The Directive Name

by Arthur Kronfeld, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The form had come up from the Alexanderplatz that morning in a brown envelope, with a note clipped to it in a clerk's upright hand: Ärztliches Gutachten erbeten. Name, Geburtsdatum, Befund, Unbedenklichkeit. Name, date of birth, findings, and a statement that there was no objection. Dr. Martin Sielaff read the four words twice, put the form face down on the blotter, and went to the window.

Rain was coming across the Tiergarten in long grey slants. Below, on In den Zelten, a man with a handcart had stopped under the chestnuts to wait it out, and was rolling a cigarette with his back to the Institut, as people often did, as if the building might look at them.

The patient was early. Frau Thiel brought her up at twenty to eleven and left the door open a hand's width, which was the house rule for first consultations and which Sielaff closed, because the corridor carried every word down to the waiting room.

"Rieck," the patient said. "Anton Rieck. On the paper." She sat down without being asked and kept her coat on. It was a good coat, dark blue, a little short in the sleeve, and her hands came out of the cuffs large and red, with a white seam of old burn across the back of the left one. She put her handbag on her knees and held it there. "I have the fee."

"We can settle that downstairs."

"I would rather settle it now." She opened the bag and counted onto the edge of his desk: two twenty-mark notes, then coins, a five, four ones, and the rest in fifty-pfennig pieces, which she stacked in a column with her forefinger until the column stood straight. Fifty Reichsmarks. A pastry cook in Moabit earned that, Sielaff supposed, in something under three weeks, if the Konditorei was decent and the owner did not drink. "Count it, please."

He counted it, because she wanted him to, and wrote her a receipt.

---

The questionnaire was the Institut's own, a hundred and thirty questions in four printed sheets, and Sielaff had long ago stopped believing that it measured anything except the patience of the person answering it. He used it anyway. It was the instrument the house had. It gave the patient something to do with their hands for the first half hour, and it gave him the order of his questions, so that the questions he cared about could arrive in the middle, where nobody was braced for them.

Born 1897, in Spandau. Father a turner at the arms works, dead of the influenza in the last winter of the war. Mother a laundress, dead four years. No brothers. One sister, married, in Köpenick, who did not write. Apprenticed to a baker at fourteen because the baker was a cousin, and moved to pastry at twenty because pastry was warmer and the hours began an hour later. Served in the war: no, rejected in 1916 for the flat feet, and she said this with a small grim satisfaction, as though the feet had known what they were doing.

"When did you first wear women's clothes?"

"Which time?"

He looked up.

"There is the first time as a child, which everybody has, my mother put me in my sister's dress for a photograph, I have it. There is the first time I did it on purpose, which was at twelve, in the wash-house, in a customer's petticoat, and I was beaten for it. And there is the first time I went outside in them." She moved the handbag a little higher on her knees. "That was nineteen twenty-two. The newspapers said the police would not arrest people any more just for the clothes. I read it at the bakery. I went out that same Sunday, as far as the Kleiner Tiergarten and back."

"And?"

"And I was arrested on the Tuesday after," she said. "Not for the clothes. For causing a public nuisance. They are very careful, at the Alex, about what they arrest you for."

He wrote it down. Paragraph one hundred and eighty-three: Erregung öffentlichen Ärgernisses. Up to two years. He had seen the paragraph in so many files that his hand wrote the number before he had decided to.

"They let me go the same night," she said. "The sergeant was decent. He said, Get yourself a paper from Hirschfeld's people, and then we can leave you alone. That was seven years ago." She looked at the column of coins, which he had not yet put away. "It took a while to save."

---

He examined her because the form required findings and because it would have been a discourtesy to her money not to.

Height a hundred and seventy-four centimetres. Weight sixty-eight kilos. Larynx prominent. Voice low, but carried high in the chest by long habit, so that it came out softer than the throat that made it. Beard sparse, shaved close that morning, a nick under the jaw dabbed with powder. Hands as noted. The burn was from an oven door, 1919. Breasts slight; she had been taking, for a year, a preparation she bought from a chemist in the Turmstraße, and when he asked the name she gave it at once, and he wrote it down and said nothing about it, though he had his opinion of the chemist in the Turmstraße.

He went through the three things he went through with every patient, in the order he had taught himself to keep. What did the body bring? A tall frame, a low voice, an endocrine picture that the chemist was interfering with and that nobody in Berlin, himself included, could honestly claim to understand. What had her history made of it? A mother who had dressed a child for a photograph and then, by the sound of it, had looked the other way for twenty years; a trade learned among women at the ovens at five in the morning; a beating in a wash-house. And what did the situation permit? The situation was on his blotter, face down, with four words clipped to it.

The first two he could write about. He had written about them a hundred times. The third was the one the form wanted, and it was not a medical question at all.

---

Everyone at the Institut knew what Unbedenklichkeit meant at the Alexanderplatz. The police had no use for a diagnosis. What the officer who issued the cards wanted to know, and what he would decide for himself in the end whatever the doctor wrote, was whether the person in front of him would turn heads in the street. In the spring he had refused a woman from Neukölln, a laundry hand with a heavy jaw, on the grounds, as he put it in his reply to the Institut, that her appearance in female clothing could not fail to excite public notice. Sielaff had read the letter in the staff room. It had gone from hand to hand, and people had laughed at the officer's prose, and Sielaff had laughed with them, and nobody had asked what became of the laundry hand.

So the form's last word asked him to predict the behaviour of strangers. It asked him to sit in his room in the Tiergarten and forecast what a tram conductor on the Turmstraße would do with his eyes. And it asked him to sign the forecast with the same signature he put under a Wassermann result.

He turned the form over and uncapped his pen, and then he capped it again.

"Fräulein Rieck," he said. He had not called her that before; the word came out before he had weighed it, and he saw her register it, and saw her decide not to show that she had. "Would you walk with me for ten minutes? The rain is easing."

She looked at him for a long moment. "You want to see if they look."

"Yes."

"They look," she said. But she stood up and buttoned the coat.

---

The rain had thinned to a fine cold drift that hung in the air rather than falling. They went out past the porter and turned left along In den Zelten towards the Brandenburg Gate, Sielaff on the kerb side, as his mother had taught him to walk with a lady, and he noticed that he had done it and did not correct it.

He had meant to watch the street. He found that it took an effort, as if his eyes, too, had been trained.

A woman with a dachshund passed them and did not look up from the dog. Two schoolboys under a single umbrella looked, and one said something, and the other laughed, and Fräulein Rieck walked on at the same pace with her handbag in the crook of her arm. A cab driver at the rank on the corner watched them from under the peak of his cap the whole way along the rank, without expression, the way cab drivers watch everything. A young couple did not look. An old man in a loden coat looked, looked away, and then, after they had passed, turned right round on the pavement to look again. Sielaff saw that because he had turned round himself.

He turned back. Fräulein Rieck had not turned at all.

At the corner by the Kroll Opera a Schupo in his shako stood under a tree, with the rain dripping off the brim, and as they came level with him his eyes went to her and stayed there. Sielaff felt his own shoulders lift. The policeman's gaze moved from her face to her hands, and from her hands to Sielaff, and took in the overcoat and the doctor's bag he had not thought to leave behind, and then moved off into the park as if nothing in particular had happened.

"That's how it goes," she said, when they were past. "When I'm on my own he stops me. When I'm with a gentleman, he looks at the gentleman."

They walked back. Sielaff counted, as they went, and stopped counting at nineteen; he could no longer tell which of the faces had been looking at her and which at the two of them, or at the rain, or at nothing. He had a figure, and the figure meant nothing. Half of it, very likely, was himself.

---

In the consulting room she sat down in the same chair and did not take off her coat. Sielaff took a sheet of the Institut's paper, not the police form, and began the draft as he always began them.

Herr Anton Rieck, geb. 1897 in Spandau, Konditor, wohnhaft Berlin NW, ist mir bekannt und wurde von mir untersucht. Es handelt sich um einen Fall von ausgesprochenem Transvestitismus . . .

He stopped there. He read it over and drew a line through ausgesprochenem, then through Fall. A case. The category had been in the language for less than twenty years, and Hirschfeld had built it himself, for this very purpose: so that a person like the one in front of him could be handed to a police clerk as something already known. It was a good tool. It had kept people out of cells. He had used it himself, perhaps forty times, and he had believed every time that he knew what he was doing with it.

He wrote it again, more carefully, and the careful version was no better. The difficulty was not in the noun. Every sentence he could put on this paper described her for the benefit of a man who would never meet her except across a counter.

"What are you crossing out?" she said.

He told her. He did not soften it. He said that the police would want to know whether she would pass unnoticed in the street, and that he could not honestly write that she would, because he had been in the street with her ten minutes ago and he had seen what he had seen.

She listened with her head a little on one side, the way she must listen to the owner of the Konditorei explaining why the cream had not set.

"Herr Doktor," she said. "Write what gets me the card."

"I should not write what isn't true."

"Then write what is true and gets me the card." She leaned forward and put two fingers on the edge of his desk, beside the receipt. "I know what I look like. I've known since I was fourteen and the baker's wife told me I'd never get a husband with hands like those, and then laughed, because she'd forgotten for a minute what I was supposed to be. I have a mirror. I don't need you to tell me about the man in the loden coat." She sat back. "I need a paper in my bag so that when the Schupo stops me I can go on to work, and I'm not in a cell at the Alex when the ovens want lighting at five. That's all I need you for. The rest I do myself. I've been doing it for seven years."

Sielaff was quiet for a moment. Then he drew a line under the crossed-out draft, all the way across the sheet.

---

There remained the name. The card would carry a first name, and a first name could be changed, with a doctor's report and the police's approval and, at the end of a long corridor, the signature of the Minister of Justice himself. But the Ministry permitted only what the clerks called Direktivnamen, names that would serve for either sex, so that the State need not take a position: Alex, Gert, Toni. He explained this as plainly as he could, and he apologised for it, which he had not meant to do.

She laughed, the first time he had heard her laugh, low and short.

"Toni," she said. "My mother called me Toni. In the wash-house, when nobody was listening. Toni, fetch the blue. Toni, mind the copper." She looked at the window, where the rain had stopped and the light was coming back white and flat off the wet leaves. "Well. They've given me back what she gave me. Tell them Toni."

He wrote the certificate in a single draft, and it was shorter than any he had written. Under the findings he put the body plainly, as he had measured it, with the voice and the hands and the burn, because a lie there would be found out at the first counter and would do her more harm than the truth. Under history he wrote three sentences. And at the place where the form wanted its last word he wrote, in the plainest German he had, something the form had not asked for:

In female clothing the patient goes about her work and her life in an orderly and inconspicuous manner. That she is seen, and sometimes stared at, is a fact about the onlookers and not a finding about her. The clothing is not the cause of any disturbance; it is the condition of her health. An arrest under §183 would bring about the very harm that the paragraph claims to prevent, and I cannot regard it as medically justified. There is no medical objection.

He read it through. It would not persuade the officer at the Alexanderplatz of anything. It might, if the man was in a decent mood, give him a sentence to copy into his own file. That was the most a doctor's paragraph could do against a police paragraph. Sielaff signed it, and dated it, the eighth of October, 1929, and pressed the blotter down over the ink.

When he lifted the blotter, the name was there in reverse among older names, a small backward Toni in violet, the T hooked the wrong way like a question.

She folded the certificate into three, and then, after a glance at the bag, into six, and put it in the inner pocket where she had kept the money. She swept the coins off the edge of the desk into her palm, held them out to him, and when he shook his head and pointed at the receipt, she put them away again without argument.

At the door she turned. "If they refuse it?"

"Then come back," he said, "and I will write to them again."

She nodded as though this was what she had expected, and went down the stairs. Sielaff went to the window. In a minute she came out under the chestnuts, where the man with the handcart had gone, and set off towards the Kroll corner with her bag in the crook of her arm. The Schupo was still under his tree. He turned his head as she came level with him, and Sielaff put his hand flat on the cold glass. She did not alter her pace. She went past him, across the wet gravel, into the park.

---

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Arthurō Kronfeldiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Arthur Kronfeld, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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