WEDNESDAY, 13 JUNE 1945
A day to myself. The widow and I went out to look for nettles and orache, and roamed through the professor’s ruined garden, now run wild. Even if I did receive permission to tend the garden, I would be too late. Strangers’ have broken off whole branches of the cherry tree, picking the cherries just barely turned gold. Nothing will ripen here; hungry people will harvest everything before its time.
Cold, storms and rain. The tram drove down our street again for the first time. I jumped on right away, just for the ride, but once on board I realized that it would be a good time to go to the town hall and ask whether we really could expect pay for our week’s labour for the Russians. It turned out my name was indeed on the list, along with all the others, with every workday neatly recorded. They’d even entered the amounts to be withheld for tax. I am to be paid. 56 marks – though not until there’s money in the coffers again. The clerk asked me to check again next week. At any rate they’re keeping the books and adding amounts and collecting the money, so I’m bound to get something.
While I waited in the rain for the tram to take me back, I spoke with two refugees, a married couple. They’d been travelling for eighteen days from Czech territory and had bad things to report. The man told how the Czech at the border was stripping Germans of their shirts and hitting them with dogwhips. ‘We can’t complain,’ his wife said, wearily, ‘We brought it on ourselves.’ Apparently all the roads from the east are swarming with refugees.
On the way home I saw people coming out of a cinema. I immediately got off and went into the half-empty auditorium for the next showing. A Russian film, entitled At Six p.m. After the War. A strange feeling, after all the pulp-novels I’ve been living, to sit in the audience and watch a film.
There were still soldiers in the audience, alongside several dozen Germans, mostly children. Hardly any women, though – they’re still reluctant to venture into dark places with all the uniforms. But none of the men paid any attention to us civilians, they were all watching the screen and laughing diligently. I devoured the film, which was bursting with salt-of-the-earth characters: sturdy women, healthy men. It was a talking movie, in Russian – I understood quite a bit, since it takes place among simple people. The film had a happy end – victory fireworks over the turrets of Moscow, though it was apparently filmed in 1944. Our leaders never risked anything like that, for all their promises of future triumphs.
Once again I feel oppressed by our German disaster. I came out of the cinema deeply saddened, but help myself by summoning things that dull my emotions. Like that bit of Shakespeare I jotted in my notebook, back then in Paris, when I discovered Spengler and felt so dejected by his Decline of the West. ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ Losing two world wars hits damned deep.
THURSDAY, 14 JUNE 1945
And once again the walking machine was back in Charlottenburg. If only our firm were already in operation and I had my Group II ration card, with 500 grams of bread per day so that I could save a little of it for the evening. As it is I sacrifice all six of the rye rolls I get every morning for breakfast. That is to say, I pack two with me and eat them at the two breaks I allow myself; otherwise I’d give out. Despite my ‘frying’ them in coffee substitute, the rancid-tasting potatoes are difficult to get down. I should pick them over again; the little pile is melting away at an alarming rate.
Dozens of telephones were lining the hallway outside the engineer’s apartment. They’re being collected from everywhere, supposedly for the Russians. Berlin without phones! Looks like we’ll go back to being cavemen.
The evening brought a nice surprise. I finally procured my ration of fat for the past twenty days at the corner shop – 20 times 7 equals 140 grams of sunflower oil. Reverently I carried back home the little bottle I’d been toting around all week in vain. Now my apartment smells like a Moscow stolovaya – one of those cafeterias for ordinary people.
FRIDAY, 15 JUNE 1945
I went down very early to get my six daily rolls. They’re dark and wet – we never had anything like them before. I no longer dare buy a whole loaf, because I’d eat up the next day’s portion.
Today we broke into my old employer’s basement. The Hungarian, the engineer and I slipped in through the back, through the laundry room. We had managed to prise open the crate, which was standing untouched in the shed, when the wife of the company’s representative appeared on the basement stairs. They’re still living in the building. I mumbled something about having left some files and papers lying around. The men hid behind the crate. Then we broke off the frames, tore out the pictures – photographs signed by young men decorated with the Knight’s Cross – and stacked the glass panes; we had brought some packing paper and string with us. After that we were able to make our getaway through the back entrance. I don’t really care if they notice the loss; after all, I lost my camera and all my equipment, which I had left at work at my boss’s request, when the place was destroyed by a bomb. What are a few panes of glass compared with that? We absconded with our loot as fast as we could, each of us lugging a heavy stack of glass to my place where the men had parked our two valuable company bicycles. I was given four panes as commission. I could have glazed one whole window in my attic apartment – if I’d had any putty.
In the evening I read some of the rather random selection of books belonging to the apartment’s rightful tenant. I found a copy of Tolstoy’s Polikushka and read that for the umpteenth time. Then I ploughed through a collection of plays by Aeschylus, and came across The Persians, which, with its lamentations of the vanquished, seems well suited to our defeat. But in reality it’s not. Our German calamity has a bitter taste – of repulsion, sickness, insanity, unlike anything in history. The radio just broadcast another concentration camp report. The most horrific thing is the order and the thrift: millions of human beings as fertilizer, mattress-stuffing, soft soap, felt mats – Aeschylus never saw anything like that.
FROM SATURDAY, 16 JUNE TO FRIDAY, 22 JUNE 1945
I haven’t been writing. And I won’t be either – that time is over. It was around 5 p.m. on Saturday when the doorbell rang. The widow, I thought to myself. But it was Gerd, in civilian dress, suntanned, his hair lighter than ever. For a long time neither of us said a thing; we just stared at each other in the dim hallway like two ghosts.
‘Where have you come from? Have you been discharged?’
‘No, I just sneaked off. But now would you let me in?’ He was dragging a sled behind him, mounted on small wheels and loaded with a trunk and a sack.
I was feverish with joy. No, Gerd wasn’t coming from the Western Front. His anti-aircraft unit had been shipped out to the east at the last minute. After an enemy shell hit their position three of them went off and parked themselves in an abandoned villa, where they found suits, shoes, a bale of tobacco and sufficient food. The situation got dicey though, when the local authorities, a mixture of Russians and Poles, started going through the houses. The three joined a group of Berlin evacuees and marched home with them. Gerd knew my current address from the red-bordered field-post he received about my apartment being hit. Of course, he fully expected to find my new lodgings destroyed as well and me who-knows-where. He’s amazed I’m here and in one piece. When I told him about my starvation rations he shook his head and claimed that from here on in he’d take care of getting what was needed. He had some potatoes in his sack, in perfect condition, and a piece of bacon. I started cooking it immediately, and invited the widow to join us. She knows Gerd from my stories, greeted him with an effusive hug, even though she’d never seen him before, and in her torrent of words was soon showing him her thumb-and-finger trick: ‘Ukrainian woman – like this. You – like this.’