Free The Karnau Tapes by Marcel Beyer Page A

begin with.
    I can hear Holde and Hilde laughing in the nursery — what are they playing, mothers and babies? — and Helmut is hammering and screwing away at my watch. He can't use a screwdriver properly, he's too stupid to play with his Meccano. If Papa tells Mama about our fight he'll say Helmut was playing quietly by himself. Mama won't ask if it's really true, she'll scowl at me and make her headache face. There's the nursemaid, she's saying something to the others. Now she's knocking on my door: 'Helga, get tidied up and comb your hair, it'll soon be supper-time.'
    I'll have to unlock the door, I can't put it off any longer. I hope Papa won't be there for supper. I'll listen on the stairs first, to see if I can hear him talking.
     
    *
     
    Street signs are being dismantled and taken down. The men's hands are sore and calloused from unscrewing so many in quick succession. Potting and glazing are in progress. Clay is being moulded on the potter's wheel and fired. Now everyone will get new jugs. A summer wind is blowing across the green meadows. The blue pencil is scouring fields and ridding flower-beds of thistles. Walls are being repainted, hoardings whitewashed over. The blue pencil bites through weeds, rips out tufts of vegetation, strips trees of foliage and lays them flat. Incredible, the extent of this clearance: threshed grain, shady hillsides, forest glades, charred signposts, barns, farms, ploughland — the whole countryside is being burned off like a field of stubble. Tongues, too, are set ablaze and their last words cauterised as a prelude to extinction.
    The operation is already in full swing. The entire region is being blue-pencilled. Readers are combing every library. The blue pencil is inflicting deep wounds, gnawing away at the foreign vocabulary. Street names, formerly French, are being replaced with German. The blue pencil underlines, corrects, makes marginal notes, suggests appropriate German replacements. Typewriters churn out words at seventy-eight per minute. Normative regulations are being imposed, indigenous civil servants re-educated, language courses administered under the auspices of a compulsory programme designed to inculcate a basic vocabulary and eliminate any pronunciation problems.
    Hammers and chisels are chipping away at tombstones and excising memorial inscriptions, even the French words for BORN and DIED . Labels bearing washing instructions, too, are being ripped from the collar of every garment. The blue pencil is deleting forms of address, conventional words of farewell, verbal courtesies.
    New names are being assigned to everyone and everything. The Germanising process requires that foreign words be erased from mouths and foreign names from passes and permits. Any inscriptions other than HEISS and KALT are disappearing from bath taps throughout Alsace. The blue pencil is prescribing financial penalties for the use of French words. All mottoes or graces stamped on tableware, whether of silver or some other metal, are being removed.
    The linguistic purge is being implemented with the utmost rigour. The authorities raid a china factory where, in contravention of a strict ban, French inscriptions are still being scratched into the soft clay of crockery ready for firing. Paint pots are tipped over, startled workers drop their brushes and are lined up facing the wall with their wrists handcuffed behind them. While the guilty parties' personal particulars are being taken down, all the crockery in the warehouse is systematically smashed, even inscribed plates adorned with floral patterns and landscapes. Fragments bearing isolated letters in cursive could have been combined into new, German, words, but the blue pencil is implacably thorough: the fragments and the letters painted on them are vigorously trampled underfoot and ground to dust. Jugs for water, milk and wine are hurled through the shop window, and a trayful of salt cellars goes sailing into the street just as the prisoners are