a gash in the starboard hull. A bomb that detonated in the harbor had caused the damage: the ship had to be put in dry dock. On a subsequent test run in the Bay of Danzig the “swimming barracks” proved to be still seaworthy.
In the meantime, the captain in command of the ship was no longer Bertram but — as once before, in the KDF era — Petersen. There were no more victories, only reverses along all sections of the eastern front, and the Libyan desert also had to be evacuated. Fewer and fewer U-boats returned from their missions. The large cities were crumbling under the impact of surface bombing; but Danzig still stood, with all its gables and towers. In a carpentry shop in the suburb of Langfuhr, work continued unabated on doors and windows for barracks. Around this time, when not only special victory bulletins but also butter, meat, eggs, and even dried legumes were scarce, Tulla Pokriefke was called up for war service as a streetcar conductor. She was pregnant for the first time, but lost the wee one after she intentionally jumped off the car on the trip between Langfuhr and Oliva: repeatedly, and each time just before a stop, which she described to me as if it were a particular form of physical exercise.
And something else happened in the meantime. When the Swiss began to worry that their still megalomaniac neighbor might decide to occupy them, David Frankfurter was transferred from the prison in Chur to a penal institution in the French part of the country, for his protection, as the explanation went; and the commander of the 250-metric-ton submarine
The new boat,
Now let me leave the ship lying where it was relatively safe, except from air attacks, and crabwalk forward to return to my private misery. It was not as though you could tell from the beginning in what way Konny had gone astray. It looked to me like innocuous childish stuff that he was scattering as he roved through cyberspace, for instance when he compared the KDF cruises, kept inexpensive for propaganda reasons, with the package deals offered to participants in todays tourism for the masses — the cost of tickets for Caribbean cruises on so-called dream ships, or TUI offerings. Needless to say, the comparisons always worked out to the advantage of the “classless”
“Now,” he asserted, “the KDF ruins must be designated a historic site!” And he went on to bicker in schoolboy fashion with his adversary David, whom I had long taken for his invention. They argued about the prospects of achieving a Volk community that would be not only nationalist but also socialist. Konny quoted Gregor Strasser, but also Robert Ley, whose ideas received from him a grade of “excellent.” He spoke of a “sound Volk body,” whereupon David warned him against “socialist-style pseudo-egalitarianism” and called Ley an “alcohol- sodden blowhard.”
I skimmed through this chitchat, finding it only mildly amusing, and realized that the more my son raved about Strength through Joy as a brilliant project and model for the future, and praised the Workers' and Peasants' State s efforts to bring a similar socialist vacation paradise to fruition, notwithstanding all the shortages and shortcomings, the more embarrassingly I could hear his grandmother speaking through him. I no sooner entered Konny s chat room than my ear was filled with the irrepressible jabber of the has-beens.
Mother had provoked me and others in much the same way long ago. During the period before I went to the West, I would hear her holding forth at our kitchen table in her role as Stalin's last faithful follower: “And let me tell you, comrades, you know how our Walter Ulbricht started out small as a carpenter's apprentice? Well, I started in a carpentry apprenticeship, too, and always smelled of bone glue…”
Later, after the First Secretary was forced to vacate the premises, she apparently experienced difficulties. Not because I had fled the Republic, but rather because she belittled Ulbrichts successor as a “puny roofer” and suspected revisionists under every rock. When she was summoned before the Party collective, she is said to have cited Wilhelm Gustloff as a victim of Zionism, describing him as “the tragically murdered son of our beautiful city of Schwerin.”
Nonetheless, Mother managed to hang on to her position. She was both loved and feared. The recipient of several awards for “activism,” she continued to fulfill quotas successfully, and up to the end remained the leader of her carpenters' brigade at the People's Own Furniture Combine on Gustrower Strasse. She also increased the number of women apprenticing as carpenters to over twenty percent.
When the Workers' and Peasants' State was gone and the Berlin Handover Trust opened a branch in Schwerin, responsible for the city and surrounding countryside, Mother is supposed to have had her ringers in the pie, assisting with the winding down and privatizing of the People s Own Cable Works, the PlastExtrusion Machine Works, and other large manufacturing plants such as the Klement Gottwald Works, which made marine hardware, and even her own old Furniture Combine. It is safe to assume that she did not come away empty-handed from the general grabfest that took place in the East, for once the new currency arrived, Mother was not completely dependent on her pension. And when she gave my son the computer, with all the costly peripherals, the purchase did not leave her destitute. I attribute her generosity — toward me she was always fairly stingy — to an event that didn't make waves in the West German press but had a decisive influence on Konny.
But before I get around to describing the survivors' reunion, I have to bring up an embarrassing incident that a certain someone would like to talk me out of, he having formed a far too immaculate picture of his Tulla. On 30 January 1990, when that damned date seemed to have been withdrawn from circulation, because everywhere people were dancing to the tune of “Our Single German Fatherland,” and all the Ossies were panting for the D- mark, Mother undertook her own kind of action.
On the southern bank of Lake Schwerin, a three-story mouse-gray youth hostel was quietly crumbling away. It had been built in the fifties and named for Kurt Burger, an early Stalinist who had arrived from Moscow at war's end as a certified antifascist and had earned his spurs in Mecklenburg by taking a tough stance. Behind the Kurt Burger Youth Hostel, Mother placed a bouquet of long-stemmed roses at approximately the spot overlooking the lake where the granite boulder honoring the martyr was supposed to have stood. She did this in the dark, at exactly 10:18 p.m. She later described her nocturnal act to her friend Jenny and me, giving the precise time. She was all alone, and with her flashlight had searched for the place behind the youth hostel, which was closed for the winter. For a long time she was uncertain, but then, with the sky overcast and a cold rain falling, she decided that she had found it. “But I didn't bring them flowers for Gustloff. He was just one Nazi of many that got shot down. No, it was for the ship and all them little children that died that night in the ice-cold sea. I put down that bunch of white roses at ten-eighteen on the dot. And I cried for them, forty-five years after it happened…”
Five years later, Mother was no longer alone. Herr Schon and the management of the Baltic seaside resort of Damp, along with the gentlemen from the Rescue by Sea organization, issued the invitation. Ten years earlier a reunion of survivors had taken place at the same location. In those days the Wall and the barbed wire were still in place, and no one had been allowed to come from the East German state. But this time people came who for years had not dared to mention the sinking of the ship, for political reasons. Thus it was not surprising that the guests
