’s hut in the strong arms of the hero. He warmed her delicate limbs, and before long there was a merry blaze in the hearth. Dreamily the lovers stared into the crackling logs.

Luise had been impressed. Goddamn the cinemas of the world. How can I go on planning to move to a fishing village, without having to fear persecution? Each time I trod on something unusually soft in those soft dunes, I would have to think, you are stepping on the earthly remains of your loving bride, who lost her way as she tried to follow you. You are stepping on the victim of your brutal, cowardly, manly egoism.

“Mum always says no man knows how much a loving woman sacrifices to him,” she said at the end of our conversation about the fishing village. I was happy that I had curtains to put up, and the stovepipe to take out and clean.

While I was busying myself with the dirty stovepipe, Luise tooted from the next-door room, “You don’t even have a permanent job, but I’m sticking by you, I’m your steadfast little Lu.”

It had always bugged me when she signed her letters like that: “Your little Lu.” She’s a big solid woman. The role of the little chickadee doesn’t suit her.

Maybe I will manage to find a man who likes her. I’ve got to. If Luise takes him, I’ll happily continue to clean sooty stovepipes, even though it’s ghastly work. I promise also to weed the garden, put the sheets through the mangle, help the hens lay, and wash the nappies of the babies.

Unfortunately, we’re not at that stage yet.

^* Man, the German impersonal pronoun meaning “one,” is one letter short of Mann, German for “man.”