In the late sixties the director Rolf Lyssy made a film that had as its subject this man of the sorrowful countenance. I've played the video at home; the black-and-white original has been gone from the theaters for years. Lyssy presents the facts quite accurately. We see the medical student, initially wearing a beret, later a hat, smoking despairingly and downing pills. When he buys the revolver in Berne's Old Town, two dozen bullets cost him three francs seventy. Unlike my version, even before Gustloff enters his study in street clothes, Frankfurter puts on his hat, moves from the armchair to a straight chair, then fires with his hat on. After turning himself in at the Davos police station and reeling off his confession emotionlessly, like a memorized poem recited in school, he places the revolver on the counter as proof.
The film does not tell us anything new. But it has an interesting feature: clips from newsreels that show the coffin, draped in a swastika flag, moving slowly through falling snow. All of Schwerin is snowed in when the funeral procession gets under way. Contrary to the actual reports, only a few civilians salute the coffin with raised right arms. At the trial, the actor playing Frankfurter looks fairly small, standing between two cantonal policemen. He says, “Gustloff was the only one I could get at…” He says, “My intention was to strike the bacillus, not the person…”
The film also shows, the prisoner Frankfurter working day after day at a loom, surrounded by other prisoners. Time passes. It becomes clear that during his first years in Churs Sennhof Prison he gradually recovers from his bone disease; we see him well nourished, plump-cheeked and no longer smoking. Meanwhile, and as if in another film, in the waters along the Baltic coast the submarine commander Aleksandr Marinesko practices rapid diving after an above-water attack, and the Strength through Joy ship Wilhelm Gustloff'sets out on cruise after cruise to Norway's fjords and the midnight sun.
Of course Lyssy's film shows neither the Gustloff nor the Soviet U-boat; only several shots of the looms allow us to surmise from their pounding that as the simple fabric grows, time is passing. And repeatedly the prison doctor certifies to the prisoner Frankfurter that his continuing residence in jail is making him well. It may look as though the perpetrator has already paid for his deed and become a different person, but I still feel uncomfortable with anyone who has one thing, and one only, on his mind — my son, for instance…
She's the one who infected him. For that, Mother, and also for giving birth to me as the ship was sinking, I hate you. I keep having these episodes of hating the simple fact that I survived, for if you, Mother, had gone overboard like thousands of others when the watchword was “Every man for himself,” and in spite of the life jacket over your bulging belly, if you had frozen in the frigid water or been dragged under, together with your unborn, as the ship sank, bow first…
But no. I cannot, must not come to the tipping point of my own accidental existence yet, for the ship still has peaceful Strength through Joy cruises ahead of it. Ten times it rounded the toe of the Italian boot, including Sicily, with shore excursions in Naples and Palermo, because Italy, organized in exemplary fascist fashion, was a friendly nation; here as there the raised right arm was the compulsory salute.
After an overnight train trip, the passengers, always carefully selected, would embark in Genoa. And at the end of the cruise, they would head home by train from Venice. With increasing frequency, high-muckety-mucks from the Party and industry came along, which caused the Strength through Joy ship's classless society to list somewhat. For example, during one cruise the famous inventor of the Volkswagen, originally called KDF-Wagen, was among the guests; Professor Porsche took a particular interest in the ships state-of-the-art engines.
After wintering in Genoa, the Gustloff reached Hamburg again in mid-March of '39. When the Robert Ley came into service a few days later, the KDF fleet comprised thirteen ships, but for now the pleasure trips for workers and white-collar employees were over. Seven ships from the fleet, among them the Ley and the Gustloff, set off down the Elbe for an unannounced destination, and without passengers. Not until they reached Brunsbüttelkoog were the previously sealed orders opened and the destination revealed: the Spanish port of Vigo.
For the first time the ships were to serve as troop transports. Now that the Civil War was over and General Franco and the Falangę had won, the German volunteers of the Condor Legion, righting at Franco s side since '36, could come home.
Not surprisingly, the military unit that went by this name provided ample fodder for the ever-voracious Internet. Getting a jump on all the others, www.blutzeuge.de reported the return of the Luftwaffes 88th Flak Regiment. The account of the legionnaires heading for home on the Gustloff read as vividly as if they had beaten the Reds only yesterday. My Webmaster delivered his report as a solo; the chat room remained closed, permitting no duet — Wilhelm vs. David — on the subject of the bombardment of Guernica, in the Basque region, by our Junker and Heinkel planes, although these types, whether diving or dropping bombs from a higher altitude, richly illustrated the Web site devoted to the victory celebration.
Initially the spokesman for the Comrades of Schwerin presented himself as a detached expert in military history, indicating that the Spanish Civil War had provided an opportunity for trying out new weaponry, just as the Gulf War had given the Americans a chance a few years back to test their new missile systems. But before long the tone in which he spoke of the Condor Legion became positively lyrical. Apparently he had drawn on Heinz Schöns painstakingly researched book, for he echoed Schöns enthusiastic description of the ships return to port and the reception its passengers received. And like the chronicler of the Gustloff, whom he repeatedly quoted online, he assumed the role of eyewitness — “Those on board were rejoicing in their smashing success…” — and he reported “deafening applause” when the legionnaires were greeted later by Field Marshal Goring. On the Web site he even posted the musical notation, with all the requisite oom-pah-pah, of the Prussian Grenadiers' March, which the band struck up as the Gustlojf and the Ley tied up at the pier in Hamburg.
While the Gustloff was being used as a troop transport for the first time, and David Frankfurter, enjoying much improved health, was serving the third year of his sentence in Sennhof Prison, Aleksandr Marinesko continued undeterred with his practice runs in coastal waters. In the naval archives of the Baltic Red Banner Fleet, a file on the submarine M-96 has turned up, revealing how successfully the commander drilled his crew for above-water attacks: eventually they were able to submerge a vessel in the record time of 19.5 seconds, as compared to a fleet average ot 28 seconds. M-96 was tested for the real thing. And on the Comrades of Schwerin Web site, too, it looked as if the oft-repeated line from the song “Revenge will come our way one day…” had helped them get ready, if not yet tested, for something undefined — the day of reckoning.
Somehow I could not dismiss the thought that this person incessantly stirring the Nazi pot and hailing the triumph of the Thousand-Year Reich like a cracked record was not some has-been like Mother but a young man — perhaps a skinhead of the more intelligent sort, or an obsessed schoolboy, engaging in sophistry over the Net. But I did not follow up on my hunch, did not want to admit that certain phrases in these digital postings, such as the seemingly innocuous judgment that “the Gustlojf was a beautiful ship,” had an alarmingly familiar ring. That was not Mother's actual voice, but still…