In 9.30 she defended the worker whom the class-biased legal system of the Republic had seen fit to charge with murdering that Nazi provocateur Horst Wessel. (He had murdered Wessel, but that’s not the point.) The young attorney made a striking picture in the first row of wax-gleaming defendant’s benches in that elegant wood-paneled courtoom, for she was calm, thoughtful and even smiling. The defendant, whose eyes shone with desperation and whose collar was less than clean, whispered another of his anxieties into her ear. Frau Dr. Benjamin’s smile elongated slightly. Unkind observers might have described it as a smile of contempt.—Sit up straight, she said from the side of her mouth. Act like a human being. Look the enemy in the face.
Called upon by the prosecutor, Horst Wessel’s mother held aloft his bloody uniform. She prayed for the day when Germans would take vengeance on the Jews for this and many other crimes. Frau Dr. Benjamin laughed ironically.
The Fascists did not forget her. Their so-called “Führer” was said to have her name on a list. Frau Dr. Benjamin remarked: There must be so many other names on it, I’ll be old by the time he gets to me!—The truth was that every time she saw them marching in the streets, or, worse yet, heard them singing their “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the bottom dropped out of her stomach. But our line in those days was that the quicker those brutes came to power the better, because they would bring capitalism’s contradictions to a head.
Whenever she lost a trial, she had one very particular thing to say to her client. It was not the so-called “consolation” with which a bourgeois lawyer seeks to wash his own hands of what the fired trade unionist or the hungry thief must now suffer—or, if it was, it was consolation sharp as a razor. It inculcated hatred; it simplified and abstracted the case to its socioeconomic essentials; it directed energy toward the future. What she said was this: I’ve come to recognize that questions of law and justice are at the same time questions of power.
Like good Communists, we’ll pass over the irrelevantly personal aspects of her marriage to Dr. Georg Benjamin. Their son Michael (born when the Reich absorbed Austria) is likewise of no concern to us; we’ll merely note that in the end he fulfilled their expectations and studied in Moscow.
As soon as the sleepwalker came to power, she found herself in imminent danger of being taken away. All the same, she kept bravely defending the workers, following the maxim of Comrade W. Ulbricht that the Communists must be the ones who know Fascist labor law the best. Georg feared for her, but she told him what she used to tell her mother: I myself have a head to think with! Naturally she soon lost her right to practice her profession.
Her husband was a Jew, and his fate ordinary: arrested in May 1933, sent to KZ-Lichtenburg, released for Christmas, resumed legal and illegal political work, rearrested in 1936, sentenced to six years’ hard labor, which he completed through contact with the electrified barbed wire of Mauthausen.
Do you want to know who stands ready to help us Germans now? There can be but one answer: SMAD, the Sowjetische Militäradministration.
Watching the open boxcars of women, children and old men hoping to escape the Slavs, she bided her time. They had black ruins for their food and grey sky to drink, but they rode the silver rails of hope: If only they could get to the American zone before the Reds crossed the Oder! The widow Benjamin stayed quietly at home.
Then came that visit to the man with four wristwatches, as a result of which (I quote the legend exactly) she was asked by the commander of the Berlin city precinct Stieglitz to organize the judicial system, and was thus made District Attorney. That was in May. (She paused to smile on camera for Roman Karmen’s new film, “Berlin.”) By September she was already Director of Cadre Development. The radical removal of Nazi and reactionary elements was a main focus of her department.
The plan of the zero hour activists: Since East Germany doesn’t even have trade unions yet, our first task will be to complete the bourgeois revolution of 1848. Then we’ll smash the monopoly capitalists and Junkers who created Nazism.
No elections, of course. Hitler had elections.
Hence we’ll fly in the Ulbricht Group40 from Moscow, form our working committee of the two proletarian parties, then create a broad-based antifascist bloc, which we’ll winnow down bit by bit until only we are included.
Next step: the democratic land reform, commenced in our very first autumn—I mean collectivization, with loudspeakers, searchlights, threats and happy fireworks. After all, the producers of national wealth are the only ones who deserve full citizenship. Whatever mercy we might have possessed was interred beneath the greenish-beige dirt of Auschwitz.
A pregnant young woman whose husband SMAD had just sent East asked her, perhaps a little wistfully, what she thought of the developments in the American sector, and the new District Attorney contemptuously replied: Over there, it’s not creation of the new, but restoration of the old.
Almost every other German avoided that barbed-wire-topped fence at Karlshorst behind which General Zhukov operated. Comrade Ulbricht loved to go there; only then did we see him smile. (The collectivizers beg him to intercede with the Russians, who keep dismantling everything and shipping it eastward, even the machinery we’ll need for collectivization. Comrade Ulbricht replies: This meeting has nothing to do with dismantling.) As for the Red Guillotine, she rushed to Karlshorst nearly twice a week. She had a pass. She was pale, shining-eyed, roundheaded—there was something almost deformed about her. She’d come to hasten that decisive moment when the firing squad approaches the stakes, one man bending over each victim with a pistol ready for the coup de grâce. Sometimes she failed to get her heart’s desire, but at least she could send them forever or almost forever to one of our Eastern zone’s jails, which we’d begun to call the yellow misery.
The Fascists kept saying, up against the wall, up against the wall, and after a while one wanted to put them up against the wall, or tie them to chairs at the base of some sunny rubble-hill, the firing squad now in position. Instead of feeling sorry for her country, she was sickened and angered by the myriad pale white upraised arms like antennae from each marching caterpillar of German prisoners.
I myself am reminded of the scene in the Nibelungenlied when Kriemhild agreed to dry her tears and marry again only when the envoy promised to take upon himself anything needed to avenge wrongs committed against her.
40
Comrade Ulbricht had already proven helpful to us during the Spanish Civil War, when he’d prepared Trotskyite volunteers for liquidation. He declined to smile for R. L. Karmen’s cine-camera. From her own experience, Elena Konstantinovskaya knew exactly what he was and avoided him in terror. Comrade Leonhard remembers him as follows: