Ingo Schulze - New Lives

After breakfast in our orchard the baron invited us to board a small bus. Except for him I don’t think anyone had the vaguest idea what awaited us. Michaela climbed up front into the driver’s cab. Seated in the back were the hereditary prince, Robert, Mother, Vera, Astrid, and I — each in his own seat upholstered with the same velvety fabric that lined the entire vehicle. The television up front flickered — and the baron and Michaela appeared on the screen. They waved to us, then the screen went blank again. Music was coming from somewhere, Mozart, I think — we were already on our way. The vehicle smelled new and strange, filtered light came through the windows, the cool draft from the air conditioning was pleasant. We could see people halt in their tracks to stare at us. But I knew that all they could make out would be their own reflections in the black windowpanes. We roared out of town in the direction of Schmölln, past the baron’s scaffolded villa, where workers scrambled about like ants. No sooner were the last buildings behind us than I drifted into a kind of half sleep. But at the same time I noticed every detail — each tree and field, each ear of grain and leaf, revealed itself with painful clarity. Even the faces of people working in the fields or waiting at a bus stop seemed to glow as they looked up and waved.

In Grosstöbnitz we turned off the highway. We picked up speed. The houses, gardens, and fields flew past, we started uphill, a steep climb that it seemed would never end. I closed my eyes again — and sank into another world, a world of sounds and melodies. I lost myself in the music, unable to tell whether it came from inside me or from outside. I felt as if I had exchanged my human existence for a different mode of being, and for the first time ever I had the premonition of a redeemed world in the midst of our own. Yes, go ahead and laugh, but there are dreams that the instant they brush our consciousness burst like a fish from the depths of the sea when it’s forced to the surface.

As the door opened, I could feel how the outside temperature corresponded exactly to that in the bus.

In a tone of voice that sounded as if we had been carrying on an uninterrupted conversation, the baron explained that what awaited us would be real theater, if not to say theater as reality. He laughed, but in the next moment announced, in the voice of a master of ceremonies: A drama performed on the occasion of the return to Altenburg of the hand reliquary of St. Boniface, the apostle to the Germans, and in honor of the visit of the hereditary prince to the city of his birth.

I pushed the wheelchair forward, and Massimo, who along with all the others had been following us, lifted him into it. Vera laid the prince’s blanket across his knees, Mother handed him binoculars, and Robert raised a parasol to prevent the hereditary prince from being blinded by the sun. Astrid never left the side of the wheelchair — the right side, let it be noted, so that she could always train her good eye on him.

And here came the district councilor and mayor. Together with their retinue, these “first freely elected officials” formed a guard of honor along both sides of the steep bumpy path, up which Massimo labored to push the wheelchair. The top of the hill was crowned with a little chapel. I had no idea where we were.

A white tent had been pitched in front of the chapel. Perhaps it would be better to call it a baldachin, because except for the four corner struts clad in triangular strips of fabric leading down to a point, there was only a roof and no walls. The sun stood at its zenith, the view was overwhelming, a downright shock. To the north of this hill fit for a commanding general — as the baron termed our nameless elevation — lay Altenburg and the flats of the brown coal mines, with Leipzig’s Battle of the Nations Monument far in the distance. To the south rose the expanses of Vogtland and the Ore Mountains. To the west, the pyramids of Ronneburg were so close you felt you could reach out and touch them, and behind them the Thuringian Forest. To the east you were offered a view of lovely rolling hills.

“For the fields lay sere and not yet freshened with heavenly dew!” a stentorian voice proclaimed. To our left, not fifty yards down the slope, stood several hundred strangely garbed people. Divided into two large equal clusters, they were staring at a man in a broad-brimmed hat. Hitching up his long robe, he descended from a mound of sand that, according to a sign, was FRIESLAND and climbed another, where a sign that read ENGLAND had been planted. Basic theater for the masses. And we were the audience.

A tree was now raised with the help of a hand-driven winch.

The hereditary prince asked to be pushed as close as possible to the edge of the slope. Once the tree was standing — its equilibrium maintained by several men holding the ropes — a man stepped out in front of the troupe of players and called out: “The oak of Thor!” At that same moment a sign appeared above some heads that designated this new scene of action as GEISMAR/HESSIA. The man in the hat quickly stepped forward — it was Mansfeld, the Catholic priest — followed by three companions who had evidently learned their nervous gestures from studying bodyguards. When he pulled out an ax from under his robe, they lifted their voices in wails of lamentation. Their efforts were amateurish, but the effect was tremendous. 377

The baron pointed toward the man in the hat. “That’s Boniface,” he offered in superfluous explanation, and smiled at Robert. Boniface had fallen to his knees, and as he prayed his brow touched the ax handle he held in both hands. As he rose to his feet, above the more general cries of “Woe! Woe!” I could hear howls so desperate, so shrill they gave me goose bumps.

Step by step the throng retreated before Boniface and his ax. A few seconds later, what I had taken to be splendidly simulated apprehension turned into genuine fear on the part of the actors. As Boniface struck the tree with his ax — amid utter silence — the trunk split into four pieces that, as each was tugged by a rope, fell away to the ground. The Germanic heathens burst into a wild outcry prompted less by the spectacle itself than by their fear for one of their fellow actors posted farther down the slope, who had barely missed being hit by one quarter of the tree. But since evidently no harm had come to him and he like all the others knelt down to gaze up at the cross that Boniface now held in his hands in lieu of the ax, none of us regarded it as a serious matter either.

Besides which, a chorale had been taken up. I would have sworn I also heard an orchestra. More and more heathens sank to their knees and raised pleading hands to their new God.

Before the chords of their song had died away, the narrator announced in his powerful bass voice that a church would now be built.

That was the starting gun for a race. Four teams lifted the four pieces of trunk that formed a cross on the ground and now rushed uphill as if to take a city gate. Their goal could only be the chapel behind us, which, although it had a fresh coat of paint, had not been newly plastered. The painters had left obvious traces of their work in the grass and the gravel.

Without so much as a glance our way, the converted Germanic men, women, and children panted past us. Viewed from close up, their makeup was good enough for a movie take — disheveled hair, bruised arms, feet and legs mud-caked halfway to their knees. We considered ourselves lucky not to have been overrun by this mob in their thespian frenzy. They set to work on the chapel, attaching the pieces of trunk beside the entrance and at the apse with chains that had been previously bolted there.

A searing sun blazed in the sky, but it was still pleasantly cool where we stood. The hereditary prince, who had been intently following the proceedings, dismissed with a smile any questions about how he was holding up.