Europe Central (107 page)

Now, who was
this
one? It seems that when a team of Rubblefrauen were raising up the remains of the gravestones in the Jewish cemetery they heard a noise, so three of them stood round the hole with shovels raised to strike, while the fourth ran for the People’s Police. The Fascist war criminal Hagen had ensconced himself there. What a provocation! The Anglo-Americans had pretended to hang him at Nuremberg, and here he was! He had a tunnel and even a crystal set so that he could receive orders from the enemies of our new Germany. It was the Anglo-Fascist Operation Gold all over again. Our brave People’s Police, led by Oberst H. Scholz, ran to give their aid; Red Army men came speeding down Leninallee in their Vopo-Jeeps. And so we captured the imperialist snake Hagen.

First pursing her fat grey lips, then showing her crooked teeth, the Red Guillotine narrowed her eyes at the defendant, who gazed insolently back at her. Oh, she felt a rage coming on! Meanwhile, in the name of East Germany’s smiling chemists and laughing athletes, our Young Pioneers (ages six to ten) were already shrieking out
Down with the traitor!
while our Thälmann Pioneers (eleven to fourteen) waved beautifully lettered placards in support of our inevitably just sentence, whatever it might be.

Esteemed comrades and friends! began the Red Guillotine
in the name of the people
; and her wide little eyes and parted little lips definitely stood ready to do justice. Vigilance against the reptiles! Spies beware! We’ve caught another one!

And still, no matter how she glowered and glared, the Fascist traitor refused to lower his eyes, and thereby revealed his negative attitude. How pale he was! He must have been a long time underground.

All the preparations were ready. His sentence had already been confirmed. She felt that she could hardly rest until he was in the grave, with his head severed from his shoulders.

Confesss your criminal activities, began the Red Guillotine.

Which ones? laughed Hagen.

When Hagen not only refuses to rise for Siegfried’s widow, but lays across his lap the jasper-jeweled sword of the man he’s murdered, the bard who’s made him grows gleeful; what’s more manly than open defiance, especially in the presence of a superior host? Hagen knows he’s doomed, and shows off his hostility in that sword’s beauty and insulting nakedness.

The Red Guillotine gazed back into his defiant face and experienced a hideous sense of familiarity. It had never been her habit to indulge the so-called “feelings,” so the sensations of sorrow and repugnance which now assaulted her were overwhelmingingly inexplicable. This Hagen had been, said the indictment, a guard at KZ-Mauthausen. Although Georg’s death had been officially judged a suicide, we all know how
those people
do things. It was possible that Hagen had witnessed or even precipitated her husband’s death. All the same, a true Communist remains unaffected by such things.

Defendant Hagen, you committed crimes against the people, did you not?

That I did.

Then why did you say to the arresting officers that you had done
nothing out of the ordinary,
when you knew perfectly well that such was not the case?

The accused began to answer: I can’t say it any more exactly than this—

In fact, you can say it extremely exactly! laughed the Red Guillotine, and the courtroom laughed with her. But you want to make fools of us.

No, I don’t want to . . . he whispered. At least, that is what the others had always whispered. But Hagen didn’t whisper at all. In fact, he chuckled: You’re not simply a Jew by marriage, now, are you, Frau Benjamin? You’re a
blood-Jew.
Do you know what Germans think about blood-Jews?

She went greyish-white.

Of course she condemned him to
death
—one more example of the impartiality of justice in our German Democratic Republic. To us onlookers she explained: This sentence is a warning for all who waver in the defense of our state, for all who fail to press forward for the victory of world peace.

But her round pale face writhed and trembled restlessly.

25

After that she seemed to age ever more swiftly, and the set of her mouth expressed weariness and disgust. Neither torchlight processions in our traditional German manner nor trainloads of glistening coal gladdened her. The smoke of the past hung so gloomily over everything! And that dream she had, the one of the tarnished silver box whose lock she could not master, she could never understand why it caused her such anxiety.

She came into the Stasi office and Comrade Mielke was all smiles; but she wondered whether an instant before her arrival he’d been making anti-Semitic innuendos against her.

In 1956, when we created our National People’s Army to counter the increasing threat from the West, the second Five-Year Plan was approved, and Roman Karmen made the film “India’s Dawn.” Meanwhile, de-Stalinization began. This put the Red Guillotine in almost as awkward a position as Comrade Ulbricht. In any event, it was already being said of her that her energies had slackened. What she used to demand of those within her power was confession. After Hagen, what she longed for more than anything was silence before the quick conviction. Her courtrooms were no longer quite so full of sadistically expectant onlookers. And now, without regard to the very serious internal and external situation we faced in those days,
Neues Deutschland,
following Comrade Khruschev’s line, dared to attack her for being
schematic and unbending.

We retreated; we amnestied twenty-one thousand criminals. Fortunately, the so-called “Hungarian uprising” gave us the excuse we needed to reestablish our standards. On 17.10.56, the Red Guillotine announced:
We cannot permit ourselves to dispense with the death penalty. There have been no unjust sentences in our German Democratic Republic.

All the same, in 1957 we agreed to punish murder with twenty-five years’ imprisonment, not death. I saw her sitting beside the Hungarian Minister of Justice, Ferenc Nezval, each of them isolated, and later that same day she signed this dreadful piece of legislation in a bizarre ceremony of abstruse plainness, while dark-suited figures stood behind them in a line, and behind them hung a huge portrait of a man with white hair: Comrade Ulbricht. Fortunately, treason, espionage and kindred crimes could still be penalized as they deserved.

I’m told that she attended the funeral of the former Field-Marshal Paulus, which for political reasons was a restrained affair. Afterward she sat at the writing-desk of her hotel room, opened her briefcase, removed the Stasi folder, withdrew the second photograph, which showed Paulus in a waist-deep trench at Stalingrad, clasping his wrist and seeming to push away at the enemy as the men in uniform who surround him gaze obediently on; laughing, she tore this photograph to pieces.

She signed another death sentence, and then I saw her speaking earnestly with Erich Mückenberger, her missing and crooked teeth giving her a cheaply monstrous expression; the sentence was not carried out. Meanwhile her Stasi file began to contain complaints of her overbearing, imperious, “uncolleaguish” lapses of temper. It was around this time that we reinvestigated her past record and discovered that the years 1937-39, which her autobiographical statement claimed she’d spent as a retail employee, were in fact passed in a Jewish-owned pastry shop. It’s not that we have anything against Jews in
our
Germany. (I won’t speak for the West.) All the same, one can’t be too careful, given the adventurism of the Zionists nowadays. It’s possible that a report was made to Comrade Mielke. On the other hand, I can’t believe that anything came of it. The memorial tribute she wrote to Georg Benjamin a few years later was published to careful acclaim.

On 5 December, when we’d passed around cigarettes and schnapps to celebrate Soviet Constitution Day, she tried to ingratiate herself with Comrade Honecker, who was obviously going to be Number One sooner or later, but he snubbed her.

I’ve seen her in her fur coat, standing next to SED- Zentralkomitee Secretary Grüneberg in 1958, by which time we had completely liquidated unemployment. That was when peace-loving peoples of the Soviet Union demanded that the Anglo-American imperialists demilitarize Berlin. Needless to say, the imperialists rejected this just demand. No matter. When the time is ripe we will open their eyes.

At another ceremony with Soviet soldiers she was smiling, looking sweet, with her grey hair braided in coils upon the top of her head; and her striped scarf appeared quite stylish within the fur coat. Particularly as she aged, she came to have a strangely sweet meditative face, round and soft as she sat at a white-clothed table with a line of other dignitaries; she could be a Jewish refugee, which by marriage she was, or a Spanish gypsy woman or even Käthe Kollwitz herself with that heavy round face; oh, how odd that she could be Käthe Kollwitz! As the Programmatic Declaration of the State Council so perfectly put it in 1960:
Our laws are the realization of human freedom.

That same year, when the Stasi expanded its powers and membership in order to better spy on
hostile-negatives;
when we executed the traitor Manfred Smolka; when Roman Karmen directed “Our Friend Indonesia” and Shostakovich composed Opus 110, we resumed our drive for forced collectivization—a task which the drought of 1959 had made doubly urgent. Who was willing to undertake the prosecutions for failure to deliver harvest quotas? Why, our dear Red Guillotine! (Comrade Bley:
Based on the teachings of Lenin, she envisioned a necessary direction for the workers’ and farmers’ movement in socialist legislation.)
Meanwhile, the Red Guillotine sat frail and uncomfortable in the front row of a gathering, her hand gripping the armrest, her white legs crossed for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Humboldt University.

Naturally, our increased efforts to socialize agriculture caused more parasites to flee the nation—two thousand of them a day!—The Red Guillotine sent the ones we caught to prison, crying to the courtroom:
To get a free education and then run away, is that decent?
All the same, more and more of them got away. So Comrade Ulbricht was forced to build the Wall—or, as it’s more properly termed, the
anti-Fascist protective barrier.
That worked perfectly. It made manifest to the world the utter divide between our new Germany and what has been aptly called
nazideutscher Faschismus.
The telephone screamed for joy.
Only a shambles was left of Adenauer’s “policy of strength,”
Comrade Honecker gloated.

26

She drafted our Family Law of 1966, which protects the property of wives after marriage and requires parents to educate their children with a socialist outlook. How many other countries can boast such progressive legislation? Her head was tilted, showing the part in her hair as she signed; a man from the Zentralkomitee bent over her, while at her right another man was bending over Comrade Ulbricht. They gave her the Service Medal of the National People’s Army in gold. But her ideals were already being lost.

Regarding the Volkskammer elections of 1967, it had been arranged immediately before her one-week trip to Bulgaria that she would be put up for candidature as usual; but three days after her return, on 30.5.67, she called her chauffeur and had herself driven to Potsdam in that tiny-windowed limousine so that she could take care of the formalities, only to discover that she wasn’t going to be nominated after all; and, in fact, that her term as Minister of Justice was over. A report by Richter Hauptmann of the Stasi describes her as between astonished and angry. Her round grey head sank deep between her dark-suited shoulders. And so she found herself obliged to step aside for Dr. Kurt Wünsche. After all, she was now sixty-five.

She took a few mementoes with her, including a folder whose only exhibit now was a grainy photograph of Paulus from the side as he enters his captivity, head up. Now she entered hers, in her two-storey house in the new concrete-walled restricted area between Basdorf and Wandlitz, with its tennis court and shooting range; according to Comrade Ulbricht, the food was far better than it had been at the “reserved” restaurant in Moscow’s Hotel Lux. She could walk over to Justice Minister Matern’s house whenever she pleased, or even to Comrade Ulbricht’s, which boasted Chinese silk hangings. But she didn’t like either of them. Sometimes when she went to get a massage she met Comrade Ulbricht doing calisthenics, and she did her best to be polite, but how could she forget that he had not prevented her removal?

In ’68, we firmly supported the Soviet Union against the Czech provocateurs. Listening to her radio at home, the Red Guillotine screamed:
Death, death!
The year after that, the Soviet Union sold us out and normalized relations with West Germany! (Look! There’s Roman Karmen, smiling amiably at little crewcut children as he films “Comrade Berlin.” He’ll come back again soon for a retrospective in celebration of his sixty-fifth birthday. But none of this makes the Red Guillotine feel any better.)

That September she attended an international legal conference at Walter Ulbricht German Academy of State and Law, but she was only a lecturer in the history of law; she was no longer allowed to do what she’d been put on earth to do. The lessons of the Hagen case were forgotten. And everything got worse and worse in our ever more advanced socialist society right up until 1989, the last year of her old age, by which time her dark eyes kept looking away from everything, while her drawn mouth showed teeth. A few months after she closed her eyes forever, so did East Germany.

Well, what had she accomplished? By 1967, seventy-five percent of our judges in the regional and district courts derived from the working class.
To be remembered here is her impartiality, as well as her distinct contributions to refining the family law system and conducting cases consistent with the culture of socialist jurisdiction.
Her praises stretch as long as the lines at the Intertank gas station. By the time she retired, ninety-three hundred industrial enterprises had been demonopolized and transferred to the ownership of the people; thirteen thousand seven hundred farms had been confiscated by local agencies of self-government! Much of this vital work was accomplished in the courtroom, for which we must thank our Red Guillotine. The sly cones of the SM-70 automatic shooting devices on the Wall were not in place until the seventies; we can’t give her credit for instituting those; but she could be proud of having presided over our new Criminal Code of 1968, which respects Soviet justice even more, and replaces beheading by (I quote the regulations)
an unexpected shot at close quarters in the back of the head.
As Comrade Mielke always used to say: Short schrift to all of them! Because I’m a humanitarian.