Letters and Papers From Prison (32 page)

I’ve just had a very nice letter from Renate, dated 28 January,
still rather anxious about you, as she had no news for a week. Happily that’s now been cleared up. Are you now a clerk or a dispatch rider? or both? You’ve always liked lists – reminiscences of the sixth form! – and I’ve often enough unjustly mocked you for it. Now you will certainly make an exemplary and unique contribution. I’m very glad you’ve found someone more congenial than the ordinary run of people, for a companion to talk to and do things with.
¹⁵⁶
But I should very much prefer to be in his place. I wonder whether we shall ever manage it, or whether we may perhaps keep Easter here as we used to. You see I’m not giving up hope; don’t you give it up, either.

Things are again so-so with me, but as usual after these bouts of influenza, I’m still very tired, and unfortunately that hinders productive work considerably. Nevertheless, I hope that I shall soon have finished the smaller literary thing. How are you keeping up physically? What is the food like? When do you get leave? When are we going to baptize your boy? When shall we be able to talk together again, for hours at a time? Good-bye, Eberhard. Keep well! What are the Italians doing? Do you ever get any music? God bless you. I think of you every day.

Your faithful Dietrich

25.2 Can’t you try some small work in the history of art down there? What do you think about my question about Laocoon as the ‘man of grief? The parents have just been here. All is in order at home.

From Eberhard Bethge

[Rignano] 22 February 1944

Dear Dietrich,

I want to use the chance of a messenger to say thanks to you once again for your letters…It was very reassuring to me to hear so quickly that you’ve been kept safe in the alarms of these days. When I see and hear the gunfire at night on my occasional jour
neys further south,
¹⁵⁷
I’m especially reminded of Sakrow and all of you. It’s very much the same, except that it lasts longer here. So far, however, I’ve only experienced it rarely. Our people who’ve been there for a while and haven’t experienced the attacks at home are quite full of it and tell every detail again and again with exaggerations. Of course I wasn’t there for the worst part. Distant artillery fire affects one remarkably little. One knows what the range is, and a few kilometres beyond that the whine of shells doesn’t amount to much. Of course it puts one’s nerves on edge. I saw the [allied] fleet on the water in the distance; through glasses one could distinguish between large and small units, and occasionally broadsides flashed out and the noise could be heard clearly. I expect there’s some colossally savage fighting there. The wider surroundings, all the beautiful and well-known places on the Alban hills and even the Papal seats, look frightful and have been thrown into complete chaos by our fighting units. Any wandering cattle are shot and ‘devoured’ without further ado. In some houses they have a mad rampage of destruction which ends with people indecently immortalizing themselves in the middle of the room. First of all we had to clean the house for our people there carefully from these and other traces.

I have the shortest service of any of my comrades here…But I must say that by and large they all behave decently towards me. A false sensitivity about turns of speech and constantly recurring pornographic expressions is quite out of place. If the talk gets round to spiritual matters, prompted by my calling, the security here and the self-assurance of the old soldiers immediately produces a long and very wordy explanation of people’s own standpoint of a justificatory kind. ‘Each in his own fashion’ plays a large part. After an audience with the Pope, one person recently confessed to me that he was now changing from being a negative to a positive Catholic. The fact that I’m married plays some part with the Catholics; they think that it’s a good thing and see celibacy as a central source of ridicule. The whole thing always takes place before a large audience. I have the impression that it’s not a good thing to discuss self-justifications or contradict them too much. But there may be some false restraint here. Among them I am what
I am. There’s a freethinker among us here; he never attacks me, and speaks only occasionally; he too is a soldier, and as far as I’m concerned he’s only a soldier. I contradicted him. Of course, everything that I say is completely in accord with the attitude that I should maintain among people who in many things have unshaken convictions.
¹⁵⁸
I’m advisedly cautious, and keep off things that are important to us.

I’m deeply distressed when I go past places which we saw together. For instance, the day before yesterday I was near the place where we went out together one evening with the car rattling;
¹⁵⁹
in the end it only kept going with difficulty and we turned round. The war - and now I see the destruction and the inexorable way in which everything is drawn into it – seeks out all the most beautiful places. There is no more respect, none at all. Women and children walk along the streets hungry and beg for bread. And to think that I’m involved in all this! Most people are quite inured to it. What a task, to bring up
people
again!

I’m eager to see your work, the meeting of the two friends. I was very pleased to read the good service that
Witiko
has done you…

One’s capacity for forgetting dangers that one has just experienced is quite remarkable. I wonder whether it is primarily a physical reaction? The danger is not completely forgotten. And unfortunately one takes the experience along as a burden into the next danger. One can feel in one’s body this shaking off, this liberation, as one goes out of the war-zone.
¹⁶⁰
I’ve now done it twice. Right up to the eternal city what one sees and hears is a burden. With the first houses life seems to begin, in a confused sort of way, and behind the city one almost seems to be ‘at home’. After the experience of danger one tends to be more talkative than usual; if it has been really bad one does this and that zealously when one gets out of the shelter. My comrades tell how after the worst night they fooled around and jumped on the see-saw in their garden like children…

I must stop for today. I think of you a great deal with many wishes and prayers. Warmest greetings

from your Eberhard

To Eberhard Bethge

[Tegel] 1 March 1944

Dear Eberhard,

I’ve nothing special to write to you today, but I don’t want you to feel lonely, nor to believe for a moment that you are in any way forgotten, that one has in any way become resigned to your absence in a distant country. I want to let you know that as far as possible I’m living in a daily spiritual exchange with you; I can’t read a book or write a paragraph without talking to you about it or at least asking myself what you would say about it. In short, all this automatically takes the form of this letter, even if there is really nothing ‘to report’. I.e. there is, of course, enough to report, but one doesn’t know where to begin and so one puts it off to the great moment of reunion. What a day it will be when you see your son for the first time (according to Maria’s mother, who visited me recently, he is also said to be a bit like me, - the general view is that he looks like
you,
and that he has a particularly nice and open face), when you see Renate again – and finally, I also imagine to myself that you also look forward to being with me again and to discussing all that we’ve been through and learnt during a whole year. For myself at any rate, that is one of the greatest hopes for the near future. I suppose you, too, can sometimes hardly imagine that such a day will ever come. It’s difficult to believe that there is any chance of our overcoming all the obstacles in our way, but ‘that which tarries is all the sweeter when it comes…’, and I must say I am entering on this new month with great hopes, and I think you are doing the same. I’m redoubling my efforts to make the best use of the last part of my time here. Perhaps your experiences, too, will be of great value to you all your life. The constant danger to which nearly all of us are at present exposed in one way or another provides a wonderful incentive to use the present moment, ‘making the most of the time’. I sometimes feel that I’m living, just as long as I have something great to work for. Do you know this feeling, too? or is it rather mad?…

The less reflective part of your nature makes you a member of the younger generation rather than of my own, and to this extent
I can even feel as though I’m an ‘uncle’ towards you. What has impressed you among us older ones is, I suppose, above all the security which has come through reflection and has hardened in this way, a reflection which has not led to intellectualism and thus to disintegration and relativism, but has entered into one’s whole attitude to life and not weakened, but strengthened, the impulses of life. Nevertheless, I regard ‘you younger ones’ as being more competent than we are. People say in America that the negroes survived because they had not forgotten how to laugh, whereas the Indians went under because they were too ‘proud’. What I mean lies somewhere in this direction.

But that’s all for today. This is just meant to be a brief token of the daily remembrance of your loyal

Dietrich

From Eberhard Bethge

In the south, 2 March 1944

Dear Dietrich,

I got your letter of 12 February on Sunday with great delight. Many thanks for it. Any letter from you is an event and prompts a host of questions…I’ve also just heard that by now a decision must already have been made. How long will it be before I hear anything of it?…

I think of you a great deal these days. It began early on Sunday when during the epistle, II Cor. 6.1-10, I saw you standing in the pulpit at Schlönwitz and remembered that splendid long sermon. That was an event for the brethren. I played the organ. I find your thoughts about the landscape very stimulating. With very few exceptions, I don’t see Italian towns at all, but only the country, albeit still rather wintry. Over the Tiber valley on the hills. Here and there a village on the top of a hill, boxed up like Radicofani, which we both saw together that time in 1936 on the Via Cassia. But it
is
true; in conversation with my jurists here we confirmed that there’s really no typical
Italian
landscape painting; it’s always only filling or background. What interested the Italians was people and architecture, building cities. I wonder whether that is why
Italy produced Machiavelli and why the state played a decisive role alongside art at an early stage? Is it the case that in the south the landscape is an obvious abundance and there is nothing to discover there – or that nature is the enemy in the scorching heat? Is there Greek or Spanish landscape painting? I don’t think so. The people who discovered the landscape here alongside antiquities, churches and cities, and painted it, were the Germans, Romantics, the generation round Kalckreuth, 1820-40. The beautiful lakes of Alba and Nemi, Rocca di papa – I’ve seen them all, but how ravaged! How much they’ve drawn here – gnarled oaks, rivervalleys! I had many recollections of Klaus’ beautiful portfolios of Kalckreuth and his friends, which he showed us at his house after the betrothal. Then his beautiful ‘Oak Wood’ in the entrance hall…

I’ve become aware of the…poverty of the Havel neighbourhood and its sands. Yet I would rather be there than here. The rain comes teeming down here in buckets and shortly afterwards the most splendid sun is shining, so that in a few hours the daisies spring up, large and fat, and the yellow and blue flowers along the road open. There isn’t a long struggle, but it all comes with great abundance and power. And the way the soldiers go through the world, among these people and in this landscape. All they want is for the German police to be here, so that they could see order and work…

Some people’s delight in commerce is sickening. You can find it in a person right next to sympathetic qualities: a man with whom you can talk, laugh and steal horses…

Many, many thanks for your decision to assign your good things to Renate. That’s very nice of you. I’m rather worried that in fact you seem to be having some difficulties with your food. But if you have hard days
¹⁶¹
at this time, you will need everything yourself. One has heard of other such proceedings, but not this. Or aren’t any people admitted anyway? I think that that will be the case. It will be bad and disturbing for the grandparents now…

I simply can’t decide whether to ask Renate to have the child baptized now. In the normal course of events I would expect to be home in the summer and would very much like to be present. The
fur sleeping bag is quite wonderful. I haven’t seen the divisional pastor yet. It isn’t very simple, as we’re all alone here. Perhaps we shall have to wait a little longer about the military chaplaincy.

Will you be getting to see my son now, or have you to expect worse things? I’m burning for some news.

I’m thinking faithfully of you and send warmest greetings.

Your Eberhard

To his parents

[Tegel] 2 March 1944

Dear parents,

So you made the long journey once again and left a parcel for me down below, and once again I wasn’t able to thank you for it myself, but had to rely on the NCO to do it properly. I hope that the permission to visit comes soon! You probably heard from Maria that I told her last time (although we don’t often mention the subject) that our meals here had become rather scantier because of reduced rations, and that I was sometimes rather hungry, though that was no doubt partly because I had hardly eaten anything during the few days when I had flu.
¹⁶²
Now once again you’ve looked after me nobly, and I must frankly admit that the world does sometimes have a different look if one has some good food inside one, and that the work goes better. All the same, I should hate to think I was depriving you of food when you have so much to do all day and need your strength more urgently than I do. Now March is here again, and still you haven’t been away for a holiday. Maria’s mother is expecting you eagerly. The only pity is that Maria is no longer at home. By the way, today I received her first letter from Bavaria. She is particularly fond of the cousin whose children she’s teaching and in whose house she is helping; she seems to be keeping well. I hope that that is the best solution for her during the last weeks – and I really do hope that they are the last weeks – until we see each other again and can make plans together. Of course it would be best of all if we could all go to Pätzig together and then make our plans for the future
together there. But after a trial of patience which has lasted so long, it’s probably an almost crazy thought to wait for that.