love, the computer, wearing one of those little caps religious Jews wore. “He kept asking me to cook kosher!” That, at any rate, was her explanation as to why Wolfgang had represented himself in his computer games as a person of the Mosaic faith. When she objected that at some point there somehow had to be an end to these neverending accusations, she was ignored. “In the last few months our boy became unreachable.” For that reason she had no idea how her son had come upon this dreadful Nazi functionary and his murderer, a medical student named Frankfurter. “Did we give up trying to have an influence on him too soon?”
Frau Stremplin spoke in bursts. Her husband nodded by way of confirmation. Wolfgang had worshipped this David Frankfurter, he said. His endless talk of David and Goliath had been silly, but apparently it was a serious matter to him. His younger brothers, Jobst and Tobias, teased him for this cult he had created. On his desk he even had a framed photo of the young man, taken shortly before the murder in Davos. And then those books, newspaper clippings, and computer printouts. Apparently it was all connected with that man Gustloff and the ship named after him. “It was somehow dreadful what happened when that ship went down. All those children. We didn't know anything about it. Not even my husband, and his hobby is research on recent German history. Even he didn't have any information on the Gustloff case, unfortunately, until…”
She cried. Gabi cried, too, and in her helplessness put her hand on Frau Stremplin's shoulder. I could have wailed, too, but the fathers made do with exchanging glances intended to signal mutual understanding. We got together with Wolfgang's parents several more times, outside the courthouse as well. Decent liberals who reproached themselves rather than us. Always making an effort to understand. It seemed to me that during the trial they listened intently to Konny s usually long-winded speeches, as if they were hoping to gain some insight from him, their son's murderer.
I found the Stremplins quite likable. He, around fifty, with glasses and well-groomed gray hair, looked like the type who sees everything as relative, even hard and fast facts. She, in her mid-forties but looking younger than that, tended to find things somehow inexplicable. When the conversation came around to Mother, she said, “Your son's grandmother is certainly a remarkable person, but she makes an uncanny impression on me, somehow…”
We learned that Wolfgangs younger brothers were cut from a different cloth. And she was still worrying about her eldest son's performance in school, specifically his weakness in mathematics and physics, as if he were still alive, “somehow,” and would soon be taking the university qualifying exams.
We sat in one of Schwerins new upscale cafes, on bar stools at a round table that was a little too high. As if by prearrangement, we had all ordered cappuccinos. No pastry to go with them. Sometimes we drifted away from the topic, for instance when we felt we had to admit to the Stremplins, who were about our age, the reasons for our early divorce. Gabi maintained that it was normal nowadays for people to separate when things didn't work out, and there was no need to assign blame. I held back and let my ex deal with everything halfway explicable, but then I changed the subject, bringing up in a fairly confused fashion the oral reports that had been banned in Konny s schools in Molln and Schwerin. Immediately Gabi and I were fighting again, just we had eons ago during our marriage. I argued that our son's unhappiness — and its dreadful consequences — started when he was prohibited from presenting his view of 30 January 1933 and also the social significance of the Nazi organization Strength through Joy, but Gabi interrupted me: “Perfectly understandable that the teacher had to put a stop to it. After all, in terms of that date, its real significance was that it was the day of Hitlers takeover, not that it happened to be the birthday of a minor figure, about whose importance our son wanted to go on and on, especially in conjunction with his subtopic, 'The Neglect of Monuments'…”
In court, this is what happened: the reports that were never given in Molln and Schwerin were dealt with in the testimony of two teachers, both of whom confirmed that the defendant had been an excellent student. Unanimously — and in this respect in pan-German agreement — the two educators said that the banned reports had been severely infected with National Socialist thinking, which, to be sure, had been expressed with intelligent subtlety, for instance in the advocacy for a “classless Volk community,” but also in the demand for an “ideology- free preservation of monuments,” which he skillfully slipped in, mentioning the eliminated grave marker of the former Nazi functionary Wilhelm Gustloff, whom the schoolboy Konrad Pokriefke had planned to introduce in his second, also banned, presentation as a “great son of the city of Schwerin.” For reasons of educational responsibility it had been necessary to prevent the spread of such dangerous nonsense, the more so because there was a growing number of boys and girls, in both schools, with radical right-wing tendencies. The East German teacher emphasized in his concluding remarks his schools “antifascist tradition,” while all that occurred to the West German teacher was the fairly overused Ovid quotation, “Principiis obsta! — Beware the beginnings!”
All in all, the hearing of witnesses went smoothly, with the exception of Mother s outbursts, as well as those of the witness Rosi, who tearfully affirmed again and again that she would remain true to her “comrade, Konrad Pokriefke.” Because proceedings in juvenile court are closed to the public, they were not held in chambers where effective speeches could be delivered. But then the presiding judge, who sometimes allowed himself little jokes, as if he wanted to introduce some levity into the deadly earnest background of this trial, gave my son an opportunity to illuminate the motivation for his deed, which Konny was all too glad to do, and at length, in an impromptu speech.
He began, of course, at the beginning, that is, with the birth of the later Landesgruppenleiter of the Nazi Party. Highlighting his organizational accomplishments in Switzerland and declaring his victory over tuberculosis “a victory of strength over weakness,” he proceeded to sculpt a likeness of a hero. Thus he found an opportunity to celebrate, at long last, the “great son of the capital city of Schwerin.” If the public had been admitted, approving murmurs might have been heard from the back rows.
When he reached the point where he dealt with the preparation and execution of the murder in Davos — Konrad soon abandoned his notes and quoted materials — he stressed the legal acquisition of the weapon and the number of shots that had been fired: “Like me, David Frankfurter scored four hits.” My son also established a parallel to the motive that Frankfurter had articulated in the cantonal court, but expanded the statement: “I shot because I am a German — and because the eternal Jew spoke through David.”
He passed quickly over the trial before the cantonal court in Chur, although he did say that he, in contrast to Professor Grimm and Party speaker Diewerge, did not believe Jewish instigators had been involved in the crime. For reasons of fairness, he added, it had to be said: like him, Frankfurter had acted “solely out of a personal sense of necessity.”
After that Konrad offered a fairly vivid account of the state funeral rites in Schwerin, even providing information on the weather — ”light snowfall” — and did not omit a single street name from his description of the parade. Then, after an excursus on the meaning, mission, and accomplishments of the NS organization Strength through Joy, which even the patient presiding judge found tiresome, he came to the laying of the ship's keel.
My son obviously enjoyed this portion of his speech to the court. Using his hands, he provided the statistics on the ship's length, breadth, and draft. And in connection with the launching and christening of the ship by the “martyr's widow,” as he called her, he took the opportunity to exclaim reproachfully, “Here in Schwerin Frau Hedwig Gustloff's house was illegally expropriated after the collapse of the Greater German Reich, and later she was driven from the city!”
Then he began to speak of the inner life of the christened ship. He provided information on the reception and dining rooms, the number of cabins, the swimming pool on E deck. Finally he summarized, “The classless liner
It seemed to me that my son was listening to the applause of an imaginary audience after that last exclamation point; but at the same time he must have noticed the gaze of the judge, stern and warning him to cut it short. Relatively quickly, as Herr Stremplin might have said, Konny came to the final journey and the torpedoing of the ship. He characterized the appallingly large number of those who drowned and froze to death as a “rough estimate,” and compared it to the far smaller number of victims of other ship sinkings. Then he gave the number of survivors, expressed gratitude to the captains, skipped over me, his father, completely, but mentioned his grandmother: “Present in this courtroom is seventy-year-old Ursula Pokriefke, in whose name I bear witness today,” whereupon Mother stood up, white hair blazing and the fox around her neck, and took a bow. She, too, seemed to be appearing before a large audience.
As if Konny wanted to put an end to the applause audible only to him, he now assumed a very matter-of-fact tone, expressing appreciation for the “valuable attention to detail” manifested by the former pursers assistant
