Barack II, Room 66
by Gottfried Benn, 1945
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And he cried mightily with a strong voice,
saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the
habitation of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and
hateful bird.
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John of Patmos
|
This was
the address of the quarters assigned to me
and my wife. The garrison held the high ground, overseeing the city
like a
citadel. “Montsalvat” said a lieutenant, apparently an opera
aficionado, and
indeed it was inapproachable, at least for the idler: coming from the
train
station, one needed to climb 137 steps to reach the foot of the hill.
Nothing
more dream-stricken than this garrison! Room 66 is looking out to the
parade
ground, three little aspen trees obstruct the view, the berries have
lost the
purple, the shrubs weep rust-brown tears. This is end of August, the
swallows
are still cruising the grounds already gathering for the big migration.
The
battalion’s brass band rehearses in a distant corner, the sun is
reflecting from
the trumpets and percussion section; “Praise the heavens” they play and “I hunt the deer
in the
darkness of the woods.” It is the
5th year
of the war, but here it is a completely secluded world, a kind of
béguinage,
the shouting of commands is just the front, from inside life passes in
a muted
hush. A city of the East, overseen by this mountain plateau, on it our
Montsalvat of yellow compounds and the far-flung parade ground; a kind
of
desert fortress. The immediate surrounding is full of strange features;
the
streets mere dirt roads, some leading into gullies, some navigating the
hills,
the houses isolated with not a single path directed to them, it’s a
mystery how
people actually arrive at the door; the fences are like in Lithuania,
moss
covered, low and dripping wet. A trailer doubles as someone’s house. A
man
appears in the evening with a cat on his left shoulder, the cat has a
piece of
cord around the neck, is keeping a precarious balance, wants to get
down; the
man laughs. Low drifting clouds for ever announce coming rain,
everywhere are
poplars, black under a purplish light, barely opening to a brighter
areas in
between. In front of a wall rise three blue roses, almost like a lyre,
not a
gardeners doing. The light in the morning is particularly gentle,
almost like
an Aurora Borealis. Here, too, as everywhere, a sense of the unreal
prevails,
almost theatrical, flat like a film set.
Surrounding
the parade ground are the living quarters, like frozen dreams! Not the
dreams
of glory and victory, more of solitude, of the fleeting moment, of
passing
ideas, of the unreal. Over the guardhouse, in big letters, it says “General
von Strantz, base.” Some general
from the
Great War. For three days I amuse myself asking the guard who this
general was.
The man stands to attention, but never an answer. Completely unknown
this
general. Gone, sunken, complete with standard, motorcade, and staff
officers
milling around his person. Only two decades have passed and already
nobody
remembers.
An
other
tidal wave of conscripts is flooding in into the barracks. One notices
two
different types of recruits. The sixteen year old, undernourished,
impoverished, intimidated, pathetic figures from the national
labor-levy,
docile and willing, and the elderly, the fifty to sixty year old from
Berlin.
On the first day they are still the lords of the manor, wear civvies,
buy
themselves a newspaper, have a spring in the step that tells you “we
are
CEOs and managers, consultants with pretty wives and central heating;
this
condition here is temporal, can’t touch us, is mildly amusing even.” The next day they receive their kit and
have become
less than dirt. A sergeant screams and they run through corridors on
the
double, give him twenty on the grounds, lug around ammunition crates,
squeeze
on helmets. The training is brief, two to three weeks; I note with
interest
they go to the shooting range already on the second day – previously
that used
to happened only after four to six weeks. Then, in the dead of night
they fall
in with backpack, rolled up coat and tent cloth, gasmask, the automatic
and the
rifle – nearly 120 pounds to carry – and off they go to the platform
where the
train is waiting in the dark. This exit into the darkness is spooky. An
invisible brass band marches ahead, is playing rousing rhythms,
followed by the
column marching silently into eternal oblivion. The whole thing is a
brief
affair, just a sudden split in the fabric of silence and blackness,
leaving
behind the plateau in the darkness of a night without sky. The next
morning there
will be new arrivals. These, too, go away. It is getting colder on the
grounds.
The recruits are ordered to rub the palm of their hands and to beat
their knees
with their fists in order to stimulate the circulation and keep life
awake;
militaristic biology. Ever new tides of manpower float in and out, new
waves of
blood, destined, after learning to disassemble a rifle and shooting a
couple of
rounds, to ebb away towards so called enemies in the eastern steppes.
It would
be incomprehensible, if there wasn’t the appearance of the commanding
general,
a charismatic figure in purple and gold, who shoots and orders to
shoot; his
pension is not yet in immediate jeopardy.
The
officers gather at the dinner table. Since the beginning of the war
there is no
longer a distinction between the food for officers and privates. Every
week the
colonel, just as the grenadier, receives two loaves of bread, in
addition to
margarine and ersatz syrup on paper strips, to be taken away. At dinner
you get
a pile of boiled potatoes in a soup bowl; you are supposed to carry
them to
your place by the table and peel them yourself (on an oilcloth if there
is
still a tablecloth, otherwise a requisitioned bed linen); then you put
the
peeled potatoes to the side and wait for the soup or sauce. The
commanding
officer of my department is entering the canteen – unshaven. There are
no more
blades and nothing to hone it. Somebody here says he knows a place in
Berlin
where to get some. The comrade in arms from Austria contributes the
anecdote,
that in the k.u.k. Army only the dragoons of Windishgrätz had the
privilege to
go clean-shaven – a recollection of the battle of Kolin, where the last
minute
intervention of just arrived recruits, the adolescent greenhorns,
decided the
day. “In America they shave you in a horizontal position. Typical
plutocratic riffraff.”
All
these
men, as tight-assed and rectangular they pretend to be, in actual fact
only
think how to go on leave and bring home to their wives a basket of
mushrooms,
and how the son is doing at school, and whether, as in 1918, they will
find
themselves on the street again, if – and this is the expression they
sometimes
permit themselves to let slip – “things go bust.” Almost all of them are officers in
their fifties from the old
imperial army, who had seen the Great War. Then they became
tobacconists and
newsagents, receptionists at the ministry of agriculture, stable
masters for
riding clubs, everything to get by. Now they wear the uniform of a
major.
As
for the
top brass only one word. It is little known that a retiring marshal
continues
to receive his full salary with no taxes and with a staff-officer as
his aide
for life. He also receives a fairly proportioned piece of estate in the
Grunewald. Since the creator of marshals is also the one who thrashes
about
with demotions and collective punishment of kin and kith, and the
termination
of distinctions and pension claims; the marshals as good fathers and
husbands
are almost justified; nobody would think of them as demons anyway.
The
autumn
around the barracks is dangerously parched, like everywhere in the
Reich. The
fields are infested with mice, the potato harvest has been
catastrophic, the
carrots and beetroots contain not enough sugar. The loss of the
territories to
the East means for the nation the loss of two months of bread, one
month of
fat, one month of meat. The rations are further reduced. There is no
more
leather for boots; no more prosthetic limbs for the amputees, no
shoestrings,
no dentures, no bandages, no Petri-dishes and not enough doctors;
entire
divisions take the field without a surgeon. The civilians depend on one
practitioner per 25,000 people, and she has no petrol for her car.
On
a day in
November I need to go to Berlin on business. A regular train service is
no
longer running. At two o’clock a.m. a wonderful train stops, eight
sleeper
cars, four 1st and 2nd class coaches, all of them almost empty, an
armored
antiaircraft coach at the end. I board the train. Immediately I am
followed by
an SS man and asked to get off. I don’t understand. The man reports,
that it is
the train from the supreme command, only for use by the top brass. I
understand. I could carry a hand-grenade in my briefcase. So I take the
next
train, i.e. squeeze into a toilet of the 3rd class, I in my colonels
uniform,
with two laborers from the East squeezing my elbows. The door to the
toilet
remains open, women and children can’t help using it, the door is
jammed, and
moving away is impossible, but nobody seems to mind. I need to change
trains.
In the next one I find a 2nd class compartment. Three underage punks in
party
uniform stretch out on the cushions. White haired women, and mothers
with
babies are left standing in the aisle. The master-race whips out a
bottle of
brandy and a bundle of cigars (for lesser mortals the daily rationing
allows
for one cigar and no brandy) and for the next three hours they go on
invigorating themselves for party-duties ahead (“Strength through Joy”). In the newspapers of the same day
there is a
column explaining that the highest percentage of the most highly
decorated and
of the casualties in the field is coming from the ranks of the party,
way more
than the national average. Exemptions from service is something unheard
of. And
then the sentence: “Appearances to the opposite, as
occasionally
seen, are completely misleading.”
Apparently these three guys belonged to this misleading appearance.
And
in the
meantime Christmas is approaching. We receive 100 grams of liverwurst
as an
extra ration, and in addition to the weekly meat ration there is 25% of
gravy
powder. And also, who is willing to give up on 30 grams of margarine
and 100
grams of sugar can place an order for a stollen. I sign up to the list.
Christmas carols are prohibited, instead it is officially suggested to
reflect
on the solstice and the renewal of the light emanating from the womb of
Mother
Nature; the commanding officers are instructed accordingly. So far
there is not
much of a renewal to see. I am standing by the window of Room 66, the
grounds
linger under a grey light, a grey like the wings of seagulls diving
into the
oceans. Christmas eve has arrived. In the morning there was a
tremendous air
raid on Berlin; one wonders whether the apartment is still intact, and
who
among the few remaining acquaintances left to live there, has survived
it. Then
it is evening, the stollen is delivered to the door. I ask the orderly
how he
is coping with his respiratory troubles; he is hard of hearing, we
communicate
with some difficulty. I look again out to the grounds, into the
distance
towards the lowlands and the eastern steppe – so near and immediate,
soaking up
uncounted generations who never had the time to arrive at some modicum
of
clarity and understanding. Eve descends, it is Holy Night.
And
then came the end. When on January 27, 1945 you had the nerve to
approach the
town’s commandant and ask “when the Russians are coming what are we
going to
do with our belongings here, now, after we had them brought from Berlin
with so
many difficulties,” his aide de
camp, a
SS-captain, says “who is talking like this will be shot; the
Russians
won’t break through, perhaps a stray tank may appear in the distance,
but the
town will be held, and who is sending his wife back to Berlin is going
to be
shot, too.” The following night
at five
o’clock a.m. the alarm sounds, we are under artillery fire and with
nothing but
a briefcase we walk home through a blizzard in -10º Celsius, on
icy allay ways,
choked by endless trains of horse-drawn wagons from which the dead
children
drop over the side. In Küstrin we got a place on an open bullock
cart, which
carried us the sixty kilometers to Berlin and Bahnhof Zoo in 12 hours
and under
constant antiaircraft salvos. At home we found strangers squatting in
the flat,
the rooms were emptied of any furniture, we fell asleep on the floor,
covering
ourselves with my cloak and with newspapers, and in the morning awoke
to the
howling of the sirens.
© – 10/14/2008 – translated by michael
sympson, 2,225
words, all rights reserved
