Not until 3 January did Marinesko, by now sober again, report back to Turku. The NKVD immediately interrogated him, holding him under suspicion of espionage. Since he had no recollection of any of the stages of his extended shore leave, he had nothing but memory gaps to present in his own defense. Eventually his superior, Captain First Class Orjel, managed to postpone the convening of a court-martial by citing Comrade Stalin's recent order for an all-out effort. Captain Orjel had only a few experienced commanders at his disposal and did not want to diminish the fighting power of his unit. When even die crew of S-13 intervened in the proceedings against their captain with a petition for clemency, and the NKVD began to see mutiny as a possibility, Orjel ordered this U-boat commander, who was unreliable only on shore leave, to set course at once for Hangö, whose harbor S-13 left a week later. Icebreakers had opened the navigation channel. The boat was supposed to head for the Baltic coast, passing the Swedish island of Gotland.
There is a film in black and white made at the end of the fifties. It is called Night Fell over Gotenhafen, and its cast includes stars like Brigitte Horney and Sonja Ziemann. The director, a German American by the name of Frank Wisbar, who had earlier made a film about Stalingrad, hired the Gustlojf expert Heinz Schön as an adviser. Banned in the East, the film achieved only modest success in the West, and is now forgotten, like the unfortunate ship itself, submerged in the depths of archives.
While I was living with Mothers friend Jenny Brunies in West Berlin and attending secondary school, I went to see it, at her insistence — ”Tulla conveyed to me that she would very much like us to see the film together” — and was quite disappointed. The plot was utterly predictable. Just as in all the Titanic films, a love story had to be brought in as filler, taking on heroic dimensions at the end, as if the sinking of an overcrowded ship weren't exciting, the thousands of deaths not tragic enough.
A wartime romance. In Night Fell over Gotenhafen, after a much too long prelude in Berlin, East Prussia, and elsewhere, the love triangle is revealed: the cuckolded husband, a soldier at the eastern front, who is later brought onto the ship, critically wounded; the unfaithful wife, a temptress torn between two men, who manages to get on board with her infant; and a playboy naval officer who figures as adulterer, father, and rescuer of the infant. Although Aunt Jenny managed to cry at certain passages in the film, when she invited me afterward to join her at the Paris Bar, where I had my first Pernod, she remarked, “Your mother would not have found much to like about the film, because they show not a single birth, either before or after the sinking of the ship…” And then she added, “In point of fact there's no way you can film something so terrible.”
I'm sure that Mother didn't have a lover on board, or any of my possible fathers. It's not out of the question, however, that even in her advanced state of pregnancy she attracted men from the ship's personnel — that was her way, and still is: she possesses an internal magnet that she refers to as “a certain something.” As the story goes, the anchors had hardly been weighed when one of the naval recruits, in training for U-boat duty — ”A pale fellow with pimples all over his face” — escorted the pregnant girl to the top deck. She was feeling too restless to stay put. I would reckon the sailor was about Mothers age, seventeen or barely eighteen. He carefully guided her on his arm across the sundeck, which was slippery as glass, because it was completely iced over. And when Mother looked around, with those eyes that never missed a thing, she noticed that the davits, blocks, and mountings of the port and starboard lifeboats and their cables were coated with ice.
How many times have I heard her comment: “When I saw that, my knees went weak”? And in Damp, as she stood there, lean and all in black, surrounded by older gentlemen and initiating my son Konrad into the myopic world of the survivors, I heard her saying, “I realized then there was no way we could be rescued with them boats iced over. I wanted to get off. I screamed like a maniac. But it was too late already…”
The film I saw with Aunt Jenny in a theater on Kantstrasse showed none of this — no lumps of ice on the davits, no ice-coated railing, not even ice floes in the harbor. Yet in Schön's account, as well as in the paperback report by the Englishmen Dobson, Miller, and Payne, we read that on 30 January 1945 the weather was frigid — minus 180 Celsius. Icebreakers had had to clear a channel in the Bay of Danzig. Heavy seas and squalls were predicted.
When I let myself wonder nevertheless whether Mother might not have left the ship in time, the basis for this essentially pointless speculation can be found in the established fact that soon after the Gustlojf pulled away from the dock, a coastal steamer, the Reval, suddenly materialized out of the driving snow, heading straight for the Gustloff. Crammed with refugees from Tilsit and Königsberg, the ship was coming from Pillau, the last harbor in East Prussia. Since there was not enough room below decks for all the passengers, they were packed in tight on the open deck. As would become clear later, many had frozen to death during the crossing but remained upright, held in place by the standing block of ice.
When the Gustlojf stopped and let down a few rope ladders, some survivors managed to scramble to what they thought was safety on the large ship; they found crannies in the overheated corridors and stairwells.
Couldn't Mother have gone in the opposite direction by way of a rope ladder? All her life, she has known when to turn back. This would have been her chance!
Why not leave the doomed ship for the Reval? If she had ventured down the ladder, in spite of her big belly, I would have been born somewhere else — who knows where — but certainly later, and not on 30 January.
There it is again, that damned date. History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising. For instance, this accursed thirtieth. How it clings to me, marks me. What good has it done that I have always avoided celebrating my birthday — whether as a schoolboy or a university student, as a newspaper editor or husband, whether among friends, colleagues, or family members? I was always afraid that at a party someone might pin the thrice-cursed significance of the thirtieth on me — in a toast, for example — even when it looked as though this date, once force-fed to the point of bursting, had slimmed down over the years, becoming innocuous, a day on the calendar like any other. By now, after all, we Germans have come up with expressions to help us deal with the past: we are to atone for it, come to terms with it, go through a grieving process. But then it seemed as if on the Internet flags had to be displayed — still, or again — on the thirtieth, the state holiday. At any rate, my son highlighted the day of the Nazi takeover as a red-letter day, for all the world to see. In the housing project in Grosser Dreesch, built of concrete slabs, where he had been living with his grandmother since the beginning of the new school year, he continued his activity as Webmaster. Gabi, my ex, had not wanted to interfere with our son's desire to exchange left-leaning maternal lecturing for grandmotherly brainwashing. Even worse, she had shrugged off all responsibility: “Konrad s going to be seventeen soon, old enough to make choices for himself.”