He even proposed a meeting place, but left the date for the desired rendezvous open. At the spot where the block of granite had towered above the others in the memorial grove, and where today hardly anything preserved the memory of the martyr, because desecrators had cleared away the rock and the hall of honor — in that very place where, in the not-too-distant future, a stone monument would have to be erected once more, in that historically meaningful place they should meet.
The sniping promptly resumed. David favored a meeting anywhere but in that accursed location. “I absolutely reject your historical revisionism…” My son added his own fuel to the fire: “He who forgets his peoples past is not worthy of it!” David agreed with that. What followed was sheer silliness. They even allowed themselves to make jokes. To one of them — ”What's the difference between e-mail and Emil?” — I unfortunately did not get the punch line. I logged out too soon.
I've been there numerous times. Most recently a few weeks back, as if I were the perpetrator, as if I had to keep returning to the scene of the crime, as if the father were running after the son.
From Mölln, where neither Gabi nor I could find much to say to each other, to Ratzeburg. From there I drove east, passing through Mustin, a tiny village just beyond which the border had been located, complete with death strip, cutting off the highway. One still sees a three-hundred-meter gap in the chestnuts planted long ago on either side of the road: not a tree to right or left. The place gives one a feel for the multitiered efforts the Workers' and Peasants' State undertook to secure its people.
Once I left that scar in the landscape behind me, Mecklenburg's sweeping farmland extended all the way to the horizon on both sides of the once more tree-lined highway. Hardly any undulations, few larger stands of trees. On the outskirts of Gadebusch I took the new bypass. A strip of home improvement stores, shopping centers, flat-roofed auto dealerships, trying with strings of drooping pennants to revive business. The Wild East! Not until close to Schwerin, where the road was now lined with smaller varieties of trees, did the area become hilly. I drove past larger wooded stretches, the radio tuned to channel 3: the classical request program.
I then turned right onto Route 106, toward Ludwigslust, and was soon approaching the Grosser Dreesch housing complex, thrown up in several stages and once home to fifty thousand citizens of the GDR, and parked my Mazda by unit 3, right next to the Lenin monument in the curve at the end of Gagarinstrasse. The weather held; it didn't rain. Now renovated and made presentable with pastel colors, the apartment buildings lined up in a row.
Every time I visit Mother, I am amazed that this bronze statue, which grew so large under the hands of its Estonian creator, is still standing. Although Lenin is gazing westward, he was denied any gesture that might indicate a destination. With both hands in his coat pockets, he stands there like a man out for a stroll who is allowing himself to take a breather, his feet resting on the low granite platform that forms a pedestal. The left corner of its lowest step is clad in bronze. The inscription molded into the metal in capital letters recalls a revolutionary resolution: the land reform decree. Only on the front does Lenin's overcoat reveal traces of color from some meaningless spray-can graffiti. Pigeon droppings on the shoulders. His wrinkled trousers have remained clean.
I did not linger on Gagarinstrasse. Mother lives on the eleventh floor, with a balcony and a view of the nearby broadcast tower. She insisted on serving me coffee, which she always makes too strong. After the renovation of the concrete-slab buildings, the rents were raised — to manageable levels, Mother thinks. We talked about that, only that. Otherwise there was not much to say. She did not ask what had brought me to the city of many lakes, besides my brief visit to her: “Certainly not the Führers birthday!” The date of my arrival must have given my destination away; she exclaimed as I entered her apartment — and after I had denied myself a glance into Konnys room: “What's there for you? Nothing to be done about it now.”
Taking Hamburger Allee, formerly Lenin-Allee, I drove in the direction of the zoo, then along Am Hexenberg, and parked by the youth hostel, having found my way to the spot as if in a trance. Around the back of the gray stuccoed structure from the early fifties, the wooded bank on the southern end of Lake Schwerin falls off steeply. Down below, almost at the waters edge, you see Franzosenweg, a favorite path for walkers and bicycle riders.
A sunny day by now. Actually not typical April weather. When the sun came out, it had real warmth. At a slight distance from the entrance to the youth hostel, the moss-covered blocks of granite still lay motionless, as though nothing had happened, remnants of the memorial grove that had been cleared away, not very thoroughly, decades earlier. Among the trees once planted to form the grove, scanty underbrush. The square foundation of the hall of honor was easy to make out, because only a little dirt had been dumped over it, but the youth hostel faced the site, obstructing any sense of the original layout. To the left of the hostel's entrance, above which one could read in raised lettering the name of the hostel, “Kurt Bürger,” a Ping-Pong table on sawhorses was waiting for players. A sign on the door hung slightly crooked: CLOSED FROM 9 AM TO 4 PM.
I stood for a long time amid the mossy blocks of granite, one of which even displayed fragments of an inscription and a chiseled rune. Lost property — from what century?
Back in the day when Mother and I found refuge in Schwerin, everything was still standing: boulder next to boulder, the Nazi hall of honor, and the massive piece of granite with the martyrs name. When Mother first saw the memorial, it was already neglected, but still under the care of the Party, which was crumbling from the outside in. She told me that she came upon the oaks and beeches, still small at the time, while she was out looking for firewood: “Where they assigned us to, there wasn't a blessed thing to burn in the stove…” Many other women and children were also out looking. By the time the American tanks reached Schwerin from their bridgehead on the Elbe southwest of Boizenburg, followed by the British — ”They had genuine Scotch soldiers…” — we had been moved from the cellar of the school to Lehmstrasse, in the part of town known as the Schelfstadt; it must have been fairly run-down by the end of the war. We were assigned to a brick outbuilding with a tar-paper roof, located, of course, to the rear of the building that fronted on the street. It's still standing, that shack. We had two tiny rooms and a kitchen. You had to go out to the courtyard to use the toilet. They even put in a cylinder stove for us. The stovepipe went through the kitchen window. And to feed the stove — Mother cooked on the cover plate — she had to hunt all over for firewood.
That's how she happened upon the memorial grove. When the British pulled out in June and the Red Army came in, and stayed for good, the boulders with various names and runes chiseled on them remained standing for a long time; the Russians didn't care.
Since the Potsdam conference, where the victors divided up Germany, we were in the Soviet occupation zone, Mother even of her own free will, ever since she discovered, on the largest of the remaining stones, set close to the lakeshore, a name that was not unfamiliar: “That stone had the same name as our Yustloff...”