“Frau Schmitz? She moved out this morning.”
“And her furniture?”
“It’s not her furniture.”
“How long did she live in the apartment?”
“What’s it to you?” The woman who had been talking to me through a window in the door slammed it shut.
In the administration building of the streetcar company, I talked my way through to the personnel department. The man in charge was friendly and concerned.
“She called this morning early enough for us to arrange for a substitute, and said that she wouldn’t be coming back, period.” He shook his head. “Two weeks ago she was sitting there in your chair and I offered to have her trained as a driver, and she throws it all away.”
It took me some days to think of going to the citizens’ registration office. She had informed them she was moving to Hamburg, but without giving an address.
The days went by and I felt sick. I took pains to make sure my parents and my brother and sisters noticed nothing. I joined in the conversation at table a little, ate a little, and when I had to throw up, I managed to make it to the toilet. I went to school and to the swimming pool. I spent my afternoons there in an out-of-the-way place where no one would look for me. My body yearned for Hanna. But even worse than my physical desire was my sense of guilt. Why hadn’t I jumped up immediately when she stood there and run to her! This one moment summed up all my half-heartedness of the past months, which had produced my denial of her, and my betrayal. Leaving was her punishment.
Sometimes I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t her I had seen. How could I be sure it was her when I hadn’t been able to make out the face? If it had been her, wouldn’t I have had to recognize her face? So couldn’t I be sure it wasn’t her at all?
But I knew it was her. She stood and looked - and it was too late.
PART TWO
Chapter 18
A FTER HANNA left the city, it took a while before I stopped watching for her everywhere, before I got used to the fact that afternoons had lost their shape, and before I could look at books and open them without asking myself whether they were suitable for reading aloud. It took a while before my body stopped yearning for hers; sometimes I myself was aware of my arms and legs groping for her in my sleep, and my brother reported more than once at table that I had called out “Hanna” in the night. I can also remember classes at school when I did nothing but dream of her, think of her. The feeling of guilt that had tortured me in the first weeks gradually faded. I avoided her building, took other routes, and six months later my family moved to another part of town. It wasn’t that I forgot Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It’s there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?
I remember my last years of school and my first years at university as happy. Yet I can’t say very much about them. They were effortless; I had no difficulty with my final exams at school or with the legal studies that I chose because I couldn’t think of anything else I really wanted to do; I had no difficulty with friendships, with relationships or the end of relationships - I had no difficulty with anything. Everything was easy; nothing weighed heavily. Perhaps that is why my bundle of memories is so small. Or do I keep it small? I also wonder if my memory of happiness is even true. If I think about it more, plenty of embarrassing and painful situations come to mind, and I know that even if I had said goodbye to my memory of Hanna, I had not overcome it. Never to let myself be humiliated or humiliate myself after Hanna, never to take guilt upon myself or feel guilty, never again to love anyone whom it would hurt to lose - I didn’t formulate any of this as I thought back then, but I know that’s how I felt.
I adopted a posture of arrogant superiority. I behaved as if nothing could touch or shake or confuse me. I got involved in nothing, and I remember a teacher who saw through this and spoke to me about it; I was arrogantly dismissive. I also remember Sophie. Not long after Hanna left the city, Sophie was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She spent three years in a sanitorium, returning just as I went to university. She felt lonely, and sought out contact with her old friends. It wasn’t hard for me to find a way into her heart. After we slept together, she realized I wasn’t interested in her; in tears, she asked, “What’s happened to you, what’s happened to you?” I remember my grandfather during one of my last visits before his death; he wanted to bless me, and I told him I didn’t believe in any of that and didn’t want it. It is hard for me to imagine that I felt good about behaving like that. I also remember that the smallest gesture of affection would bring a lump to my throat, whether it was directed at me or at someone else. Sometimes all it took was a scene in a movie. This juxtaposition of callousness and extreme sensitivity seemed suspicious even to me.
Chapter 19
WHEN I saw Hanna again, it was in a courtroom.
It wasn’t the first trial dealing with the camps, nor was it one of the major ones. Our professor, one of the few at that time who were working on the Nazi past and the related trials, made it the subject of a seminar, in the hope of being able to follow the entire trial with the help of his students, and evaluate it. I can no longer remember what it was he wanted to examine, confirm, or disprove. I do remember that we argued the prohibition of retroactive追溯的 justice in the seminar. Was it sufficient that the ordinances under which the camp guards and enforcers were convicted were already on the statute books at the time they committed their crimes? Or was it a question of how the laws were actually interpreted and enforced at the time they committed their crimes, and that they were not applied to them? What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right? The professor, an old gentleman who had returned from exile but remained an outsider among German legal scholars, participated in these debates with all the force of his scholarship, and yet at the same time with a detachment that no longer relied on pure scholarship to provide the solution to a problem. “Look at the defendants - you won’t find a single one who really believes he had the dispensation (permission, privilege) to murder back then.”
The seminar began in winter, the trial in spring. It lasted for weeks. The court was in session Mondays through Thursdays, and the professor assigned a group of students to keep a word-for-word record for each day. The seminar was held on Fridays, and explored the data gathered during the preceding week.
Exploration! Exploring the past! We students in the seminar considered ourselves radical explorers. We tore open the windows and let in the air, the wind that finally whirled away the dust that society had permitted to settle over the horrors of the past. We made sure people could breathe and see. And we placed no reliance on legal scholarship. It was evident to us that there had to be convictions. It was just as evident that conviction of this or that camp guard or enforcer was only the prelude. The generation that had been served by the guards and enforcers, or had done nothing to stop them, or had not banished them from its midst as it could have done after 1945, was in the dock被告席, and we explored it, subjected it to trial by daylight, and condemned it to shame.
Our parents had played a variety of roles in the Third Reich. Several among our fathers had been in the war, two or three of them as officers of the Wehrmacht and one as an officer of the Waffen SS. Some of them had held positions in the judiciary or local government. Our parents also included teachers and doctors, and one of us had an uncle who had been a high official in the Ministry of the Interior. I am sure that to the extent that we asked and to the extent that they answered us, they had very different stories to tell. My father did not want to talk about himself, but I knew that he had lost his job as lecturer in philosophy for scheduling a lecture on Spinoza, and had got himself and us through the war as an editor for a house that published hiking maps and books. How did I decide that he too was under sentence of shame? But I did. We all condemned our parents to shame, even if the only charge we could bring was that after 1945 they had tolerated the perpetrators in their midst.
We students in the seminar developed a strong group identity. We were the students of the camps - that’s how the other students described us, and how we soon came to call ourselves. What we were doing didn’t interest the others; it alienated many of them, literally repelled some. When I think about it now, I think that our eagerness to assimilate the horrors and our desire to make everyone else aware of them was in fact repulsive. The more horrible the events about which we read and heard, the more certain we became of our responsibility to enlighten and accuse. Even when the facts took our breath away, we held them up triumphantly. Look at this!
I had enrolled in the seminar out of sheer curiosity. It was finally something new, not contracts and not property, torts or criminal law or legal method. I brought to the seminar my arrogant, superior airs. But as the winter went on, I found it harder and harder to withdraw - either from the events we read and heard about, or from the zeal that seized the students in the seminar. At first, I pretended to myself that I only wanted to participate in the scholarly debate, or its political and moral fervor. But I wanted more; I wanted to share in the general passion. The others may have found me distant and arrogant; for my part, I had the good feeling all that winter that I belonged, and that I was at peace with myself about what I was doing and the people with whom I was doing it.
Chapter 20
THE TRIAL was in another town, about an hour’s drive away. I had no other reason ever to go there. Another student drove. He had grown up there and knew the place.
It was a Thursday. The trial had begun on Monday. The first three days of proceedings had been taken up with defense motions to recuse. Our group was the fourth, and so would witness the examination of the defendants at the actual start of proceedings.
We drove along Bergstrasse under blossoming fruit trees. We were bubbling over with exhilaration: finally we could put all our training into practice. We did not feel like mere spectators, or listeners, or recorders. Watching and listening and recording were our contributions to the exploration of history.
The court was in a turn-of-the-century building, but devoid of the gloomy pomposity so characteristic of court buildings of the time. The room that housed the assize巡回审判court had a row of large windows down the left-hand side, with milky glass that blocked the view of the outdoors but let in a great deal of light. The prosecutors sat in front of the windows, and against the bright spring and summer daylight they were no more than black silhouettes. The court, three judges in black robes and six selected local citizens, was in place at the head of the courtroom and on the right-hand side was the bench of defendants and their lawyers: there were so many of them that the extra chairs and tables stretched into the middle of the room in front of the public seats. Some of the defendants and their lawyers were sitting with their backs to us. One of them was Hanna. I did not recognize her until she was called, and she stood up and stepped forward. Of course I recognized the name as soon as I heard it: Hanna Schmitz. Then I also recognized the body, the head with the hair gathered in an unfamiliar knot, the neck, the broad back, and the strong arms. She held herself very straight, balanced on both feet. Her arms were relaxed at her sides. She wore a gray dress with short sleeves. I recognized her, but I felt nothing. Nothing at all.
Yes, she wished to stand. Yes, she was born on October 21, 1922, near Hermannstadt and was now forty-three years old. Yes, she had worked at Siemens in Berlin and had joined the SS in the autumn of 1943.
“You enrolled voluntarily?
“Yes.”
“Why?
Hanna did not answer.
“Is it true that you joined the SS even though Siemens had offered you a job as a foreman?”
Hanna’s lawyer was on his feet. “What do you mean by 'even though'? Do you mean to suggest that a woman should prefer to become a foreman at Siemens than join the SS? There are no grounds for making my client’s decision the object of such a question.”
He sat down. He was the only young defense attorney; the others were old - some of them, as became apparent, old Nazis. Hanna’s lawyer avoided both their jargon and their lines of reasoning. But he was too hasty and too zealous in ways that were as damaging to his client as his colleagues’ Nazi tirades were to theirs. He did succeed in making the judge look irritated and stop pursuing the question of why Hanna had joined the SS. But the impression remained that she had done it of her own accord and not under pressure. It didn’t help her when one of the legal members of the court asked Hanna what kind of work she expected to do for the SS and she said that the SS was recruiting women at Siemens and other factories for guard duties and she had applied and was hired.
To the judge’s questions, Hanna testified in monosyllables that yes, she had served in Auschwitz until early 1944 and then in a small camp near Cracow until the winter of 1944-45, that yes, when the prisoners were moved to the west she went with them all the way, that she was in Kassel at the end of the war and since then had lived in one place and another. She had been in my city for eight years; it was the longest time she had spent in any one place.
“Is her frequent change of residence supposed to be grounds for viewing her as a flight risk?” The lawyer was openly sarcastic. “My client registered with the police each time she arrived at a new address and each time she left. There is no reason to assume she would run away, and there is nothing for her to hide. Did the judge feel it impossible to release my client on her own recognizance保证书, 保释金 because of the gravity of the charges and the risk of public agitation? That, members of the court, is a Nazi rationale基本原理 for custody; it was introduced by the Nazis and abolished after the Nazis. It no longer exists.” The lawyer’s malicious emphasis underlined the irony in this truth.
I was jolted. I realized that I had assumed it was both natural and right that Hanna should be in custody. Not because of the charges, the gravity of the allegations, or the force of the evidence, of which I had no real knowledge yet, but because in a cell she was out of my world, out of my life. I wanted her far away from me, so unattainable that she could continue as the mere memory she had become and remained all these years. If the lawyer was successful, I would have to prepare myself to meet her again, and I would have to work out how I wanted to do that, and how it should be. And I could see no reason why he should fail. If Hanna had not tried to escape the law so far, why should she try now? And what evidence could she suppress? There were no other legal reasons at that time to hold someone in custody.
