TE23 Double Feature

Anne Weber

Fatherland

with other pastors, today we’d probably call it “pastoral continuing education” or some such. Sanderling shares a room with one of these men, can’t tear the mask away from his face even for a second. On the first day, he’s appointed to say matins. He feels it keenly: a prayer such as I needed to pray was one the others could never have prayed with me. Yet he has no choice, the usual litany isn’t within his range. Or perhaps it is, yes, maybe he does reach for it, reaches for anything he might take hold of, even empty husks of prayers in use every day, and fills them up with his profound forsakenness, thrusts them out with the full force of his affliction. There’s something in his voice that separates him from the others. They don’t so much pray with him as furtively observe their brother minister. For to them, there’s something unseemly, embarrassing about the fervor erupting out of him.

prays for too long. Gently – old Hesekiel is the one who takes on the task – he’s interrupted and asked to conclude. Ten minutes were planned, and he’s already been talking for a quarter of an hour. Breakfast awaits. And the day’s program. That consists of some instructive excursions , more precisely, of visits to a prison and an insane asylum. The first institution they visited that morning was, according to Sanderling’s notes, both district poor house and penitentiary. Were the poor punished for their poverty? It seems more likely that they were two separate establishments under the same roof. It was abundantly clear that the director, an erstwhile major, was afraid these pastors he was obliged to show around might wish not just to save the prisoners’ souls, but to rescue them from the institution. We were enjoined not to exchange a single word with them. Like a gang of prisoners, we were led past the other prisoners. 155

He prays too desperately, and above all, he 154