A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (2 page)

City life: short skirts (“knee huggers”), high-heeled shoes, permanent wave, earrings, unclouded joy of life. Even a stay abroad! Chambermaid in the Black Forest, flocks of
ADMIRERS
, kept at a
DISTANCE
! Dates, dancing, entertainment, fun; hidden fear of sex (“They weren’t my type”). Work, pleasure; heavy-hearted, light-hearted; Hitler had a nice voice on the radio. The homesickness of those who can’t afford anything; back at the Hôtel du Lac (“I’m doing the bookkeeping now”); glowing references (“Fräulein … has shown aptitude and willingness to learn. So conscientious, frank, and cheerful that we find it hard. … She is leaving our establishment of her own free will”). Boat rides,
all-night
dances, never tired.

On 10 April, 1938, the Yes to Germany! “The Führer arrived at 4.15 p.m., after a triumphal passage through the streets of Klagenfurt to the strains of the Badenweiler March. The rejoicing of the masses seemed to know no bounds. The thousands of swastika flags in the spas and summer resorts were reflected in the already ice-free waters of the Wörthersee. The airplanes of the old Reich and our native planes vied with one another in the clouds overhead.”

The newspapers advertised plebiscite badges and silk or paper flags. After football games the teams marched off with a regulation “
Sieg Heil!
” The letter A was replaced by the letter D on the bumpers of motor vehicles. On the radio: 6.15, call to arms; 6.35, motto of
the day; 6.40, gymnastics; 8–12 p.m., Radio Königsberg: Richard Wagner concert followed by entertainment and dance music.

“How to mark your ballot on 10 April: make a
bold
cross in the
larger
circle under the word
YES
.”

Thieves just out of jail were locked up again when they claimed that the objects found in their possession had been bought in department stores that
MEANWHILE HAD GONE OUT OF EXISTENCE
because they had belonged to Jews.

Demonstrations, torchlight parades, mass meetings. Buildings decorated with the new national emblem
SALUTED
; forests and mountain peaks
DECKED
THEMSELVES
OUT
; the historic events were represented to the rural population as a drama of nature.

“We were kind of excited,” my mother told me. For the first time, people did things together. Even the daily grind took on a festive mood, “until late into the night”. For once, everything that was strange and incomprehensible in the world took on meaning and became part of a larger context; even disagreeable, mechanical work was festive and meaningful. Your automatic movements took on an athletic quality, because you saw innumerable others making the same movements. A new life, in which you felt protected, yet free.

The rhythm became an existential ritual. “Public need before private greed, the community comes
first.” You were at home wherever you went; no more homesickness. Addresses on the backs of photographs; you bought your first date book (or was it a present?)—all at once you had so many friends and there was so much going on that it became possible to
FORGET
something. She had always wanted to be proud of something, and now, because what she was doing was somehow important, she actually was proud, not of anything in particular, but in general—a state of mind, a newly attained awareness of being alive—and she was determined never to give up that vague pride.

She still had no interest in politics: what was
happening
before her eyes was something entirely different from politics—a masquerade, a newsreel festival, a secular church fair. “Politics” was something colourless and abstract, not a carnival, not a dance, not a band in local costume, in short, nothing
VISIBLE
. Pomp and ceremony on all sides. And what was “politics”? A meaningless word, because, from your schoolbooks on, everything connected with politics had been dished out in catchwords unrelated to any tangible reality and even such images as were used were devoid of human content: oppression as chains or boot heel, freedom as mountaintop, the economic system as a reassuringly smoking factory chimney or as a pipe enjoyed after the day’s work, the social system as a descending ladder: “Emperor-King-Nobleman-Burgher-Peasant-Weaver/Carpenter-Beggar-Gravedigger”: a game, incidentally,
that could be played properly only in the prolific families of peasants, carpenters, and weavers.

That period helped my mother to come out of her shell and become independent. She acquired a presence and lost her last fear of human contact: her hat awry, because a young fellow was pressing his head against hers, while she merely laughed into the camera with an expression of self-satisfaction. (The fiction that photographs can “tell us” anything—but isn’t all formulation, even of things that have really happened, more or less a fiction?
Less
, if we content ourselves with a mere record of events;
more
, if we try to formulate in depth? And the more fiction we put into a narrative, the more likely it is to interest others, because people identify more readily with formulations than with recorded facts. Does this explain the need for poetry? “Breathless on the riverbank” is one of Thomas Bernhard’s formulations.)

The war—victory communiqués introduced by
portentous
music, pouring from the “people’s radio sets”, which gleamed mysteriously in dimly lit “holy corners”—further enhanced people’s sense of self, because it “increased the uncertainty of all circumstances” (Clausewitz) and made the day-to-day happenings that had formerly been taken for granted seem excitingly fortuitous. For my mother the war was not a childhood nightmare that would colour her whole emotional
development as it did mine; more than anything else, it was contact with a fabulous world, hitherto known to her only from travel folders. A new feeling for distances, for how things had been
BACK IN PEACETIME
, and most of all for other individuals, who up until then had been confined to the shadowy roles of casual friends, dance partners, and fellow workers. And also for the first time, a family feeling: “Dear Brother … I am looking at the map to see where you might be now … Your sister…”.

And in the same light her first love: a German party member, in civilian life a savings-bank clerk, now an army paymaster, which gave him a rather special standing. She was soon in the family way. He was married, and she loved him dearly; anything he said was all right with her. She introduced him to her parents, went hiking with him, kept him company in his soldier’s loneliness.

“He was so attentive to me, and I wasn’t afraid of him the way I had been with other men.”

He did the deciding and she trailed along. Once he gave her a present—perfume. He also lent her a radio for her room and later took it away again. “At that time” he still read books, and together they read one entitled
By the Fireside
. On the way down from a mountain pasture on one of their hikes, they had started to run. My mother broke wind and my father reproved her; a little later he too let a fart escape him and followed it with a slight cough, hem-hem. In telling me of this incident years later, she bent double and giggled maliciously, though
at the same time her conscience troubled her because she was belittling her only love. She herself thought it comical that she had once loved someone, especially a man like him. He was smaller than she, many years older, and almost bald; she walked beside him in
low-heeled
shoes, always at pains to adapt her step to his, her hand repeatedly slipping off his inhospitable arm; an ill-matched, ludicrous couple. And yet, twenty years later, she still longed to feel for someone what she had then felt for that savings-bank wraith. But there never was
ANOTHER
: everything in her life had conspired to inculcate a kind of love that remains fixated on a particular irreplaceable object.

It was after graduating from the Gymnasium that I first saw my father: on his way to the rendezvous, he chanced to come toward me in the street; he was wearing sandals, a piece of paper was folded over his sunburned nose, and he was leading a collie on a lead. Then, in a small café in her home village, he met his former love; my mother was excited, my father embarrassed; standing by the jukebox at the other end of the café, I picked out Elvis Presley’s
Devil in Disguise
. My mother’s husband had got wind of all this, but he had merely sent his youngest son to the café as an indication that he was in the know. After buying himself an ice-cream cone, the child stood next to his mother and the stranger, asking her from time to time, always in the same words, if she was going home soon. My father put sunglasses
over his regular glasses, said something now and then to the dog, and finally announced that he “might as well” pay up. “No, no, it’s on me”, he said, when my mother also took her purse out of her handbag. On the trip we took together, the two of us wrote her a postcard. In every hotel we went to, he let it be known that I was his son, for fear we’d be taken for homosexuals (Article 175). Life had disappointed him, he had become more and more lonely. “Now that I know people, I’ve come to appreciate animals”, he said, not quite in earnest of course.

Shortly before I was born, my mother married a German army sergeant, who had been
COURTING
her for some time and didn’t mind her having a child by someone else. “It’s this one or none!” he had decided the first time he laid eyes on her, and bet his buddies that he would get her or, conversely, that she would take him. She found him repulsive, but everyone harped on her duty (to give the child a father); for the first time in her life she let herself be intimidated and laughed rather less. Besides, it impressed her that someone should have taken a shine to her.

“Anyway, I reckoned he’d be killed in the war”, she told me. “But then all of a sudden I started worrying about him.”

In any case, she was now entitled to a state loan. With the child she went to Berlin to stay with her
husband’s parents. They tolerated her. When the first bombs fell, she went back home—the old story. She began to laugh again, sometimes so loudly that everyone cringed.

She forgot her husband, squeezed her child so hard that it cried, and kept to herself in this house where, after the death of her brothers, those who remained looked uncomprehendingly through one another. Was there, then, nothing more? Had that been all? Masses for the dead, childhood diseases, drawn curtains,
correspondence
with old acquaintances of carefree days, making herself useful in the kitchen and in the fields, running out now and then to move the child into the shade; then, even here in the country, air-raid sirens, the population scrambling into the cave shelters, the first bomb crater, later used for children’s games and as a garbage dump. The days were haunted, and once again the outside world, which years of daily contact had wrested from the nightmares of childhood and made familiar, became an impalpable ghost.

My mother looked on in wide-eyed astonishment. Fear didn’t get the better of her; but sometimes, infected by the general fright, she would burst into a sudden laugh, partly because she was ashamed that her body had suddenly made itself so churlishly independent. In her childhood and even more so in her young girlhood, “Aren’t you ashamed?” or “You ought to be ashamed” had rung in her ears like a litany. In this rural, Catholic
environment, any suggestion that a woman might have a life of her own was an impertinence: disapproving looks, until shame, at first acted out in fun, became real and frightened away the most elementary feelings. Even in joy, a “woman’s blush”, because joy was something to be ashamed of; in sadness, she turned red rather than pale and instead of bursting into tears broke out in sweat.

In the city my mother had thought she had found a way of life that more or less suited her, that at least made her feel good. Now she came to realize that, by excluding every other alternative, other people’s way of life had set itself up as the one and only hope of salvation. When, in speaking of herself, she went beyond a statement of fact, she was silenced by a glance.

A bit of gaiety, a dance step while working, the humming of a hit song, were foolishness, and soon she herself thought so, because no one reacted and she was left alone with her gaiety. In part, the others lived their own lives as an example; they ate so little as an example, were silent in each other’s presence as an example, and went to confession only to remind the stay-at-homes of their sins.

And so she was starved. Her little attempts to explain herself were futile mutterings. She felt free—but there was nothing she could do about it. The others, to be sure, were children; but it was oppressive to be looked at so reproachfully, especially by children.

When the war was over, my mother remembered her husband and, though no one had asked for her, went to Berlin. Her husband, who had also forgotten that he had once courted her on a bet, was living with a girlfriend in Berlin; after all, there had been a war on.

But she had her child with her, and without
enthusiasm
they both took the path of duty.

They lived in a sublet room in Berlin-Pankow. The husband worked as a tram driver and drank, worked as a tram conductor and drank, worked as a baker and drank. Taking with her her second child, who had been born in the meantime, his wife went to see his employer and begged him to give her husband one more chance, the old story.

In this life of misery, my mother lost her
country-round
cheeks and achieved a certain chic. She carried her head high and acquired a graceful walk. Whatever she put on was becoming to her. She had no need of fox furs. When her husband sobered up and clung to her and told her he loved her, she gave him a merciful, pitying smile. By then, she had no illusions about anything.

They went out a good deal, an attractive couple. When he was drunk, he got
FRESH
and she had to be
SEVERE
with him. Then he would beat her because she had nothing to say to him, when it was he who brought home the bacon.