In my early novella Cat and Mouse, which was branded unsuitable for young readers when it first came out but eventually became required reading in schools and is therefore exposed to the interpretive whims of the syllabus-faithful, my tragicomic hero, Joachim Mahlke, dons this unattractive headgear for a while. Pilenz, the narrator, sees him wearing it at the Oliva Castle Park. Furthermore, the Tuchel Heath – the region where my Labour Service camp, a quadrangle of barracks plus mess hall, was located – matches the flat-to-rolling countryside in which an episode of Joachim Mahlke’s evolution to war hero takes place: ‘… beautiful clouds floating over birches and butterflies not knowing where to go next. Shiny black, ring-shaped pools in a bog where you could fish out perch and moss-covered carp with hand grenades. Nature wherever you shat. And movies in Tuchel …’ Also worthy of mention were the stretches of sandy soil, the woodland of trees both deciduous and coniferous, and the juniper bushes. The perfect setting for Polish partisan action.
But my time with the Labour Service is layered differently in my memory. My recollection differs from what Pilenz, in his compulsion to get it down on paper, tells us about the Great Mahlke, and not only in the details but also in the way it exposes me: I missed the opportunity to learn to doubt, an activity that – much too late, but then pursued all-out – enabled me to clear every altar and go beyond faith in making decisions.
It was not always easy, because the fires of hope were constantly being rekindled, trying to warm up the chilly atmosphere. For a time it was the desire for a lasting peace and justice for all, then the consumer bliss of the American way of life, and now the new Pope is supposed to work miracles …
FROM THE OUTSET, I had what was known in the Labour Service as a cushy job: I was good at drawing and had a way with colours and was therefore considered privileged. The walls of the canteen in the stone mess hall were to be adorned with pictures inspired by the juniper bushes, the water hole complete with reflected clouds, and the birches of the half-flat, half-hilly heath. Desired but not essential: a frolicking water nymph.
After the usual morning drill – rifle practice, first with a spade, then with a ninety-eight carbine – I was released to make sketches from nature: all afternoon I could absent myself from the camp with my watercolours, water bottle, and drawing pad. Beautiful clouds, shiny black ponds, birches in front of or behind gigantic erratic boulders made their way onto the paper in saturated colours. I soon had a pile of sketches to paint in distemper on the canteen’s white walls. Having had a tree fixation since childhood, I may well have made a single, isolated oak my motif of preference. And because in my old age I still enjoy watercolour painting from nature, whether on the road or in my Behlendorf orchard, I have no trouble picturing myself seated at the edge of a bubbling bog hole or perched on a humpback rock left behind by the last ice age.
As I sat painting the flat land or hills fading into the horizon, I was not, if I am to be perfectly honest with myself, completely free of fear. Partisans with looted carbines could have been lying in ambush, crouching behind a thick juniper bush or hidden by boulders jutting out of the heath. A private who sighted a Labour Serviceman screwing up his face as he plied his brush would have had no trouble picking him off.
The wartime volunteer’s career would have ended before it began. Besides, I was unarmed: at first the carbines were distributed only for regular and silhouette target practice. As dim and fuzzy as the picture of myself and my routine in my Labour Service days that has come down to me is, the picture of the distribution of arms is painfully sharp and very much alive, even now.
DAY AFTER DAY we went through a ceremony conducted by the corporal in charge of weapons, a man who looked serious on principle. He handed them out, we grabbed them. One man after another experienced what it meant to be armed. It goes without saying: every member of the Labour Service was to feel honoured by the touch of the wood and metal, the butt and barrel of the carbine in his hands.
And we boys did in fact inflate ourselves to men when we stood at attention with our guns by our sides or presented them or marched with them on our shoulders. You might say we took the expression ‘A soldier’s gun is a soldier’s bride’ literally. We thought of ourselves as engaged, if not quite married, to the ninety-eight carbine.
Though I make a point of using ‘we’ here, there was an exception to that rank-and-file, somewhat facile plural, an exception whose image I can conjure more clearly than that of the privileged muralist, his assiduous brush strokes, and all else that transpired under the partly sunny, partly cloudy skies of the Tuchel Heath.
This exception was a lanky boy who was so blond and blue-eyed and whose profile revealed a skull so elongated that the likes of him could be found only in propaganda promoting the Nordic race. Chin, mouth, nose, forehead – each was the epitome of ‘racial purity’ at a stroke. He was a Siegfried, a Baldur, and like Baldur, the Teutonic god of light, he shone brighter than the day. He was untainted: no trace of a wart on neck or temple. He neither lisped nor stuttered when ordered to report. No one could beat him in long-distance running, no one could match his daring when leaping over musty ditches or his agility when clambering over a wall. He could do fifty knee bends without getting tired. He was born to break records. There was nothing, no flaw, to sully the picture. But what made him an exception was that he – whose name, first and last, eludes my memory – was an insubordinate.
He refused to take part in rifle drill; worse still, he refused to take butt or barrel in hand; and, worst of all, when our dead-earnest drill instructor pressed the carbine on him, he would drop it. Which made him or his fingers criminal.
Was there any greater crime than to let a gun, a weapon, the soldier’s fiancée fall into the parade ground dust absent-mindedly, let alone intentionally?
With the spade, a basic utensil for everyone in the Labour Service, he did all that he was ordered to do. When he presented the blade, it gleamed before his Nordic profile like a shield. To gaze upon him was to worship him, make him your ideal. As long as the Reich had cinemas to show newsreels, the screen would have been graced by his celestial countenance.
He would also have received top marks in camaraderie. When a nut cake came from home, he would willingly share it. He was the friendly, good-natured type, always ready to help, to do anything asked of him, and he never complained. Upon request, he would give his comrades’ boots such a regulation shine that they would be a feast for sore eyes, even the eyes of the strictest NCO during roll-call. He had no trouble with brushes or dust cloths; it was only the firearm he refused to wield, the ninety-eight carbine we were being trained on to ease our entry into the military.
Every possible sort of punitive labour was imposed upon him – they were patient – but nothing helped. He would work conscientiously for hours without a peep, emptying the latrine with a worm-infested bucket on a long stick – a punishment known as ‘honey-slinging’ in soldiers’ slang – filling the bucket to the brim from the pit the men shat into and carting it off, only to appear, freshly showered, at rifle drill shortly thereafter and refuse to wield the weapon once again. I can see it falling to the dust as if in slow motion.
At first we merely asked him questions and tried to talk him out of it. We actually liked the fellow, this oddball, this knuckle-head: ‘Take it! Just hold it!’
His response ran to a scant few words, which soon made the rounds in the form of a whispered quote.
But when they took to punishing us on his account and tormented us in the hot sun until we collapsed, we all began to hate him.
I, too, worked up my ire against him. We were expected to give him a hard time, and so we did. He had put us under pressure; we would return the favour.
He was beaten in his barracks by the very boys whose boots he had polished mirror bright. All against one. Through the boards dividing room from room I could hear his whimper, the snap of the leather belt, the loud counting. They are ingrained in my memory.
But neither the hazing no
r the beatings nor anything else could force him to carry arms. When some of the boys pissed on his straw pallet so as to label him a bed wetter, he swallowed his humiliation and delivered his by then famous phrase at the next opportunity.
Nothing could be done about this unprecedented state of affairs. Morning after morning, when we gathered for roll-call and the drill instructor with his immutable solemnity started passing out the weapons, the insubordinate would let the one meant for him fall to the ground like the proverbial hot potato and immediately return to his ramrod position, hands pressed to trouser seams, eyes fixed on a distant point.
I cannot count the number of times he repeated his mantra, which had now reached even those in command, but I remember the questions his superiors, all the way up to the commanding officer, asked him and we plagued him with: ‘Why are you doing this, Labour Serviceman?’ ‘What makes you do it, you idiot?’
His unvarying reply became a catchword that has never left me: ‘We don’t do that.’
He stuck to the plural. In a voice neither loud nor soft, yet sonorous, a voice that carried well, he pronounced what he and his refused to do. It was as though he had if not an army then at least a goodly battalion of imaginary insubordinates lined up behind him ready to repeat the phrase after him. Four words fusing into one: Wedontdothat.
When asked what he meant, he repeated the indefinite ‘that’ and refused to call the object he would not take in his hands by its name.
His behaviour transformed us. From day to day what had seemed solid crumbled. Our hatred was mixed first with amazement, then with admiration expressed in questions like ‘How can that idiot keep it up?’ ‘What makes him so hard-nosed?’ ‘How come he doesn’t report sick? He’s been pale as a ghost lately.’
We let him be. No more beatings on the bare behind. The most obstreperous among us – some boys from Alsace or Lorraine who stuck together during time off, carrying on in their incomprehensible patois, and who whenever the opportunity presented itself, as after a pack march in the pouring rain, reported sick in their strange attempts at High German – would whisper in French, which was taboo, words that probably meant ‘one of a kind’.
The insubordinate stood above us, as if on a pedestal. What is more, the insubordination of this individual seemed to our superiors to have affected general discipline. They imposed extra duties on us, as though everyone in his year shared his guilt.
In the end this morning ritual was cut off by his arrest. ‘Off to the cooler with him!’ came the command. Yet out of our sight though he was, he remained palpable as an absence.
From then on, discipline and order reigned. My afternoon plein-air sessions soon came to an end – the brushes rinsed clean, the murals incomplete, the distemper dry. My cushy days gone for ever, I was entitled to nothing more than instruction in hitting bull’s-eyes, throwing hand grenades, lunging with fixed bayonet, and crawling through fields.
Every once in a while the ‘convict’ came up in our conversations. Someone – was it the drill instructor or one of us? – would say, ‘He must be a Jehovah’s Witness.’ Or ‘He’s a Bible nut. No doubt about it.’ But the blond, blue-eyed boy with the racially pure profile had never referred to the Bible or Jehovah or any other almighty; he had said simply, ‘Wedontdothat.’
ONE DAY HIS locker was cleared out: private things, including religious pamphlets. Then he was gone – transferred, it was called.
We did not ask where to. I did not ask. But we all knew. He had not been discharged as proven unfit for service; no, we whispered, ‘He has long been ripe for the concentration camp.’
Some made jokes, without garnering much laughter: ‘It’ll do him good, the crackpot, help him to concentrate.’ Others knew: ‘It’s a sect that doesn’t do that. That’s why they’re banned, the Jehovah’s Witnesses.’
That’s what we said, though no one knew precisely why they were banned, what they witnessed, or what they did when they weren’t witnessing. Everyone agreed, however, that such an intransigent insubordinate could end up in only one place: Stutthof. And since we knew of the camp only by hearsay, we thought Wedontdothat, which was what we called him in secret, was in good hands. ‘They’ll bring old Wedontdothat down a peg or two.’
Was it all as simple as that?
Did no one shed a tear?
Did everything go on the way it had before?
What could have passed through my head or otherwise disturbed me when on the one hand he was taken off to quarantine as if carrying a disease and was therefore out of sight, yet on the other was so palpably missed that in a visible hole off to the side he seemed to go on drilling, standing guard, crawling through fields, eating potato soup at our long table, squatting in the latrine, shining boots, sleeping, having wet dreams or giving himself a helping hand, and welcoming the incipient summer. Summer came; it was dry, hot, and windy. Sand dust settled everywhere, covering much, including thoughts that might have gnawed at me.
But setting aside all subplots and going straight to the point, I must say, I was if not glad, then at least relieved when the boy disappeared. The storm of doubts about everything I had had rock-solid faith in died down, and the resulting calm in my head prevented any further thought from taking wing: mindlessness had filled the space. I was pleased with myself and sated. A self-portrait from that period would have shown me well nourished.
But later, much later, when I was developing the hero of the novella Cat and Mouse, Joachim Mahlke, a marvellous, off-beat character – fatherless altar boy, student, master diver, Knight’s Cross recipient, and deserter – I used the insubordinate we called Wedontdothat as a model. Even though Mahlke had to do battle with an enlarged Adam’s apple, he seemed unblemished when, time after time, he dropped his weapon, slowly, deliberately, the better to ingrain it in our memory.
WHEN THE BULLETIN of the Wehrmacht high command, which was tacked up daily on the noticeboard, announced the landing of the British and American forces on the Atlantic coast, thus enriching yet again my knowledge of geography (only the Alsatians and Lorrainers among us could wrap their tongues around the names of the Norman and Breton towns and villages), the battle for the Atlantic Wall pushed everything that preceded it – including the model for the propagation of the Nordic race, and thorn in our side – into the background.
Increased vigilance was the order of the day. Twice the camp was roused by a partisan alert, but no shooting – or anything else – followed. Our quadrangle of barracks was constantly patrolled by one or two guards.
When I was on duty by myself, I would allay my fears by letting my thoughts wander. I got plenty of practice. History would immediately give way to legends: Old Prussian deities like Perkun, Pikoll, and Potrimp; the Pomeranian princess Mestwina; Prince Swantopolk; and, going back even further, Goths wandering from the mouth of the Vistula to the Black Sea. The legions peopling my daydreams – all of them armed in the fashion of their times – helped me hold my fear of partisans at bay.
One of our duties was to fortify the camp: we dug trenches, set up mined wire barriers. We also had to install a complex alarm system, though nothing alarming ever happened except that one Sunday we were ordered out onto the parade ground in full force, all two hundred and fifty of us, and not in the light grey of the troops but in our own shit-brown garb plus arse-with-handle headgear on our closely cropped hair.
In the middle of the square, right next to the flagpole, a Reich Labour Service leader, who had arrived out of nowhere with a tightly knit retinue, was reeling off clipped pronouncements about shame and craven betrayal, that is, about the base and insidious plot on the part of a coterie of well-born officers – unsuccessful, thank heaven – to assassinate our dearly beloved Führer, and about merciless revenge, the ‘extermination of this vile clique’. And on and on about the Führer, who – ‘It was truly a miracle!’ – had survived.
With ever-longer sentences his rescue by fate was celebrated, and we were told to renew our vows on his behalf. In this hour of nee
d, from now on, from this moment on, it was our duty, yes, here and throughout the German Reich, in this hour of need, the duty of – more than anyone – the youth representing the movement which bears his name to stand unswervingly by him until the final victory …
A shiver ran through us. Something akin to piety sent the sweat seeping out of our pores. The Führer saved! The heavens were once more, or still, on our side.
We sang both our national anthems. We shouted Sieg Heil! three times. We were irate, we were incensed at the still nameless traitors.
Although I had never – not in school, let alone in my mother’s grocery – met anyone who could be called well-born, I tried to work up the requisite hatred for the reputed blue bloods, but in fact I was torn. From the period of my mental excursions into the dark corners – and enlightened ones – of German history I had retained my admiration for the Hohenstaufen line of emperors: I would have been only too happy to serve as a squire to Frederick II in thirteenth-century Palermo. And when it came to the Peasant Wars a few centuries later, I was not only a fan of Thomas Müntzer’s, I also sided with the upper-class ringleaders of the insurrection, men with noble names like Franz von Sickingen, Georg von Frundsberg, and Götz von Berlichingen. Ulrich von Hutten was my idol, the Pope and his clerics my enemies. When in time the names of the conspirators and the man who had pulled the trigger – names like von Witzleben and von Stauffenberg – became known, I had trouble reaffirming the hatred I had vowed against the ‘craven band of aristocrats’ as weeds to be rooted out of our society.
THE CHAOS THAT raged under our closely cropped hair! The image that had been crystal clear in the sixteen-year-old Labour Serviceman’s mind until then was turning fuzzy around the edges. Not that it had become alien, no. But my uniformed self seemed to be slipping away. It had even given up its shadow and wanted to belong among the less guilty.