An old woman sitting opposite us in a pre-war pot of a hat complained of the pipe, pointed at the ‘no smoking’ sign, coughed by way of demonstration, then resumed her laments, even shouting for the conductor and urging her fellow passengers in her affected Hanover accent to join her protest against the ‘indecent fumes’. My pal, who called me pal, raised his knife menacingly – it was glistening with fat – and, holding on to his pipe in his free hand, froze in that position for an endless few seconds. Then, jabbing the blade through his trouser leg into his right thigh, where it remained, quivering, he laughed a spine-tingling laugh.
Horrified, the woman fled the compartment clutching her hat. Her place was immediately occupied by a man who had been standing in the corridor. The one-time lance corporal loosened the knife, snapped the blade shut, dropped it back into the haversack, and tapped his pipe a few times. We were pulling in to Hanover.
WHAT REMAINS ARE Fortune’s candid snapshots, which the memory archives. The silent sausage-chewer can still see the quivering knife sticking out of the wooden leg, though he cannot be quite certain whether the incident took place during the train trip from Göttingen to Hanover or during a journey in the opposite direction, to Kassel and on, all the way to Munich, where I went to visit my Bavarian friend Joseph in Marktl am Inn or some other dump – the friend with whom the year before I’d munched caraway seeds and rolled dice and argued about the Immaculate Conception. I didn’t find him at his parents’ house: he must have been off in a seminary somewhere, surmounting scholastic obstacles, passing examinations with flying colours, while I …
The incident could just as easily have featured another ‘pal’ with a wooden leg – there were so many. Blood sausage or pork, flick knife or fixed blade, on the way there or back: what memory stores and preserves in condensed form blends with the story in whatever way it is told, and has no interest in origins or other such questionable issues.
The fact remains that the lance corporal sitting next to me in Göttingen Station waiting room with a perfectly possible wooden leg had advised placeless me by the time we pulled into Hanover to present myself at the office of the potash manufacturers Burbach-Kali Limited and ask for work. ‘They need men for underground. You’ll get special ration cards – all the butter you can eat – and a roof over your head. What do you say, boy?’
TWO PALS STANDING in front of Hanover Central Station next to an Ernst-August-Crown-Prince-of-Hanover-on-a-horse monument riddled with bomb-splinters.
The younger pal did what the older pal advised, because whatever he was like at the time or whatever the time had made of him, one experience had marked him: he mistrusted anyone who claimed adult status, with one exception: the unmistakable type of the lance corporal. It was a type he had known since a man, a barber by trade, had led him out of the woods and across the Russian front lines. When T-34 tanks fired on the street along which troops were retreating, the lance corporal’s legs had been shot to pieces, which made his survival highly unlikely. My waiting-room pal got off with a wooden leg. He knew what to do or not to do and where. His advice was worth following.
Besides, I liked the word underground. I liked the idea of crawling through the bowels of the earth, where nothing could change abruptly, isolated, swallowed up, out of sight, long forgotten. I was even willing to work deep under the earth’s crust, to sweat at hard labour. I may have hoped to find something underground that was invisible by the light of day.
Out of gratitude for his tip, I gave my friend the rest of my cigarette coupons before I followed his advice, because I still had no taste for cigs, which had the power of a stable currency at the time. They were my riches, my ready cash.
SO I WENT to the office, was seen immediately, asked for work, and was hired on the spot by Burbach-Kali Limited, as a ‘coupler boy’. The mine where I was to work, the Siegfried I Mine, was located near the village of Gross Giesen, in the Sarstedt district. I was given work clogs and carbide lamp when I got there. I felt right at home. I had been ‘top man’ in a bunk bed for years.
The village lay about halfway between Hildesheim and Hanover in a flat region perfect for sugar-beet cultivation. On the south-western horizon the hills of the Weserbergland loomed blue. Out of the early-summer green of the plains arose the winding tower of the pit, the stone mill, the boiler house with its locker-room annexe, the villa-like administration building, and, towering above all else, the slag heap, partly poured into a white cone shape, partly strewn about, the daily recipient of new loads of refuse rock from dumpers running on a cable railway. Up they climbed chock-full, and down they rolled once emptied. The swell and fade of their screech has remained in my ears, and even today I keep watch for the whitish slag heaps rising up over the cultivated flatlands, visible from the train that takes me from Ratzeburg via Lüneburg and Hanover to my publisher, Steidl, in Göttingen. They have outlasted their time and become part of the landscape: the pit along with the entire Siegfried I Mine were closed down and cleaned up decades ago.
THE BARRACKS SLEPT six men per room. The canteen food was filling if somewhat tasteless, and the ration coupons for miners allowed for ample extras: sausage, cheese, gobs of butter, and eggs for breakfast or before the late shift. We got a special portion of milk daily to prevent black lung and clogs to wear underground. In the locker room we changed, hoisting our street clothes up to the ceiling in bags, and took showers after our shifts.
As a coupler boy I worked on a mine floor 950 metres below the surface. Electric-powered dumper trains either empty or full of potash ore ran along kilometres of tracks, away from the vents of the higher floors and to the hoist of the main shaft, which also came, at the ring of a bell, to take miners to and from their shifts.
My job was to couple the dumpers, full or empty, then uncouple them at the main shaft, and to open and close the weather door on the trip to the roof galleries, where the salty ore was dynamited and broken down. It meant a lot of running through draughty tunnels, a lot of tripping over tracks, a lot of bumped knees.
I had been taught the tricks of the trade by other coupler boys. When the trains slowed down, I had to jump off the last dumper, jog alongside the train, pull aside the artificial-leather flaps of the weather door, let the train pass, shut the weather door, run after the last dumper, and jump back onto it. Usually the driver of the electric locomotive on my shift gave me enough time, but once or twice I missed the train and had to catch up on foot. Alone, it was a long haul.
The rush involved makes it sound like gruelling work worthy of those special rations, whereas in fact it was not all that strenuous because the power supply would go off during nearly every shift, and outages of an hour or two were not unusual. Outages were part of day-to-day existence, and people simply accepted them.
At such times we would sit it out near the main-shaft hoist or, if the outage caught us while we were on our rounds, in one of the gigantic roof galleries, which were big enough to store all our present and future atomic waste and let it shine and shine …
Later I set the last chapter of Dog Years in a former potash mine taken over by scarecrows, which were being manufactured for export on all levels of the mine, including the roof galleries. Either frozen in particular poses or else mobile, thanks to a built-in mechanism, they were decked out as reproductions of human society and meant to convey human desires and sorrows, and as merchandise they had their price. They could be ordered direct from the factory and sold well worldwide. And since man is said to be created in God’s image, God could be said to be the protoscarecrow.
The only light we had during the outages came from our carbide lamps, which made giant, ghost-like shadows on the towering roof-gallery walls. Out they came from newly dug tunnels, from the now silenced vibrating chutes, from the depths of the earth: miners, blasters, inspectors, face workers, and coupler boys like me with their drivers – a mixture of quickly trained, mostly young workers and old-timers, some approaching retirement age, all brought together by a power failure.
/> It was never long before their babble came round to politics and voices grew louder and more argumentative until the fight that was brewing failed to break out only because the current had gone on again, the galleries had lit up, the chutes had started rattling, the trains humming, and the hoist had jerked into action. Then the dialect-tinged quarrel died down and everyone returned to work, silent or swallowing their last words, their shadows in the beams of the swaying carbide lamps, growing smaller and smaller.
For me, who, as if struck by lockjaw, did no more than listen and pick up arguments and counter-arguments passively, indiscriminately, these power-free periods made up for lessons missed in school. Despite the heat – we sweated even when idle – I tried to follow the debate. I didn’t catch much, felt stupid, was stupid, wanted to question the old-timers, but didn’t dare. I kept feeling torn because various factions would take shape in the course of the discussion. Roughly speaking, there were three opposing groups.
The smallest of them represented Communist class consciousness. Its members predicted the imminent demise of capitalism and the victory of the proletariat, and had a pat answer to every question and a predilection for clenched fists. The pit foreman, who belonged to their ranks, was an amiable enough fellow above ground, where he had a detached one-family house not far from the mine, and I occasionally took his eldest daughter to the cinema.
The second and largest group was big on Nazispeak and claimed to be trailing the culprits responsible for the collapse of the old order. Its members would hum the Horst Wessel Song and indulge in speculations and maledictions of the ‘If the Führer were alive today, he’d round up the lot of you …’ variety.
The third group tried to tone down the dispute with increasingly shabby compromises. On the one hand, it opposed the expropriation of companies like Burbach-Kali Limited; on the other, it called for the nationalization of major industries under trade-union supervision. This group, which would lose ground for a while and then rally, was referred to disparagingly as social-democratic and even, by the Communists, as social-fascistic.
Even though I had trouble making sense of the issues that infuriated them so, I realized, coupler boy and idiot on the fringe that I was, that when push came to shove the Communists inevitably teamed up with the Nazis to shout down the Social Democrat remainder. Mortal enemies as they were, they made a red and brown front against the Socis.
It was so predictable as to be maddening. Every time the power went out, out came the factions. I had trouble siding with one or another. Lacking firm beliefs, I was besieged from all sides and could have taken any direction.
The driver of my locomotive, a former face worker who had been injured in a blasting accident, was a Soci; he explained the odd-bedfellows alliance to me as we were leaving the locker room after our shift one evening. ‘The same thing happened just before Hitler came to power in ’33: the Commies and the Browns ganged up on us. Till then the Browns were out to liquidate the Commies; then they switched to us. And that was the end of solidarity. When will they ever learn? All or nothing, that’s what they want, and they hate us Socis because we’ll take only half if need be …’
Far be it from me to claim that this carbide-lamp lecture in ideology enlightened me to the extent that it fashioned my first post-war political views, but it did help the coupler boy to see how a malignant partnership had stymied a regime that both elements, Communists and Nazis, had denigrated as ‘the system’ and how it had eventually laid that regime low.
Even though I didn’t become a sophisticated Soci below the surface, I did imbibe some more of its principles above the surface when my locomotive driver took me to that former rubble heap, Hanover, one Sunday morning to hear the head of the Social Democratic Party, Kurt Schumacher, speak to an open-air audience of ten thousand.
No, he didn’t speak, he screamed, the way all politicians – not only Forster, the Nazi Gauleiter in the Danzig Maiwiese – screamed. And yet the future Social Democrat and unflinching supporter of ontheonehandontheother took to heart some of the words that the frail figure with the empty, fluttering sleeve thundered down to his ten thousand adherents in the blazing sun.
His years in Nazi prisons had made an ascetic of him. He was a stylite gone public. He called for the renewal of the nation, for a social and democratic Germany to rise from the ruins. His will was firm, his every word a hammer striking iron.
Repelled by his delivery though I was, I was convinced by Comrade Schumacher.
Convinced of what? With what consequences? It was not until many years later that the coupler boy of yore – after a number of misguided attempts at utopian discipline – began to fall into step with the Social Democrats in the sense of Willy Brandt’s ‘policy of small steps’. And it was not until years later, in The Diary of a Snail, that I prescribed crawling shoes for the ills of progress. The snail’s track, not the fast track. A long road paved with the cobblestones of doubt, Dr Doubt being the nickname I chose for the Diary’s protagonist.
But even below the surface my political encapsulation, that empty shell, developed cracks. I would try taking sides. The private tutoring offered me by the Siegfried I Mine had varying results: as erratic as the play of light and shadow in the steeple-high roof galleries, I favoured this and opposed that, I championed one side, then the other, closing my ears only when the neversaydie Nazis tried to win me over.
Below the surface, whenever the issue of merging the Communists and the Socis into a single party in the Soviet zone came up, I would parrot my locomotive driver, who warned against compulsory unity and always proceeded slowly and prudently when his coupler boy was opening and shutting the weather door to give him time to jump aboard the last dumper; at the surface, in the post-war low-calorie reality, I would be fed quotations from the Communist Manifesto by the pit foreman and affable father of three daughters.
They had varying degrees of success with me. The fact that I was a good listener must have encouraged their efforts. But when I conjure up the coupler boy today – that is, in a time of the absolute supremacy of capital and in full consciousness of my utter lack of power – when I lure him next to my stand-up desk and force him, a born dodger, through an ever more rigorous third degree, putting him more and more on the spot with my trick questions, what I piece together out of the subordinate clauses of the young man in dungarees is that what actually lured him to the one-family house with its porch and garden was the inspector’s eldest daughter: she won him over without a word of propaganda.
THOUGH NO BEAUTY, she was not without charm. She had dragged her left leg since childhood. An accident? She never spoke about it. Or did I simply close my ears to her laments about the cause of her misfortune?
There was a breathy, raspy quality to her speech, and she spoke quickly, as if there wasn’t enough time. I see an oval, elongated face, close-set brown eyes, straight dark hair, an always thoughtful and hence wrinkled brow. She was intelligent and could form logical, well-thought-out sentences. Her spirited hands gave her words a second voice. One of her favourite words was precise: to be precise, a precise way of talking, thinking …
She was training to be a secretary in the office, and typed up a few of my hastily rhymed poems on the office typewriter. That made them read fluently and look important, ready for print, if only visually, especially because she had quietly corrected my spelling mistakes.
We spent as much time as we could together. Her leg didn’t bother me. The face and spirited hands were attractive enough. She would stand at the entrance to the mine, small and small-breasted, waiting for her father and probably for me as well. So dainty and light she was that I could lift her flat body to the appropriate height and enter it standing, as soon as we came back from the movies in Sarstedt and had a few minutes on the porch, or inside the door, to become one flesh.
I was not allowed upstairs into her maiden’s chamber; she refused to go to my room with bunk beds. But she was concerned about me and always let the final feature on our movie b
ill run its course, even if I was the only one who felt like it. And I obeyed her request to be careful.
But more vivid than our moments on the porch were the times we spent on the paths between the sugar-beet fields. Her precise speech. Calling everything by its name. Face-to-face with the towering slag heap shimmering white against an overcast sky, we went on and on about the movies we had been seeing: Gaslight, a blood-curdling tale of foggy England; Murderers Among Us, starring Hildegard Knef.
We also talked about God, who didn’t exist. We outdid each other in tearing apart the articles of faith. Two pupils of existentialism who did not yet know or had barely heard of that newly fashionable concept. Both had dipped into Thus Spake Zarathustra and snapped up lofty philosophical monstrosities like ‘essentiality’ and ‘facticity’. There were no haystacks in the area.
When after the first frost the sugar-beets were ready for harvest, we would hurry into the fields after dark with sacks and baskets and short-handled hoes. We weren’t the only ones harvesting by night. Our enemies were peasants with dogs.
In the laundry room of the pit foreman’s house – his wife had died during the last year of the war and he often seemed at a loss when it came to his three daughters – we would peel and dice the beets, then stew them into a syrup in the kettle meant for washing clothes. I can still remember the large wooden ladle I used for stirring and the smell and taste of the sticky, cloyingly sweet paste and the three-part laughter of the sisters as they cut up the beets. We poured the syrup into the bulbous bottles specially reserved for it, and turned what was left in the kettle into malt lozenges, having added a little anis.
We sang while we worked. The father had taught his daughters some workers’ songs. Neither the time he had spent in the concentration camp nor his experience in a penal battalion at the front had dampened what he was proud to call his class consciousness.