Bernhard was enjoying the first summer of the new decade. Even though the weather forecast for July 8, 1950 didn’t look that good: shifting clouds, some thunder, a high of 20 degrees during the day, 15 at night. Fooling around with Helga outdoors might mean catching nephritis or getting inflammation of the bladder - but where else could they go, they were never alone, not even for a short hour, in Fuldastrasse or in Karolinenhof. So, what?
He sat in his office and leafed through the Telegraf. His eyes were automatically drawn to the word ‘Neukölln’: Yesterday afternoon the police had to take four reporters from the Soviet-German Berliner Rundfunk radio into protective custody at the Hermannstrasse station in Neukölln : the population was harassing and threatening the journalists as they were trying to report on the lack of water in the neighborhood. What else was there? At the corner of Berlinerstrasse and Uhlandstrasse two communist agitators had been beaten. In a garden colony in Friedenau a 49 year old woman had drowned in a rain tank. On Bayerischen platz the search for 6 year old Petra Koch had gone on for hours, unfortunately without result. On Tegeler lane, the Central Berlin District Courthouse steeple had been erected.
He remembered his grandmother’s favorite saying: “Children, how time goes by!” The year 1950 was already half over. And it had brought so many things: the number of unemployed in the Federal Republic had risen to two million, 13.5 percent of the working age population, an all time high and the government had declared West Berlin a disaster area. Air France had taken over the Berlin-Frankfurt-Paris route out of Tempelhof. In Tegel, Borsig, after having been dismantled by the French, had resumed production. Konrad Adenauer had visited West Berlin as Chancellor for the first time in mid April. On May 1st, there was the biggest ever political demonstration in West Berlin, on the Square of the Republic in front of the Reichstag with the motto Against Unity in chains, for Peace and Liberty. Naturally, Bacheran was there with his mother and aunt. At the end of May there had been a ‘really big thing’ in East Berlin: they had staged the Meeting of the German Youth organization, the FDJ, with 700 000 participants. For the first time since the end of the war a German soccer championship game had taken place in the Olympic stadium and VfB Stuttgart had won 2 to 1 against Kickers Offenbach before 100 000 spectators. The regional broadcasting stations had become part of the ARD broadcasting organization. The Maison de France had been inaugurated on Kurfürstendamm and the KA-DE-WE department store on Wittenbergplatz reopened. Three men belonging to the Gladow gang, whose members had perpetrated more than fifty assaults and robberies between 1948 and 1949 were sentenced to life in prison in a trial by jury in East Berlin. The trial against Elisabeth Kusian would not start until January 1951.
Kusian was not the main topic of conversation between him and Helga, as they sat in her father’s fishing boat on the river Dahme; the main topic was “potato beetles.” The GDR had set up systematic searches in order to put an end to the American onslaught against the food source in the East German sector. In the border region of Niedersachsen large groups of FDJ young people gathered to agitate in the countryside and convince the farmers on the Western side to join the fight.
“You’re lucky they haven’t sent you too to collect the beetles,” Bernhard said. “But no one will ever find such a pretty little beetle as you here.”
Helga did not respond to such banter. “I think there’s some truth in this. If you’re capable of throwing atomic bombs on people’s heads, why would you hesitate to destroy potato crops with beetles?”
“Isn’t that a little far-fetched?” Bernhard asked. How was it going to work out when they were married and living together? Probably the way his old class mate Rüdiger advised. He studied Sociology and Ethnology and he used the example of the Dobu people. They lived on an island off the Eastern tip of New Guinea and were considered to be lawless, deceitful and thoroughly mean. They were all enemies and each settlement was in a state of constant warfare with the others. They destroyed each other’s fields and used magic to bring sickness and death to their enemies. But, in order to avoid the social and physiological damage brought in time by inbreeding, the clans, headed by women, were obliged to find their partners in another clan. When a man from clan A married a woman from clan B and went to live with her, it meant he was taking his workforce away from his own family and so their enemies would gain. That could not be. It was just as unthinkable that the woman might move to the man’s village. What do to then if they wished to thrive? Well, the Dobu solved the problem in a very ingenious way: from their wedding day until the day of their death, the pair lived one year in the man’s village and the next in the woman’s village. It was then possible to properly humiliate and bully each respective ‘foreigner’ according to the dominant cultural code.
Helga was somewhat skeptical of this model when he told her about it. “How could that work for us? We have to register where we live. I can’t very well live in Neukölln and work in the Volks Police.”
“See how ‘primitive’ people are more progressive than we are for certain things.” Bernhard could not think of anything else. It was the famous squaring of the circle. “Oh well, why should we worry about it? Love conquers all, as they say.”
They rowed into the reeds and since the fishing barge had a fairly wide bottom, they could hide from any voyeurs and it was also hard to capsize, they were able to make love as exuberantly as they wished. It was absurd: he was a fervent Nazi hater and yet her body, like the hard, steely bodies idolized in photographs and sculptures by the Nazis was what he loved, and she, a self avowed Socialist or even a Communist, was the perfect example of Nazi womanhood. Her body was hard all over, only the inside of her thighs was like soft moss – and he was crazy about that, crazy to get into that. The contrast was what made him wild.
Afterwards they lay on their backs and gazed silently into the bright blue sky where a few small clouds drifted occasionally. Like feathers or cotton balls. The water rippled softly. Only when a motorboat or a steamer sailed by did the waves hit the sides so that they swayed softly as if in a hammock.
“Can you see the stars?” Bernhard asked.
“In bright daylight?”
“They’re there in the sky, where else would they go? You can’t see them because the sun outshines everything.” He was silent. “And what does that tell us?”
“No idea, what?”
“That often the sun – meaning what’s bright and good, meaning the life force – can turn us away from some other things. And you, in the East, you have the sun on your FDJ flag…”
She shut her eyes. “Must we talk politics now?”
“That’s what you people always do. And I think you need it.”
“Right now, I need something very different. Come…”
Dreams did come true then; but, later they had to go and have coffee at her parents… Just like the Dobus.
Helga’s father held him responsible for the fact that there were so many ex Nazis in key positions in the Western zone. “And among them, the worst are your fellow jurists. They had blood on their hands under the Nazis – and today they continue to hand down their decisions in the name of the people. And what about the officers of Hitler’s criminal Wehrmacht, where are they? They’re at the head of companies. Adenauer welcomes them all. So what are you doing to fight that, Mr. Bacheran? Nothing.”
“But I am: at least I’m a member of the SPD.”
“That’s not enough.”
Bacheran could only agree with Mr. Leupahn since he too thought that denazification was a joke. But still. A Stalinist sitting in his own glass house had no right to cast stones. “We know that too many of the old Nazis escaped unharmed from the process and we will take care that their crimes are not forgotten. But as long as we don’t have a majority in Parliament we can’t get the necessary laws passed. Happily the Federal Republic isn’t a dictatorship like…”
“What’s wrong with the dictatorship of the only people who are reasonable, the dictatorship of reason?”
“In such a system conflicts are repressed, the opposition is jailed or sent to a camp.” Bacheran had talked himself into a rage. “That’s precisely the strength of the free world: conflicts are played out on the free market of ideas, in Parliament and we don’t have a Communist party of the Soviet Union, KPDSU, or an SED that says: ‘The Party is always right.’”
Helga’s mother intervened : “Your Parliament, Mr. Bacheran, doesn’t have a say, things happen only if monocapitalism feels a need for them.”
“In any case, it creates living conditions that, compared to those in the East, seem like paradise, otherwise we wouldn’t have thousands of fugitives coming over weekly.”
“Those people are blind and very soon they will regret having left.”
And so it went on for a while until Bacheran tried as best he could to steer the conversation to more mundane things. His aunt, he said, had made delicious poppy seed cookies. In Wedding he had recently seen Emil, the artist with the straw hat, on his bicycle. Now you could find licorice again. Hannelore Leupahn said they had plenty of food in Schmöckwitz because the cooperative there was providing goods for the camping grounds nearby between Zeuthener and Krossinsee lake, and everything was much cheaper than in the West.
Towards evening diplomatic relations between Bacheran and Mr. Leupahn improved when the young man offered to help him tar the roof on his shed. “The water comes through whenever there’s a heavy rain.” Bernhard put on an old pair of gym pants from KdF times, climbed the ladder and kneeled on the old and already terribly cracked tar paper. From Suhl to Rostock you couldn’t find any tar paper for roofing. He would have liked to buy him two or three rolls in Neukölln but Leupahn categorically refused any such present from the West. The only thing he’d let him bring them was a box of tea. “For your wife… instead of flowers.” They heated the black lump of tar on the hotplate and Leupahn handed it up to Bacheran who laid it painstakingly on the roof with an old tar brush. It was a very dirty job and after an hour’s work he looked worse than a kid playing in slime and sludge.
“Just like the Dobus,” he said to Helga as he came down the ladder. “When are you coming over to us in Fuldastrasse to clean up the cellar and take the junk to the garbage dump?”
Anyway, there hadn’t been any major new incidents and there might even be a silver lining on the horizon.
Helga walked him to the 86 streetcar stop on Verschauer Allee. In the end they did talk about Kusian.
“I happened to meet Dr. Weimann on Monday and he told me Elisabeth Kusian had begged him to do everything in his power to let her see Kurt Muschan. ‘Just once, after that I don’t want anything more from life.’ Word for word.”
“And… is he going to let her?
“Yes. He is after all charged with investigating the psychological background to the crimes, as they say, but he’s not making any progress. He figures maybe she’ll say more about her motives if the two of them see each other again. So Weimann is trying to convince the Examining Magistrate and Muschan too. If it works, he’ll contact me.”