German Autumn

Return to Hamburg

Return to Hamburg 'America.' 'Bitter 'America!' 'America?' There's no doubting him. The boy wants to go to America and nothing can be done about it. Nothing but shake one's head and stare helplessly up into the broken roofs cloudy ironwork in the darkness high above us. But the boy who wants me to help him over to America quickly bows over my little American satchel and caresses it vexatiously. 'You work for the Amis!' 'No.' 'Doch!' There's a hard wind blowing through this station in South Germany. The refugees from the east stamp their feet among their grey bundles. Tired POWs on their way home after years in France saunter to and fro in the cold darkness, woeful men in long French overcoats with a big PG (prisonnier deguerre) sewn on the back. On the pillars up and down the platform there are big red WANTED placards describing an 101 'fawohl.' escaped Polish murderer, once a guard in a concentration camp, of medium height and armed with a pistol. On the station walls there are other WANTED notices, neatly written ones stuck there by parents seeking children who have disappeared at the front. An astrologer outside Nuremberg promises to trace them in return for twenty marks sent by mail. On big posters a young woman, her skull showing faintly beneath the mask of her face, warns against venereal disease. One has to learn to see death in everywoman one meets. A graph demonstrating the incidence of venereal diseases shows an ominous red curve rising at a dreadfully steep angle from July 1945, the month when the soldiers began to feel at home. On the platform opposite ours drunk American boy-soldiers are singing, each one his own hit-song. They fight one another playfully and the smacking sounds of their gloves are like drum-beats in the cold silence. One of them tumbles cursing over a trolley. A couple of staggering girls in their company giggle and cackle in German. Thanksgiving Day. If I work for the Americans? I explain everything to the boyin the worn-out military coat and cap- acap of defeat, bashed in and pulled right down over his forehead. He just becomes more eager and reckless and says that I must help him. He looks at the American satchel as if it were a revelation, a victory satchel with full paunch and shining buckles. He bends down over it and tells me about himself. He is sixteen and is called Gerhard. Last night he fled from the Russian zone. Managed to cross the border by train without being stopped. Fled not because the conditions back in Luther's birthplace were particularly intolerable but because he is a mechanic and he 102 did not want to be forced into making a voluntary journey to Russia. So, he has arrived here without money, without anyone he can contact, without even a roof over his head. 'In Deutschland ist nix mehr /#.' One can't stay in Germany any longer. I lend him money for a ticket to Hamburg. At least he will get as far as Hamburg; he thinks that ships leave Hamburg for America, ships to hope for. He goes off to buy a ticket and if he wanted to he could easily slip away, refrain from changing the big note and vanish in the darkness outside the station. That would have been normal, more normal than anything else. But the boy who wants to go to America does come back, and when the train reverses in we fight side by side to get places on this cold, pitch-dark train, a typical German post-war train, though with unusually whole windows and with compartments with benches to sit on. Other German trains are dark in the daytime as well because wooden planks have been nailed over the empty window-frames. If you want light you can sit in a compartment without such planks, but it is cold there and the rain comes in. We are pushed into this nocturnal compartment by busy invisible hands. In the darkness close combat develops, small-scale, quiet, wordless but bitter; trampled children shriek; countless feet kick aside the obstructive bundles of the refugees. The dark compartment is full but it can well be fuller. It is incredible how many people can find space in these miserable square metres. Not until the crush hurts is the door...