The Karnau Tapes (29 page)

According to one reconstruction, she put her six children to bed at about five-thirty p.m. and then gave them a sleeping-draught, probably Veronal. Later, when they were asleep or at least stupefied, she poured cyanide into their mouths from glass ampoules. This laborious proceeding would, it seems, have obliged her to lean across the nearest children in order to get at the ones beyond. They could not, after all, have assisted her by craning forwards and opening their mouths to take the deadly poison. Dosing the occupants of the upper bunks presented a special problem to someone ill-attired for such an activity in the brown dress, trimmed with white, which she had donned in readiness for her own death, because it must have taken considerable dexterity not to spill the cyanide while raising a child's head with her free hand.

All the children passively submitted to this treatment — all, it is alleged, except Helga, who refused to take her 'medicine'. When all attempts at persuasion failed, her mother had no alternative but to introduce the poison into her mouth by force.

Whose account of the affair is this? The details sound quite incredible, because the woman could not have done all this unaided. The source of the account, who refuses to divulge his name, is concealing something. Who else was in the children's room on that last, fatal night?

I play the 30 April disc once more. Before the children start imitating my fairy-tale voice, I can also hear my own voice in the background. We're singing a bedtime song together: 'If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take ...' Fatigue notwithstanding, the youthful, high-pitched voices are doing their best to sing in unison.

But the song is overlaid by muffled grunts and moans from the next apartment: my neighbours making love before dawn.

*

The girl is naked. That much is obvious, though all that suggests it are her bare, slender shoulders. The pale oilskin sheet covering the body from the chest down has slipped a little, revealing the left breast, because the head has been raised to show off the slightly pointed chin, the full, loosely compressed lips, the delicate nose, the closed eyes beneath the broad brow ridges, the long lashes, the arching eyebrows, the smooth, unlined forehead. The skin is universally flawless, and the complexion would be healthy but for some bluish flecks and the greenish tinge that discolours the whole face, all the more noticeable because the hair has been swept back off the forehead. Unnaturally taut in appearance, the hair is, in a sense, supporting the weight of the entire body: a whole hank of it is clutched in the gloved hand of the uniformed mortuary attendant, who has turned the dead twelve-year-old's head towards the camera and is holding it in front of his black rubber apron to ensure an even more effective contrast between pale face and dark background.

The six children, all wearing light night attire, were discovered in their bunks in a separate room in the Bunker of the Reich Chancellery, which has since been razed to the ground. Also buried there, crushed by shattered concrete and mingled with the soil, are the remains of a bar of chocolate. All six children exhibited signs of poisoning. To enable them to be identified by persons closely acquainted with them, their bodies were removed to the Berlin-Buch headquarters of the Smersh Section of the Red Army's 79th Rifle Corps.

The following report was compiled during the autopsy performed on Helga's corpse:

'External examination: The body is that of a girl about fifteen years old in appearance, well-nourished and wearing a pale blue nightgown trimmed with lace. Height: one metre fifty-eight. Circumference of chest at nipple level: sixty-five centimetres. Colour of skin and visible mucous membranes: pink to cherry-red. Back of the body mottled with red postmortem lividities that can no longer be dispersed. Fingernails bluish. Skin in the region of the shoulder-blades and buttocks noticeably pale owing to pressure. Abdominal skin dull green, discoloured by putrefaction. Head macrocephalous with flat temples. Hair long, pale brown, plaited. Face oval, tapering towards the chin. Eyebrows pale brown, eyelashes long, irises blue. Nose straight, regular, small. Eyes and mouth closed. Tip of tongue loosely gripped between the teeth. When the body was turned over and pressure applied to the thorax, serous fluid seeped from the mouth and nose and a very faint smell of bitter almonds could be detected. Rib cage normally developed, nipples small, no hair visible in the armpits, abdomen flat. External sexual organs normally developed. Labia majora and mons veneris hirsute as far as the pubic symphysis. 'Internal examination: Mucous membrane somewhat bluish. Intestinal contents unexceptional. Womb firm, four centimetres long, three centimetres wide and two centimetres thick at the oviduct. Vagina slit-shaped, hymen intact.'

Although the autopsy report speaks of plaits, the photograph shows Helga with her hair loose. Who undid the corpse's plaits? The pathologist's assistant in his rubber gloves?

*

An early bird is stirring. Awake now, it starts to sing and promptly evokes a chorus of twitters from other trees round about: the night is over at last. How much can I really reconstruct from these recordings? I've listened to every disc with care, more than once, and managed to recognise every voice including my own and that of the children's mother. Would it be better to destroy these wax matrices? No, I can't bring myself to render the children's final days on earth inaudible. I can't consign them to silence, those children who listened to me telling them a bedtime story the night before their murder.

That was on 30 April: the last recording, made on the night we saw each other for the last time. At noon the next day all the recording materials and machines were rounded up and destroyed, some of them in the Bunker itself. Nine nights from 22 April onwards: nine wax matrices. I arrange the discs in their correct order and check the dates. But there are ten discs here on the kitchen table, not nine. Did I start the sequence on 21 April? Or cut two discs the same night? Impossible, I could never have changed the discs after lights-out. Besides, Stumpfecker sent me off to make copies late on the afternoon of 1 May. Did we ever make a recording during the day? In my cubicle, on another machine? The children knew about my work, so did they make me a recording by themselves? No, they would never have done so in defiance of their father's wishes. No date, no serial number. There's something wrong here, I didn't record this.

'Is that you, Herr Karnau?'

I've already listened to this disc, with its brief exchange between Helga and Heide and their mother.

'Is that you, Herr Karnau?'

Those are the last words I can make out. No, this isn't one of my recordings, definitely not. It doesn't display the tonal quality of the others, nor does it convey any idea of the children's animated conversations after lights-out. This one must have been made by someone inexperienced. Helga's unanswered question is followed at first by some unidentifiable sounds, nothing more. On the other hand, I was the only person who knew about the microphone and recording machine concealed beneath the bed. Now an adult's voice breaks the silence. Man or woman? I can't decide which, the sound is too fragmentary. All I can make out, very faintly, is: 'Yes, yes, oh yes . ..'

Nothing more from this point on, just a liquid gurgle repeated six times over. Was that a muffled cry? A little sob? Nothing now but breathing, the superimposed breathing of six young children with different respiratory rhythms. The sound decreases in volume and intensity until, in the end, nothing more can be heard. Although the disc continues to revolve with the needle in the groove, absolute silence reigns.

Although certain characters in the foregoing narrative bear the names of actual persons, they are as fictitious as those that do not.

*

The introductory quotation is taken from an entry, dated 20 April 1941, in the diaries of Joseph Goebbels.

MARCEL BEYER

Marcel Beyer was born in 1965 and lives in Cologne. His first novel,
Das Menschenfleisch,
was described by the
Suddeutsche Zeitung
as a masterpiece and
The Karnau Tapes,
his second novel, has been translated into ten languages.