German Autumn

The Unwelcome

The Unwelcome Nowadays goods trains generally have priority on German railways. The same people who bitterly claim that Germans have been degraded to a third-class people when the occupying powers have taken season tickets for several rows in the city theatre, sit in the ice-cold compartments of the shabby passenger trains and interpret the new train system symbolically. One must certainly learn to wait: certain kinds of goods train are considered more important than several fully loaded freezing passenger trains bulging with people and their newly filled or still empty potato-sacks. But there are goods trains and goods trains. There are goods trains that are considered to be so insignificant that they are shunted into side-tracks at the junctions, forgotten or neglected and left to stand there for days on end until they are sent on. These trains usually arrive unannounced out of the night and are treated by dispatchers and authorities with the appropriate sort of reluctance that always meets the uninvited. In spite of that, the unwelcome goods trains continue, with embarrassing persistence, to reveal themselves like ghost-ships at the stations, and the railway staff continue to send them on when the 51 line at some point is by chance open. One can well understand this reluctance and hesitation on the part of the railway officials. The uninvited goods trains are hardly models of their kind; they are not even typical examples of German post-war rolling-stock. They consist of wagons which in normal times would go to the scrap-heap, but which are now coupled together and supplied with small informative signs saying: 'Not watertight. Unsuitable for the transport of perishable goods.' This means that the rain comes in through the roof and that the wagon can therefore be used only for the transport of goods which do not rust and in general will not suffer from being soaked through or which quite simply are thought to be so worthless that it would not matter if they really did come to harm - in other words, things not worth the effort of stealing and scarcely deserving the use of a goods train claiming respect and priority when its approach is signalled down the line. In a cold grey downpour such a train is standing in a marshalling yard in Essen. It consists of nineteen wagons and has spent the whole week parked here in the rain. The engine was uncoupled, and the interest which usually greets the arrival of useful-looking goods trains has not been forthcoming in this case. And yet this abandoned, famished goods train contains something which ought to be of great interest to the city of Essen: two hundred citizens of Essen who have been evacuees in Bavaria since the first Allied blanket-bombing spread over the Ruhr and who have now returned in this train to their home city or rather to the station of their home city because they are not allowed to come further. 52 All Germans know that most of the larger German cities are subject to Zuzugsverbot, which means that travel within Germany is forbidden to the extent that while one is permitted to walk about among the ruins of any German city one chooses, it is none the less forbidden to look for work, to eat or to live there. The Bavarian authorities know that too, but their knowledge did not prevent them from evicting, at five days' notice, the non-Bavarian evacuees who had been assigned to the unscathed Bavarian villages. The non-watertight goods trains are put together in Bavarian stations, the non-Bavarians are stuffed into the wagons, whose sole amenities consist of floor, roof and walls, and as soon as the line is clear the trains are sent off towards the north-west. Fourteen days later a train reaches its destination, and its destination first does not know about its arrival, and then does not want to know. During the fourteen days in which the train was on its way its passengers were not furnished with any official possibility of being fed, but their home city shows a little goodwill in offering a plate of thin soup per day in a small shed at the side of the tracks. It is embarrassing and highly unpleasant coming to such a place and feeling quite helpless. The main station-building vanished several years ago and twisted rails coil...