To DIE A LITTLE
Mayer, Milton
To Die A Little By Milton Mayer PARTIR, as the French say, est mourir tin pea. To go away is to die a little. I have gone away from Marburg—and died a little. It was-only a year, and maybe that's...
...The Russians had been massacred in Russia and now they were massacring back, but the people of Marburg didn't know, and still don't know, how the Russians had been massacred in Russia...
...Mistakes, probably, unless they were trying to hit the railroad station...
...The population of 25,000 had almost doubled since the war...
...That's the night the Marburg Synagogue was burned down by Dichter unbe-kannt, and the volunteer fire department (whose battalion chiefs rouse their men by blowing a horn out the bedroom window) didn't get there until it was too late to save a stick of it...
...for he is a Beamte, a Civil Servant, a Public Official, an Office Holder...
...I spent a whole night telling Eva Hermann how bad I felt about being illegal...
...Their rebellion consisted of their getting a watch like that and taking it out of their vest pocket to look at it in the presence of the big men...
...Every second MILTON MAYER, who recently re-ti«rn<><1 from a 15-month stay in Europe, is lecturing widely throughout the country under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee...
...Why don't you just take things as they are...
...So Elizabeth, who died of this sort of thing at the age of 24, became a saint...
...Today," I would say...
...The ages all passed over Marburg, leaving it untouched...
...Some know about the Jews, but they didn't know then...
...it might have been the French or, st:,l worse, the Russians...
...Wrecks on the German railroad are strictly forbidden, so there are none...
...Everyone was so busy, in the picture-book-town...
...Of course it is all a deceit, because Marburg was just as Nazi as any place else, and the quaint little second-floor jail, above the quaint little police station where I registered as an Einwohner—a dweller, a legal resident of Marburg, is papered with the blood of the innocent and walled with their screams...
...And, come to think of it, what is there you* can do about it when your eyes are opened so late...
...meanwhile the Reformation was persecuting the peasants...
...They didn't all of them arrive at the same time...
...in a fairy flash it will always take me back, and I will be climbing up and down, down and up, its cobblestoned alleys seeing only what is lovely and never what is humdrum...
...There are, outside the town, no niceties...
...There were 15 million expellees originally, "German ethnics," as the Nazis would have called them (and as the Allies did), expelled from liberated east Europe (remember liberated east Europe...
...The war was being lost again, and nobody thought about Nazis any more, but only about war...
...The Field Marshal and the two Hohenzollerns waited outside, in the street, while Oscar sat in the kitchen and talked to Amis who were using the house at Deutsch-hausstrasse 29 for an officers' quarters...
...Ill Nothing much really happened in Marburg, then, after the Religionsgesprach in 1529, until Frederick the Great and his father Frederick Wil-helm I, and Oscar von Hindenburg and his father Paul, and Professor Doktor Mayer aus Amerika, and his wife and their three lovely children all arrived at Deutschhausstrasse 29...
...Marburg is in the center of Hesse, where the Hessians came from...
...And that was the way the British, the French, and the Amis were, and are...
...II Stretched out across the Lahn, the tightly-built old town rises, first gently, then more sharply, on its big broad high hill...
...This picture-book-town, these picture-book-people...
...In the kitchen, where Oscar had sat, we brewed lentil soup for waxen-faced kids whose fathers, by virtue of being bad Nazis, were forbidden employment, and that was not only illegal but maybe sacrilegious, on account of the sins of the fathers are to be visited upon the children...
...The Americans—the Amis—came to Marburg...
...We spent the year there, illegally...
...But, according to Mile...
...Not Marburg, because I was there and saw them, unconsciously living out picture-book lives...
...It must have come," she said, "from the Enlightenment, when the little men of Germany were in rebellion against the big men...
...And then nothing happened except the air raid alarms, almost every night...
...And so is the jail everywhere, here only less than there...
...a few years ago the city fathers forbade the completion of an orphan asylum when they discovered that its second story would block the view of the rose-window from the train...
...a whole year, and not just a moment, of which one would say with his whole heart, "Stay— thou art so fair...
...The only person we met in a whole year in Marburg who owned a car was a rich surgeon...
...But Oscar didn't want his father and the Hohenzollern to fall into the hands of the Russians...
...Nothing much happened...
...Pietrement, a French lady official who, among all the others, lived with us in Deutsch-hausstrasse 29, the Age of Enlightenment must have lingered a moment in Marburg...
...It was the only refrigerator we ever saw in Marburg, except in all the other Ami houses...
...We will live in the street," I would say...
...That's what they said themselves —they were going only as far as Kassel...
...Nobody buys anything by the dozen, for want of cash and refrigeration...
...The two Hindenburgs and the two Hohen-zollerns arrived together, in the summer of 1945...
...That is how the Enlightenment ended, everywhere in Europe, and also, I am sure, in Marburg...
...Heil Hitler, Gruss' Gott," a few even said that...
...the Emperor of the Marburg Grade-Crossing...
...The young men went away, farther than Kassel, and other young men, in black uniforms, came to keep what the Germans love most: order...
...There were bedrooms galore, most of them filled with picture frames from which the paintings had been cut and pieces of furniture which had been used for kindling...
...There was no place to live...
...I don't know how long Oscar and the field marshal and the kings had been going around Germany looking for a place to sleep, but it had been quite a while...
...if I'd have stayed another year or two I should have seen how wretched, perhaps how brutal life is in a picture-book town in Germany...
...The geraniums grew, and on Saturday everyone bought flowers and baked bread for Sunday, and in some of the shops, but not all of them, and on some of the streets, but not all of them, the people said, "Heil Hitler," but they went on saying, as they had always said on Saturday, "Schon Sonntag"—"Pleasant Sunday to you"—too...
...And at night the bells of the three churches, one after another, never together, struck the passing hours, and a cock woke up, in someone's back yard, and crowed and, getting no response, went back to sleep...
...Then stay," they would say...
...Where will you go...
...Eva was put into prison in 1943, for hiding Jews...
...Here I'm a citizen, not a legal resident...
...But they did arrive at the same time of day, evening, and all of them came for the same reason, to find a place to sleep...
...Maybe," said Eva, "but I learned not to care about doctrines...
...the Weimar republicans brought them electricity and one 25-watt bulb, and the Nazis sold them the People's Radio Set for two dollars...
...But at least the war was over, and National Socialism was gone, with its blessing so tightly interwoven with its evils that it had taken the war to open the eyes of most of the people of Marburg...
...That," I cried, "is the most immoral doctrine I have ever heard...
...So it was there, in the castle, that German theological bickering was, one might say, born, and whence it spread to German scholarship, all of which, in time, by bicker-izing both religion and scholarship, was useful to Hitler...
...And then to go away...
...But some say the Jews got away, and those who know differently don't actually know anyone who actually did it...
...On the flat top of the hill is the castle under whose protective, and not inexpensive, shadow the people built their houses in the late Middle Ages...
...Oh, in 1808 or so, Napoleon ordered the walls of the castle torn down—a gain, architecturally— because the Marburgers rebelled against the French Occupation...
...Give all previous street addresses and month, day, and year when you lived there...
...the peasants relieve themselves in the open fields...
...here I'm responsible...
...As the train approaches the town, along the little river Lahn, the railroad guard cranks down the gate where the road from Frankfurt to Kassel crosses the tracks...
...Busy, like Professor Carl Hermann (he, too, had been imprisoned by the Nazis) sorting the unburned shreds of tobacco in his pipe-ash to smoke them again...
...I must not go back there...
...We were riding on the overnight train, and the benches are too narrow to sleep on...
...Busy going to the market to buy two eggs...
...After the Religionsgesprach nothing much happened in Marburg for a long time...
...they didn't dare know then...
...V Deutschhausstrasse 29 was a mad house, filled with illegal and, worse yet, legal persons and activities all the time we were there...
...the expellees had headed, like the Mayers, for the unbombed towns in the hope of finding a place to live...
...Below the castle is the University Church, with its rose-window...
...And that's the way the Germans are...
...His uniform is dilapidated, and so is he, but he cranks down the gate as if he were cranking down the sun in the sky...
...There was nothing to bomb in Marburg—a university town—and there were only four raids...
...IV Now the minute the British, the French, and the Amis heard that the Russians wanted the field marshal and the kings, they wanted them...
...but here, at home, I am busy with the jail...
...Kassel, to the north, and Giessen, twenty miles to the south, could be seen burning...
...It was-only a year, and maybe that's the reason...
...The Elizabeth Church was built by the Teutonic Knights for Holy Elizabeth, a Hungarian girl who was married as a child to Duke Philip the Generous of Hesse-Nassau, whose family seat was the castle...
...The next morning everybody stood and looked at the ashes, but nobody said anything until everybody was gone, and then, like the Roman centurion at the Crucifixion, a few whispered, "This was the House of God...
...Such an experience as Faust sold his soul for...
...There's a war on, Mac," is what the people of Marburg told one another after their eyes were opened...
...After the surrender, Oscar had been to see the English (who, after all, were Hohenzollern cousins), the French (who were religious) and the Americans (who were generous...
...Imagine, if I had been there in my youth...
...the Mayers six years later, so we never met...
...Down below the hill, almost on the level of the river, rise the immense twin spires of the Elizabeth .Church, the cathedral...
...the resistance would be at Kassel, but there was no Kassel...
...And even if we had all arrived at the same time we wouldn't have met, because Oscar who came in first had to sit in the kitchen, since Germans were not allowed to fraternize with Americans in the summer of 1945...
...After that nothing happened until the Jews went away, "but only as far as Kassel," forty miles north...
...In Marburg there were beatings and robbings and arrests, thousands of arrests, but that wasn't much, and it might have been much worse...
...He has geraniums growing in window boxes in his little cross-ing^house and onions in a little wedge of ground along the track...
...An irresponsible year in a picture-booktown, in a ginger-bread-town, in a fairy-tale-town in Germany, never having been hungry or afraid, or disappointed, disappointing, oppressed, or oppressive...
...From the train, between Frankfurt and Marburg, you can see oxen, and even women and children, pulling and pushing plows...
...There were many such houses in Marburg, but nobody had $2,000, so they weren't built yet...
...This meeting of Luther and Zwingli, in the castle of Marburg, was the Religionsgesprach of the Protestant Reformation...
...Busy planting, weeding, and jarring tomatoes in the spring, summer, and fall...
...Napoleon went past, and behind him the wars, of liberation and enslavement, which man uses to get rid of wealth with which industrialism has saddled him...
...Since the Amis could pay the freight—there was freight to be paid on the field marshal and the kings—the Americans got them and Marburg interred them in the Elizabeth Church, whose lines combine (as only those of the early cathedrals do) Gallic grace and Germanic mass...
...She knew this, she said, because she had seen in the jewelry store an immense pocket watch...
...a year, and then to go away with it fixed forever at the full...
...Could this have been the town, could these have been the people who ruined the world and finally made crazy militarists even of the Americans who conquered them...
...We talked against German rearmament there, and that was illegal...
...There were bazaars, beggars, breakdowns, baths, and American soldiers who thought the place might be used as a brothel...
...The question was whether the bread and the wine were indeed the Body and the Blood...
...The theory was about as sound as doing away with anti-Semitism by doing away with the Jews...
...The Russians must have wanted them for something—what could it be?—so the French, the British, and the Amis had to keep the Russians from getting them...
...To die a little...
...So the melancholy caravan had gone 'round and 'round non-Russian-occupied Germany, and then, suddenly, the Russians said that Oscar could re-bury the dead, with honors, in the Russian zone...
...Otherwise hardly anything was built or destroyed in Marburg between the Religionsgesprach and 1938, the night of Nov...
...They had all—except Oscar, of course—been disinterred toward the end of the war to save their glorious bones from the Russian hordes...
...even the age of the Nazis, and now, even the age of Amis...
...Not Marburg...
...The Mayers were Americans—not Amis, to be sure...
...In the kitchen there were people, absolutely unidentified, storing perishables in the refrigerator...
...There was no resistance...
...But those were the childish days of ash-scattering, when the Allies, who had never been to see Wagner's Gotterdamme-rung, thought that if the Germans only had no bones to glorify they would stop glorifying bones...
...So none of the victorious Allies would take the bones of the three heroes into their zones, one Prussian field marshal and two Prussian kings...
...there I wasn't...
...But the big men had made the vests out of cheap material, so the pocket wore out with the weight of the watch, and the watch fell through and broke...
...To die a little...
...The guard has one arm...
...not in Marburg, nor in Gottingen, nor in Freiburg...
...to open their eyes, but not their mouths, because, after all, there was Nichts dagegen zu machen—nothing you could do about it...
...a friend of mine spent his year, in his youth, in Bonn, another picture-book town, and nobody ever after could persuade him that Germany, even Nazi Germany, was as bad as everyone said it was...
...Otherwise nothing much happened...
...So we were allowed to spend the night in Deutschhausstrasse 29...
...The house my academic colleagues had found for us was a good house, but it wasn't built yet, and it would take $2,000 cash, to build it...
...To turn the picture-book pages further . . . Better to have gone away and died a little...
...Mayer, a regular contributor to The Progressive, can currently be heard on more than 100 educational radio stations inter' viewing the high and low of Europe in a series sponsored by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters and the Ford Foundation...
...Melancthon, who tried to bring Luther and Zwingli together that day at the castle, died glad to be shut (he said) of the bickering of the theologians...
...How wonderful it would be now, if my friend, and I, and all of us had spent an adolescent year in a picture-book town in Russia...
...Perhaps 12 million arrived, and there was, and is, no place for them to sleep...
...You ought to have been a German," said Eva, "because you worry so much about right and wrong...
...In the morning we must find a place to live...
...But their houses all have radio...
...We entertained our German friends there, and that was illegal...
...Busy waiting in line in offices, filling out four-page, six-page, twenty-page questionnaires for the Amis and, once again, for the Germans...
...into what was left of Germany...
...They wanted them because the Russians wanted them...
...The night the Mayers got to Marburg, six years later, the Amis allowed them to sleep in Deutsch-hausstrasse 29 because there was no place else to sleep...
...or third man in Germany has one arm, one leg, one eye, or one head gone...
...What a hopeless German-ophile I'd have become...
...they said...
...freie Amerikaner, free Americans—so they were allowed to sleep in Deutschhausstrasse 29 just for one night...
...The fact that Philip was a dog, and not generous at all, does not keep the people of Marburg from calling him Philip the Generous...
...There were even some who said, though this was Protestant north Germany, and it had never been said there before, "Gruss' Gott," "God be with you...
...Who can save the day when he has already slept it through with his eyes shut...
...Philip the Generous forbade his wife to squander the Ducal bread on the poor, and once, when he caught her with a covered basket, she said there were only roses in it, and when he tore the cover off, the bread in the basket was miraculously turned to roses...
...irrigation consists of a perforated barrel" on a cart...
...I must not go back there and turn the pages of the picture-book further and see the synagogue burning and the Jews leaving "only for Kassel" and the people crying out against communism, taking loyalty oaths, joining up t( hold jobs, marching off to the great crusade, defending the fatherland thousands of miles from its borders...
...A year is just .right, I think, for the full deceit to flower...
...Life in Deutschhausstrasse 29 was intolerable, and when I complained to the Amis they asked me when I would move out...
...We used the Amis' hot water to bathe our German friends, who had no hot water at home, and that was illegal...
...The mere word "Marburg," will wet my eye now as long as I live...
...We paid rent, and even that was illegal...
...Busy patching bicycle tires...
...Busy boiling and scrubbing the wash, in big vats...
...What can you do, in Marburg, or in Middletown, then...
...The castle of Marburg is where another Philip—I believe this one permitted himself to be known as the Wise—sent for Luther and Zwingli in 1529 to try to settle the dispute between the Lutheran and the Reformed...
...Let the Russians have them —and Prussia too...
Vol. 17 • February 1953 • No. 2
