For Heinz Schön, being allowed to strike the bell after all did help soften the slights he had suffered. But my son, who on his home page introduced the Russian who fired the torpedoes, paired in a photo with the Gustlaff researcher, commented that this tragedy had brought two peoples together by virtue of its lasting effects; he pointed to the origin of the U-boat, with its sure aim, citing the “superb German engineering,” and even went so far as to assert that only a boat built to German specifications could have brought the Soviets such success that day off the Stolpe Bank.
And I? After the service of remembrance I slunk away to the beach, now shrouded in darkness. There I paced back and forth. Alone, my mind completely blank. Since no wind was blowing, the Baltic lapped the shore listlessly, bearing no message.
This business has been gnawing at the old boy. Actually, he says, his generation should have been the one. It should have found words for the hardships endured by the Germans fleeing East Prussia: the westward treks in the depths of winter, people dying in blinding snowstorms, expiring by the side of the road or in holes in the ice when the frozen bay known as the Frisches Haff began to break up under the weight of horse-drawn carts after being hit by bombs, and still, from the direction of Heiligenbeil, more and more people streaming across the endless snowy waste, terrified of Russian reprisal… fleeing… white death… Never, he said, should his generation have kept silent about such misery, merely because its own sense of guilt was so overwhelming, merely because for years the need to accept responsibility and show remorse took precedence, with the result that they abandoned the topic to the right wing. This failure, he says, was staggering…
But now the old man, who has worn himself out writing, thinks he has found in me someone who has no choice but to stand in for him and report on the incursion of the Soviet armies into the Reich, on Nemmersdorf, and the consequences. It's true: I'm searching for the right words. But he's not the one forcing me to do this, it's Mother. And it's only because of her that the old man is poking his nose in; she's forcing him to force me, as if all this could be written only under duress, as if nothing could get down on paper without Mother.
He claims that in the days when he knew her she was an inscrutable person, someone you could never pin down to any opinion. He wants my Tulla to have this same diffuse glow, and is disappointed now. Never, he says, would he have thought that the Tulla Pokriefke who survived the disaster would have developed in such a banal direction, turning into a Party functionary and an “activist” obediently fulfilling her quotas. He would have expected something anarchistic of her instead, an irrational act, such as setting off a bomb without a specific motive, or perhaps coming to some horrifying realization. After all, he says, it was the adolescent Tulla who, in the middle of wartime and surrounded by people deliberately turning a blind eye, saw a whitish heap to one side of the Kaiserhafen flak battery, recognized it as human remains, and announced loudly, “That's a pile o' bones!”
The old man doesn't really know Mother. And I? Do I know her any better? Probably only Aunt Jenny has any inkling of her being — or nothingness; at one point she told me, “Fundamentally my friend Tulla should be seen as a nun manque, with stigmata, of course…” This much is clear: Mother is impossible to read. Even as a Party cadre she could not be made to toe the line. When I wanted to go to the West, her only response was, “Well, go on over, for all I care,” and she didn't blow the whistle on me, with the result that considerable pressure was put on her in Schwerin; even the Stasi is supposed to have come knocking, but apparently without success…
In those days she placed all her hopes in me. But then I fizzled out, and she decided I was a waste of time, so as soon as the Wall was gone, she began to knead my son. Konny was only ten or eleven when he fell into his grandmothers clutches. And after the survivors' reunion in Damp, where I was a nonentity, lurking on the edges while he became the crown prince, she pumped him full of tales: tales of the flight, of atrocities, of rapes — tales about things she hadn't experienced in person but that were being told everywhere once Russian tanks rolled across the eastern border of the Reich in October 1944 and advanced into the districts of Goldab and Gumbinnen, tales that spread like wildfire, causing terror and panic.
That's how it must have — could have been. That's more or less the way it was. When units of the German 4th Army managed to retake the town of Nemmersdorf a few days after the advance of the Soviet nth Guards Army, one could smell, see, count, photograph, and film for the newsreels shown in all the cinemas in the Reich how many women had been raped by Russian soldiers, then killed and nailed to barn doors. T-34 tanks had pursued people as they fled and rolled over them. Children who had been shot were left lying in front gardens and in ditches. Even French prisoners of war, who had been forced to work on farms near Nemmersdorf, were liquidated — forty of them, so the story went.
These particulars and others as well I found on the Internet under the address with which I was by now familiar. There was also a translation of an appeal penned by the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg, calling on all Russian soldiers to murder, rape, and take revenge for the havoc wreaked by the fascist beasts on the fatherland, revenge for Mother Russia. Under the URL www.blutzeuge.de my son, recognizable only to me, bewailed this state of affairs in the language used during the period in question for official proclamations: “These horrors were visited by subhuman Russians on defenseless German women…” and “Thus the Russian soldateska raged…” and “This terror still menaces all of Europe if no dam is erected against the Asiatic tide…” As an added attraction he had scanned and included a poster used by the German Christian Democrats in the fifties, showing a devouring monster with Asiatic features.
Spread by way of the Internet and downloaded by who knows how many users, these sentences and the captions to the accompanying illustrations could be read as if they applied to current events, even though the crumbling of Russia or the atrocities in the Balkans and in Ruanda were not mentioned. To illustrate his latest campaign, my son needed no more than the corpse-strewn battlefields of the past; no matter who had sown them, they bore a rich harvest.
The only thing left for me to add is that during those few days when Nemmersdorf became the epitome of horror, the contempt for everything Russian that had previously been instilled in Germans abruptly turned into abject fear of the Russians themselves. The newspaper reports, radio commentaries, and newsreel images from the reconquered town triggered a mass exodus from East Prussia, which escalated into panic when the Soviets launched their major offensive in mid-January. As people fled by land, they began to die like flies by the side of the road. I can't describe it. No one can describe it. Just this: some of the refugees reached the ports of Pillau, Danzig, and Gotenhafen. Hundreds of thousands tried to escape by ship from the horror closing in on them. Hundreds of thousands — the statistics tell us over two million made it safely to the West — crowded onto warships, passenger liners, and freighters. So, too, people crowded onto the Wilhelm Gustloff, which had been lying at Gotenhafen's Oxhöft Pier for years.