The Red Guillotine gazed back into his defiant face and experienced a hideous sense of familiarity. It had never been her habit to indulge the so-called “feelings,” so the sensations of sorrow and repugnance which now assaulted her were overwhelmingingly inexplicable. This Hagen had been, said the indictment, a guard at KZ-Mauthausen. Although Georg’s death had been officially judged a suicide, we all know how those people do things. It was possible that Hagen had witnessed or even precipitated her husband’s death. All the same, a true Communist remains unaffected by such things.
Defendant Hagen, you committed crimes against the people, did you not?
That I did.
Then why did you say to the arresting officers that you had done nothing out of the ordinary, when you knew perfectly well that such was not the case?
The accused began to answer: I can’t say it any more exactly than this—
In fact, you can say it extremely exactly! laughed the Red Guillotine, and the courtroom laughed with her. But you want to make fools of us.
No, I don’t want to… he whispered. At least, that is what the others had always whispered. But Hagen didn’t whisper at all. In fact, he chuckled: You’re not simply a Jew by marriage, now, are you, Frau Benjamin? You’re a blood-Jew. Do you know what Germans think about blood-Jews?
She went greyish-white.
Of course she condemned him to death—one more example of the impartiality of justice in our German Democratic Republic. To us onlookers she explained: This sentence is a warning for all who waver in the defense of our state, for all who fail to press forward for the victory of world peace.
But her round pale face writhed and trembled restlessly.
After that she seemed to age ever more swiftly, and the set of her mouth expressed weariness and disgust. Neither torchlight processions in our traditional German manner nor trainloads of glistening coal gladdened her. The smoke of the past hung so gloomily over everything! And that dream she had, the one of the tarnished silver box whose lock she could not master, she could never understand why it caused her such anxiety.
She came into the Stasi office and Comrade Mielke was all smiles; but she wondered whether an instant before her arrival he’d been making anti-Semitic innuendos against her.
In 1956, when we created our National People’s Army to counter the increasing threat from the West, the second Five-Year Plan was approved, and Roman Karmen made the film “India’s Dawn.” Meanwhile, de-Stalinization began. This put the Red Guillotine in almost as awkward a position as Comrade Ulbricht. In any event, it was already being said of her that her energies had slackened. What she used to demand of those within her power was confession. After Hagen, what she longed for more than anything was silence before the quick conviction. Her courtrooms were no longer quite so full of sadistically expectant onlookers. And now, without regard to the very serious internal and external situation we faced in those days, Neues Deutschland, following Comrade Khruschev’s line, dared to attack her for being schematic and unbending.
We retreated; we amnestied twenty-one thousand criminals. Fortunately, the so-called “Hungarian uprising” gave us the excuse we needed to reestablish our standards. On 17.10.56, the Red Guillotine announced: We cannot permit ourselves to dispense with the death penalty. There have been no unjust sentences in our German Democratic Republic.
All the same, in 1957 we agreed to punish murder with twenty-five years’ imprisonment, not death. I saw her sitting beside the Hungarian Minister of Justice, Ferenc Nezval, each of them isolated, and later that same day she signed this dreadful piece of legislation in a bizarre ceremony of abstruse plainness, while dark-suited figures stood behind them in a line, and behind them hung a huge portrait of a man with white hair: Comrade Ulbricht. Fortunately, treason, espionage and kindred crimes could still be penalized as they deserved.
I’m told that she attended the funeral of the former Field-Marshal Paulus, which for political reasons was a restrained affair. Afterward she sat at the writing-desk of her hotel room, opened her briefcase, removed the Stasi folder, withdrew the second photograph, which showed Paulus in a waist-deep trench at Stalingrad, clasping his wrist and seeming to push away at the enemy as the men in uniform who surround him gaze obediently on; laughing, she tore this photograph to pieces.
She signed another death sentence, and then I saw her speaking earnestly with Erich Mückenberger, her missing and crooked teeth giving her a cheaply monstrous expression; the sentence was not carried out. Meanwhile her Stasi file began to contain complaints of her overbearing, imperious, “uncolleaguish” lapses of temper. It was around this time that we reinvestigated her past record and discovered that the years 1937-39, which her autobiographical statement claimed she’d spent as a retail employee, were in fact passed in a Jewish-owned pastry shop. It’s not that we have anything against Jews in our Germany. (I won’t speak for the West.) All the same, one can’t be too careful, given the adventurism of the Zionists nowadays. It’s possible that a report was made to Comrade Mielke. On the other hand, I can’t believe that anything came of it. The memorial tribute she wrote to Georg Benjamin a few years later was published to careful acclaim.
On 5 December, when we’d passed around cigarettes and schnapps to celebrate Soviet Constitution Day, she tried to ingratiate herself with Comrade Honecker, who was obviously going to be Number One sooner or later, but he snubbed her.
I’ve seen her in her fur coat, standing next to SED-Zentralkomitee Secretary Grüneberg in 1958, by which time we had completely liquidated unemployment. That was when peace-loving peoples of the Soviet Union demanded that the Anglo-American imperialists demilitarize Berlin. Needless to say, the imperialists rejected this just demand. No matter. When the time is ripe we will open their eyes.
At another ceremony with Soviet soldiers she was smiling, looking sweet, with her grey hair braided in coils upon the top of her head; and her striped scarf appeared quite stylish within the fur coat. Particularly as she aged, she came to have a strangely sweet meditative face, round and soft as she sat at a white-clothed table with a line of other dignitaries; she could be a Jewish refugee, which by marriage she was, or a Spanish gypsy woman or even Käthe Kollwitz herself with that heavy round face; oh, how odd that she could be Käthe Kollwitz! As the Programmatic Declaration of the State Council so perfectly put it in 1960: Our laws are the realization of human freedom.
That same year, when the Stasi expanded its powers and membership in order to better spy on hostile-negatives; when we executed the traitor Manfred Smolka; when Roman Karmen directed “Our Friend Indonesia” and Shostakovich composed Opus 110, we resumed our drive for forced collectivization—a task which the drought of 1959 had made doubly urgent. Who was willing to undertake the prosecutions for failure to deliver harvest quotas? Why, our dear Red Guillotine! (Comrade Bley: Based on the teachings of Lenin, she envisioned a necessary direction for the workers’ and farmers’ movement in socialist legislation.) Meanwhile, the Red Guillotine sat frail and uncomfortable in the front row of a gathering, her hand gripping the armrest, her white legs crossed for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Humboldt University.