Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl by Uwe Johnson

Author:Uwe Johnson [Johnson, Uwe]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: German Literature, Classics, Fiction
ISBN: 9781681372037
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Published: 1970-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

April 14, 1968 Sunday

– You dialed West Berlin, Mrs. Krissauer?

– Two minutes ago. Eight-five, five-three, five- . . . .

– West Berlin is on the line.

– Seat reservation.

– Is that your code for today, Anita?

– It is. Gesine. Where are you? At the airport? Tempelhof or Tegel?

– I’m at home.

– I know you. You’re in the Hospiz Hotel in Friedenau two blocks away trying to trick me. Come over right now!

– I’m on Riverside Drive. It’s seventy degrees here, Fahrenheit.

– It’s not true.

– Anita, listen. I just wanted to ask you something. Whether you’re still alive.

– Ask me something easier. Why wouldn’t we still be alive, Gesine?

– Last summer, during the riots in Newark, you called me to—

– These aren’t riots, Gesine. You know what it usually takes to make a revolution.

– It says in The New York Times that several thousand students blocked traffic on the Kurfürstendamm for more than two hours last night, that the police used horses and water cannons—

– That’s right. Today too. Almost four thousand. I saw it. The police charged like mad into the crowd clubbing anyone within reach. The students fought back with sticks, with cans of spray paint, firecrackers, even apples!

– Were you there?

– As an old lady, you know, thirty-five. . . .

– I am too, Anita.

– Yeah well I can’t do it anymore. They run at the police chanting “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!” My feet don’t join in and my mouth doesn’t open.

– We really are alike. Why Ho Chi Minh? Isn’t it about the killing of Herr Dutschke?

– It’s about Rudi Dutschke and Herr Professor Doktor Springer, said to have brought about Dutschke’s murder with his newspapers.

– The New York Times says: The murder was inspired by the assassination of Martin Luther King.

– It was!

– Then I don’t understand it, Anita.

– The president of the Republic of North Vietnam as a symbol of the revolutionary war of liberation, and a newspaper publisher as a symbol of the powers of oppression. Something like that, Gesine.

– There’s a quote here: Not with violence but through the force of the argument. . . .

– Dutschke?

– Yes.

– Well maybe we’re not supposed to understand it, Gesine.

– Don’t trust anyone over thirty. So it’s not an uprising.

– No, it’s just that you shouldn’t go down the Kurfürstendamm, Gesine. We built a little protective floodgate. . . .

– Hey, be careful.

– Just a piece of sugar for the horses listening in.

– With their little ears and big heads.

– Nasty creatures when they get scared. Feel bad when they kick out. Peace March, that’s what they called it. At the head an older man, with a wooden cross—

– Celebrating Easter there too?

– and the police aimed six big jets of water at him, thicker than an arm. At one point a Negro appeared, an American apparently, and the police were suddenly gentle as doves. Photographers everywhere, from the papers, the TV stations, the student organizations keeping track of police contact. The police beating a citizen of the protecting power, America! Then they arrested him after all.

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