Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

The judge advocate expressed his disapproval of the behaviour of the accused. Everything was a question of attitude. In this case ingratitude was to the fore — after all Hoffmann owed his place at university to the generosity of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State. He had betrayed the trust put in him. He was guilty of a gross violation of his duty as leader of a military combat collective. Had disappointed the trust placed in him. He demanded twelve months’ confinement. Sperber frowned, tried to get it reduced to ten months.

The next morning the judgment was pronounced :

In the Name of the People

In the case against

Lance Corporal Christian Hoffmann

b. 28/10/1965 in Dresden,

single, no previous convictions,

at present remanded in custody for crimes against

Section 220, sub-section 1, Public Disparagement,

on the basis of the hearing of 6/6/1986

the 1st Division of the Dresden Military Court,

represented by …

has delivered the following judgment:

The accused is found guilty of Public Disparagement of the State according to Section 220, sub-section 1 and sentenced to a punishment of

twelve months’ detention in the military prison.

The period spent in custody will be taken into account. The period spent in prison will not count towards his period of military service. His place to study medicine at Karl-Marx University Leipzig, planned entry 05/10/1987, is cancelled. Lance Corporal Hoffmann has to bear the cost of the proceedings.

By law

signed

Then Pancake: also twelve months’ detention. The assessor read out the grounds for the judgment. The court left the room. Christian and Pancake had to sign the judgment and the grounds for judgment. The clerk kept her hand firmly on the paper while they signed.

Transfer . Again a lorry arrived with VEB Service Combine written on it. From Dresden they went to Frankfurt an der Oder. ‘Right along the wall,’ Pancake joked, as he came back from Effects with Christian; both had their kitbags with their possessions over their shoulder. Pancake was annoyed that he couldn’t take his accordion. ‘No amusement,’ the guard snapped, pushing them into the lorry. They travelled in handcuffs. At some point during the hours on the road there was thumping on one of the cell doors. ‘I need to go.’

‘Sniff it up and spit it out,’ the guard told him. Then he asked, ‘Anyone else?’ A few put up their hands. The lorry stopped, a short discussion with the officer in charge. Go one at a time. Christian was chained to the guard. The toilet was at a provincial station that remained nameless for Christian; they went along subterranean passages and through back doors. In the toilet he urinated against the blue-tiled wall they had instead of a urinal; there were cigarette butts in the drain, metal ashtrays at chest height on the wall, the man next to him put his cigarette down on one. He asked no questions and finished as quickly as he could. The guard stood, half turned away, smoking, glanced at his watch. ‘Get a move on, man, can’t you pee quicker?’

The remand detention centre in Frankfurt an der Oder was small and dilapidated. The men who had been sentenced were taken to a custody room, where Pancake and Christian couldn’t stand up straight. It was damp, in places the paint was flaking off the walls, the legs of the stools had mould on them. The bunks had been let down, the cell was overfull, they had to take it in turns to sleep. Christian lay on a bunk watching a drop of water growing like a bright pupil in the middle of a damp patch. Cockroaches rustled along the floor, ran across the walls. The other half of the night, when Pancake demanded his place, Christian sat at the table staring into the darkness with the shimmer of floodlights outside.

The next morning they were sent to the barber. The doors were low, you had to be careful not gash your forehead. The staircases were narrow, steps were missing, you had to make sure you didn’t fall, that might have looked like deliberate disobedience. Men in handcuffs were waiting to have their hair cut. The barber was a little old man with gaps in his teeth and his hair combed straight back, giving him the look of an arctic loon. Christian remembered a book from his childhood: Germany’s Birds it had been called, a green cigarette-card album that his clock-grandfather had given him. He’d seen a picture of the arctic loon in it. Christian’s hair was shorn off with electric clippers, it didn’t take a minute; the arctic loon knew what he was doing.

Transfer . Now the military detainees were separated from the other prisoners. The military detainees boarded the Schweden , as the vehicle was known, which took Christian and four others. At first they went northwards, through the Oder marshes, where the birds screeched and the flapping of their wings sometimes drowned out the clatter of the bolts on the cages, there was a smell of rushes and fish and kerosene. Then they turned off to the east, towards the Polish border.

Schwedt . A name of terror, murmured in the army with your hand over your mouth, familiar to every soldier, to hardly any civilians; Schwedt an der Oder: a new town established in the countryside, like Eisenhüttenstadt in the south, the place where the Friendship oil pipeline from the depths of the Soviet Union terminates, high-rise buildings made of prefabricated concrete slabs, a windswept plain, the gigantic petrochemical combine. They got out. Christian saw: a barred gate with sentries, a road coming out of a forest, industrial pipelines along one side of the road, beyond them a field, in the distance the colourful rectangles of a mobile bee-house. Schwedt an der Oder Military Prison. From all the rumours about it Christian had imagined it would be more grandiose. But that? It looked small, unassuming, cramped. They were taken into a low concrete building, into a room that was bare apart from a portrait of the Minister of National Defence, a table and a few chairs.

‘Put out your things,’ the guard ordered. Christian and Pancake emptied their kitbags while the other prisoners waited outside in the corridor. The guard made a list of their possessions.

‘Pick up your things. Fall in. Follow me.’ With their kitbags over their shoulders Christian and Pancake followed the guard. In a flat-roofed shed, still outside the actual camp, they had to take everything out again. A guard threw them each a set of fatigues, they had to take off their detention clothes and put on the uniforms, which had no epaulettes. The guard read out the prison regulations.

‘To the governor.’

That was a colonel. He was in the farthest shed. On the way there Christian was instructed as to how he was to report.

‘Military prisoner Lance Corporal Hoffmann reporting for instruction, Comrade Colonel.’

The colonel, a stocky, fatherly-looking man, remained seated, leafing through Christian’s file, and didn’t look at him as he spoke. He talked of remorse, of necessary punishment, of trust and re-education. That word was the most frequent one in his speech. Re-education: for two-twenty meant that he, Hoffmann, was a very bad case. He’d soon lose the taste for that here, he, the governor, could promise him that. He, the governor, would turn him, Hoffmann, into a contrite member of the army and a well-educated citizen of our Republic. He could promise him that too.

The reception block, where the new arrivals were, was separated from the actual camp by a wall with barbed wire on top. There was a barred gate in the wall through which the guard led the new arrivals. There were watchtowers at the corners of the wall on which visibly bored guards were pointing light machine guns into the camp. The concrete wall was only the outer boundary, between the reception block and the camp, inside it there was a barbed-wire fence. Between the wall and the fence was a strip of gravel where dogs were sleeping.