Hanemann

Copyright © Stefan Chwin,
translation copyright ©David Malcolm, reproduced by kind permission.

[Stefan Chwin’s novel Hanemann interweaves events in post-World War II Gdansk with those in pre- War Danzig through the eyes and imagination of a young Polish boy. Centered around the enigmatic Hanemann, a German doctor who stays on in Gdansk after most Germans are expelled in the mid-1940’s, the novel lovingly evokes the sights, smells, streets, buildings, gardens, and everyday artifacts of Danzig/Gdansk. But the city is also presented as a place of death and horror-a girl drowns in a ferry accident, a German refugee boat is sunk in the bay of Gdansk, Danzig is burned down by Soviet troops. In the following chapter, Hanemann’s memories of anatomy lessons in Berlin before the war are mixed with his rather alienated responses to post- War Catholic and Polish Gdansk. ]

Corpus Christi

What happened had shaken Hanemann, but not enough to change his life. Indeed, it surprised him rather, unexpectedly calling up from memory his Berlin youth, now so far off that it seemed unreal; he had never suspected that that time could awaken such powerful memories.

He did not think of the girl herself. Perhaps, sometimes, he felt at most something like sympathy. It was true that he had frequently seen her on the steps and in the garden, but usually-looking through the window panes at the dark hair, framed by a thin line of sunlight, where bending down she cut with tailor’s scissors the asters under the tall birch tree in the corner of the garden-the most he did was to play nonchalantly with the thought that in old German paintings you could find a figure with the same kind of beauty; but his heart took no part in this pleasure of the eye which could enjoy the beautiful lines of bare shoulders-he would watch without regret as the girl went back home with a few flowers between her fingers.

The sight of the stretcher, on which the body of the departed had been slid into the back of the white car, called up from his memory images of the Althof clinic near Moabit where he had spent several months in training under Ansen. The building on the Winterstrasse? High steps of dark granite, lamps in the hands of bronze athletes, the brass shine of the candle holders in the amphitheater of the Collegium Emaus, a carving of Medusa on the lectern, the scarlet upholstery of the chairs… And that day when they went down to the basement for the first time… A tiled interior, Gothic windows, wire screens over the glass, ventilation pipes, lamps with tin shades, rubber aprons, the distant rush of water as if behind the wall there were some great public baths. And then the sight of the body laid out on a marble table, and the thought from long ago, insistent, childish, naive, which suddenly returned at the moment when Arisen slowly drew his scalpel along the naked skin: "Soon, I’ll see the soul…"

It wasn’t an accident that he ended up In anatomy, but rather-as he liked to believe himself-it had all begun in his childhood, and even perhaps, in a deeper way, it was linked with his family past, for several Hanemanns had been famous for the art of probing the mysteries of the human body while serving as doctors in the King of Prussia’s army, and one of these, Heinrich Siegfried Hanemann of the Second Dresden Horse Artillery Regiment, had even been decorated for his unusual dexterity in the field at the Battle of Leipzig where, thanks to his cool head, he had saved the life of Colonel Fersen himself. However, in truth-and this explanation was the one Hanemann himself favored-he had been driven to medicine by his ardent and ungodly reading of forbidden books. The old anatomical tracts which he found in his father’s library, works decorated with copperplate engravings, taught him that the investigation of the human interior is not merely a technical skill which only requires knowledge and an unusual manual dexterity. The doctor’s work is shrouded by the shadow of a mystery which-so he was assured by the authors of the engravings which embellished the large pages of yellowing paper-no human eye would ever penetrate.

Frequently, when his father was not at home, he would look at Meyers’ anatomical atlas, a heavy volume with marbled edges, but after inspecting the colorful illustrations which presented naked people whose skin was covered with tiny letters and numbers, he liked to reach for the old volumes placed behind glass on the highest shelves. Then he would breathe a sigh of relief. Because, you had to admit, in Meyers’ atlas the open human body, covered with a swarm of numbers, looked exactly like a plant specimen cut open with a scalpel! The mystery of life? In these stiff lines? In the rows of numbers? How differently the old masters presented the human body in their works with the mysterious Latin titles! However many times he looked into the Brussels edition of van Helden’s Treatise on Surgery (under the elaborately decorated title stood the date 1693), he would feel each time as if he were wandering a world whose rulers were Merlin and Melisande. What a mighty volume that was! Take, for example, the woodcut on the title page: a naked youth leaning on his elbow against a Greek column gives a nostalgic smile, even though his skin is hanging nearby on the branches of a thorn bush-just like a too large, flaccid overcoat! So not even the shadow of pain had touched him? And all his muscles-precisely drawn, just like beautiful spindles-on the surface! When Hanemann, both moved and amused by the sadness of the nostalgic youth, turned over the yellowish paper, on the next page he would find a beautiful lady with big sad eyes, opened up like an oyster shell so that you could see the convolutions of her intestines nestling in her pelvis. And beside the sad-eyed beauty, who held a glittering rose in her hand, stood a naked, bearded man who had had some of his ribs removed, so that the readers could at will probe the mystery of his heart, entwined in the branches of the arteries. And what could you say about the woodcuts in the works of Ambroise Paro, about the engravings in Harvey’s treatises, the drawings decorating the studies of Boerhaave, of Morgagni, of Vesallus or Fallopio! On the huge pages naked figures, whose skin had been removed to reveal the beautiful entanglements of muscles and tendons, strolled in pairs over the wide Elysian plain with palm branches in their hands, while, from on high, over the denuded bodies, in which everything was shamelessly on show, fell the brightness of the rays of heaven, and beautiful angels with gentle faces and slender fingers, flew among the clouds, waving ribbons with the Latin names of diseases and medicines.

But this picture of the body, irradiated by the light of the mighty allegories of Time, Wisdom and Fortune, that picture which in childhood set his imagination in motion and made him dream of man’s closeness to God, struck against hard experience in the underground rooms of the Althof clinic where bodies came under the knives of students and young doctors, bodies in a fallen state, deprived of the majesty of death, debased. "Listen," said August Pfiitze, who had already done the anatomy course, to Hanemann one day. "Here, in this place, you’ll lose God. Nothing will be left of your faith, you’ll see."

Professor Ansen would certainly have been outraged by such words. He knew that it was the bodies of the despairing and the outcast that found their way from the depths of the city into Althof’s underground rooms. They had thrown away any hope of salvation, but, in the final analysis-as he argued in his first lecture of the year-that did not deprive them of dignity, for to probe death, even death in the most utter degradation, brings us closer to shedding light on the mystery of the forces which bind us to life. What really saves us from temptation? What compels us to throw away the gift? Professor Ansen, for many years an expert witness in the Berlin courts, saw his vocation in shedding light on this mystery. "Gentlemen," he would say in the great lecture hall at Althof to the first-year students who had come to the granite edifice on the Winterstrasse from Munich, Hamburg, Breslau, Danzig, and even Konigsberg, "how many regrettable mistakes have occurred, when as a result of the ignorance, and also-let it be said clearly the carelessness of the police, a judgement has been given which outrages the truth and brings shame on our profession. Do not think, however, that this is only a question of mistaken procedures. We cannot be simply doctors. We have to see in man an embodied soul which always stands on the threshold of despair. Let your eye, therefore, be watchful and patient as diamond; let it seek out the cause. Investigate the bodies of the despairing and abandoned who have chosen death, but do it in order to discover what in us maintains the divine energy of life, which even in our worst moments, when it seems to us that we have lost everything, may illuminate the darkness and bring salvation. Seek for the medical causes of despair, causes which although they do not occur alone, often determine everything. But do not forget that man is something more…"

Thinking of Ansen’s words, Hanemann smiled. Professor Ansen must have certainly been reading a lot of Nietzsche. But how much remained of the exultation which he had felt in his heart at that time, when he had listened to Ansen… ? Because, after all, it didn’t take long for him to be able to use his scalpel with the patient indifference of a cartographer tracing the familiar outlines of the continents. A cooling of the heart… In Althof’s underground rooms the darkness of human life was revealed to him, but that darkness only inspired fear at the first touch, afterwards, however… ? The horror of wilfully chosen death? Professor Ansen, dressed in a white apron of rubberized canvas, would draw back the tarpaulin covering from the white face of the corpse which the attendants had laid on the marble table, but his voice was calm.

"Do not think, gentlemen," he would say, turning to the students who were observing him, "that death at one’s own hands can easily be distinguished from death at the hands of another. Death always hides from us, and not only when someone who wants to die wants to make us believe that a crime has been committed. The body lies to us always. We must be mistrustful, even when we are most certain. Frequently, to the inexpert eye, almost nothing distinguishes the body of a suicide from the body of someone who has been robbed of life by another. And how willingly our faculties submit to appearances! Look closely: Commissioner Schinkel claims that this young man, in whose hand a knife was found, himself cast away the gift of life. But this is not true. A suicide’s neck wound usually runs slantwise from left to right, is deeper by the ear and shallower at the collar-bone, for the hand of the suicide weakens relatively as he inflicts the wound. Experimental, much weaker cuts appear at the head of the main wound, indicating the unfortunate person’s nervous disorder and fear. With a murderer’s cut it is different: it runs straight across the neck and usually ends deeper than it began-just as here-for the murderer wants to be certain that his victim will not return to life. And the shot of a suicide?" Professor Arisen would cross to the second table on which the body of an elderly – "Don’t let the revolver in his hand deceive you. This merchant of man was resting.

Bremen, whose body was brought to us yesterday, was found with a Mauser in his hand. But a suicide-please remember, gentlemen-never shoots through his clothes. He always uncovers the spot he wants to hit. Never forget that death is always the work of the psyche…"

"You know," said August Pfiltze as they were walking home through the dusk to Frau Lenz’s lodging-house, "Ansen’s right. The question why people take their lives isn’t really important. It’s the question why the majority of people don’t take their lives that’s really important. Because that’s the real miracle. When all’s said and done, life’s unbearable." He remembered those disputes in the attic of the clinic. "After all, the body doesn’t give anything away. It’s silent. Do you think the bodies of Kleist and that Vogel woman said anything at all?" He shrugged his shoulders: "Listen, August, she had cancer, didn’t she?" "And that explains everything, eh?" August spluttered ironically. "Millions have cancer, but there was only one Vogel." He knew that every evening August was delving into the writings of that Viennese psychiatrist whom people were beginning to talk about more and more, so he suggested: "Libido and Thanatos?" "For your information," August pushed aside his blond hair, "every part of our body, in equal measure, desires to live and to die. Every single part! And all the time we are on the border. Like on a bridge made out of a single hair. A breath of wind is all it takes." He looked with sympathy at his friend’s reddened face. "You’re exaggerating. After all, it all somehow holds up. And now we’re going downstairs to Muller’s place and we’re going to order a schnitzel." That wasn’t very sensible. August got offended, but fortunately not for long, and after a few minutes they were running along Winterstrasse towards the restaurant, saying hello on the way to the girls with their white umbrellas…

At that time, during his training under Ansen, Hanemann disliked looking into Catholic churches. He couldn’t bear the sight of the naked Christ. He could still look at medieval pictures of tormented saints, at Grunewald’s visions, although they terrified him, but in those the body, spattered with blood, was really covered with an overcoat of red. The nakedness was covered up with crimson. The statues in the church aroused aversion in him. Especially those which were set out in Polish churches for Easter, plaster figures of God being lowered into the grave; they reminded him a little too forcibly of what he would see on the marble table. Everything seethed within him: it just wasn’t right to show God in that way! In the Protestant chapels it was different. A simple cross. White walls. But now in Danzig there were no Protestant churches. They’d made a cinema out of the big one beside the barracks on Hohenfriedberger Way, and they’d done the same with the smaller one on Jaschkentaler Way.

So sometimes he dropped by the Cathedral, but not as often as he used to once drop by the meeting house on Pelonkerstrasse to listen to one of Pastor Knabbe’s sermons. When for the first time he entered the white nave, he felt only estrangement. He had come at the worst possible time, just before Easter; everything in him recoiled from what he saw. In the depths of the church, in front of the main altar, people were going up to the cross lying on the ground, to which was nailed the naked figure of God. With their lips they touched the wounded legs and hands. It was so hateful to him that he left the church. But the image remained with him. Looking at the people on Grottger Street, he felt that they were all united by that bowing of the head over that body white as ivory, pierced by nails, by that touching of the lips against blood painted on in thick scarlet.

It all grated on him, although he was very far from condemnation. On June mornings, when the whole of Grottger Street, freshened and sweet-smelling, made its way towards the Cathedral, he did not stay at home. Along Wit Stwosz Street, past where the trams turned and through the park, he came to Cystersow Street near the chapel of St James. No, he didn’t stay on the paths, but rather strolled slowly along, and although all that he saw around him was strange to him, nevertheless he gave himself over to the day’s splendid bright colors. The damp path, freshly sprinkled, the little girls in their long cambric dresses, gleaming little handbags, fat yellow candles encircled by lace in their hands, asparagus, fabric gloves, the warble of clay birds… He passed little altars decorated with spruce branches, tulips and narcissi, around which women in cretonne dresses busied themselves. Men in white shirts with rolled-up sleeves set up freshly cut, rustling birch branches at either end of tables covered in snowy cloths, just like altar-boys’ surplices. jackets, freshly-pressed, lay on the grass.

The bell from the Cathedral tower struck ten. Hanemann turned into Cystersów Street and stopped under the chestnut trees. He watched everything from afar, even though he was there on the warm June street amidst lively groups of people making their way towards the Cathedral. The first time he had gone into the white nave, he had felt alienated by the sight of women with their cheeks pressed up against the grilles of the confessionals, making their confessions to some strange man in black vestments and afterwards kissing with bended head the violet stole which a white hand, emerging from the shadow, held our to them with a calm, sedate gesture. When he saw all that, he felt the good Doctor from Wittenberg was right… That closeness of faces separated by the grille, that mixing of breaths… And when in the chancel stalls he caught sight of a man in a miter with a crosier in his hand-young men in the robes of seminarians, kneeling, began to touch with their lips the extended hand with the fat ring-he had to turn away his head and go out onto the square. It really was beyond bearing.

But now… Now on Cysters6w Street, under the chestnut trees with their broad leaves, the startled sparrows fluttered around, the heated faces of the musicians were reflected in the brass trumpets of the band, a drum slowly beat in the background of the melody as it rose and fell, as it drifted into the sky along with the scent and the blue smoke of the incense, and you couldn’t tell where the warmth came from which quivered in the air-whether from the sky, pale and cloudless, or maybe from under the ground, which was also coming alive, pushing out from under the turf the moist chalices of the orange lilies and the dark shoots of the white, their spring scent still weak. At the other end of the street, under the leaves of the chestnut trees, a white canopy floated like an Ark decorated with gold embroidery, sunk and rose again on four shafts, and in it there floated a metal sun, a gleaming sun with the white eye of the Host, raised up in hands wrapped in a cope.

The good Doctor of Wittenberg certainly wouldn’t have borne the sight-but now? Now the sun over the roofs of the houses on Cysters6w Street had their own reflection, a second sun whose center did not burn and dazzle, but which touched the eye with a gentle whiteness. You could look into this sun without fear; it was not the sun which burned crops and dried streams; its center was palpably alive…

Hanemann looked at the golden star shape carried under the canopy, decorated with heavy embroidery by the Swedish Queen, and perhaps the great sun, now standing high above Wrzeszcz (it was nearly eleven), softened at the sight of this small sun with its crown of metal rays, floating above bowed heads. For in the luminous transparency of this June afternoon everything seemed to become softer. The icy joints deep in his heart loosened. Hanemann half-closed his eyes, protecting himself with irony against the warm breath that touched his hair like a mother’s hand; he said to himself that it was the spring air that was coming over him, but slowly he walked under the chestnut trees among the people whose heated bodies were steaming with a light mist; he walked on the cobblestones sprinkled with fresh water where, like lost butterflies, the petals of field and garden flowers lay, thrown down in a gesture like that of a sower by little girls in dresses of rustling gauze. And now he had no desire to engage in disputes with the Papists, now everything he saw around him joined together in some kind of wholeness; in this wholeness were interwoven not only the voices from the courtyard at 17 Grottger Street, the shuffling over the stone floor when people kissed the cross, the strange singing of children about an old lady sowing poppy seed, sitting for ages by windows at dusk, badly dug flower beds, but even the way Mr Wierzbolowski came home in the evenings with Mr D., walking in a wavy line along the hedges, and then both of them drifting together into the dark hall at number 14; now it all seemed not only the most natural thing in the world, but also the most deeply appropriate.

He kept smiling to himself. Oh, good Doctor of Wittenberg… Women’s arms, on which beads of sweat glistened, covered with cambric, the arms of women walking by the canopy, they were so beautiful that even the little steps of the children wearing daisy garlands, glistening foreheads wiped with handkerchiefs, the napes of men’s necks, shaved and already touched by the brown flame of June, the shuffle of steps, the crowd, tiredness, even all this could not cloud the good light which filled the soul.

But still, once he got back to 17 Grottger Street, when he had sat down in an armchair to get his breath back, his eyes looked with relief once more at "The Cross in the Mountains" on the wall-the colored lithograph in its brown frame copied from Caspar David Friedrich’s picture.

On a dark hill, all covered with spruce, stood the black symbol of God, and there was no human being there.



Stefan Chwin

Translated from the Polish by David Malcolm



Stefan Chwin, an essayist and fiction writer, is Professor of Polish Literature at the University of Gdansk. He is the author of numerous scholarly works on Polish literature, including Romantyczna przestrzen wyobrazni (The Romantic Space of the Imagination) (1988) and Literatura i zdrada (Literature and Betrayal) (1993). His novel Hanemann (1995) has been widely praised in Polish and German literary circles. He appears for the first time in English translation in this issue of 2B.

David Malcolm is Professor of English Literature at the University of Gdansk. His translations of contemporary Polish verse have been published in Britain and the United States in such journals as Modern Poetry in Translation, International Quarterly, Primavera, and Calyx.