96
PARTISAN REVIEW
Charlottenburg. Maria Regina Martyrum stands near PIC)lZenSee, the prison
where many had been executed during the Hitler years and where, in Au–
gust 1944, the eight German oflicers found chiefly gui lty in the July plot
against Hitler were hanged. With piano wire around their necks, they had
been strung up to meathooks in the ceiling while a film camera recorded their
deaths. Then the film, as ordered, was rushed to Hitler.
Plotzensee was now completely empty. In 1952 the bishop of Berlin
had urged that a church be built nearby, and in 1962 it was finished.
It
is a quiet, terrifYing church. It is modeled on a prison camp . The en–
trance is an iron gate that opens into a large courtyard. The gate is in a con–
crete bell tower that suggests a guard tower. The courtyard is enclosed with
a concrete wall that looks like a prison wall. At the end of the courtyard is an
altar, a plain stone slab set upon what looks like a metal crown of thorns. The
church itself is a large, plain, stone box resting on slabs. The interior is plain,
too. Light comes through bands of glass high in the walls. Some of the interior
walls sti ll bear the marks of the forms in which they were molded so that the
concrete looks hammered into place. The whole church is a question, an un–
relenting question. We sat there for a while, then left.
That night I dreamed again of the church. I woke early. Llura was still
sleeping. We were leaving for Paris that aftemoon. I decided to go for a
walk before breakfast. I dressed and whispered to her that I was going out
and thought she understood.
In the fresh light the city looked falsely young. I walked a few blocks
on the Kurh.irstendamm and saw the waiters getting the cafes ready. I
turned into side streets and wandered. I fought the feeling, Emciftd, untrue,
that everything looked familiar. I tried not to imagine, not to put myself at
the center of this century's history as I walked through the morning streets
of the old capital that had made my century's history grotesque. But some–
thing had been lurking within me for four years, since my first visit, and it
began to rise.
As
I walked, as the streets began to fill, I admitted it to myself
as if I were reluctantly acknowledging an ache.
Part of me wanted to be German. Part of me wanted to share the
shame, the inheritance that burdened the best Germans I had met. Every–
thing in my childhood and youth, everything that had been brutalized by the
Hitler Germany, the Germany that would have brushed me into the ovens
with the back of its hand , all of that earlier German remembrance reached up
across the blackness. It was strange, double. I wanted to reclaim what I had
lost. And I wanted to share the gu ilt for that loss. When our plane took off
that afternoon, I felt relieved. I was on my way to my home, my only home.
Still, in a corner, the ache persisted, the early morning mystery. In one small
corner of myself, I felt that I was fleeing.
