‘Our house was opposite a cornfield where there was a battle between Communists and others and everyone moved into the cellar. But the battle wasn’t much of an event. Just a few shots. In wintertime we had the new rich, the nouveaux riches, giving a picture of gaiety in Berlin amongst starving ex-soldiers and beggars. There were twenty suicides a night, and yet it was Charleston time. A man came and said suddenly, “We must forget the Treaty of Versailles. I can give you bread, work.” On the other side there was the Spartacists, the Communists, fighting and shooting. He had the most fantastic powers of persuasion, and everyone said, “This is it!”
‘No one really took the anti-Semitic business seriously. That was party politics. We didn’t believe it till it happened and then we still didn’t believe it.
‘I heard Goebbels and left absolutely screaming with enthusiasm. He was a wonderful speaker. But you must remember always that Germany is a military country. It was drilled into people ever since Frederick the Great. Under the various Kaisers the officer class was everything. To give you an example of the sort of way it was I can tell you that if my mother and father wanted some dancing partners for my sisters they would call up and send for eight young officers. Five minutes before seven they were outside the door. At three minutes to seven they rang the bell. At one minute to seven they left their hats in the hall. At seven o’clock precisely they were greeting my parents.
‘This hatred against the Jews is as old as the hills. There were pogroms against the Jews in Russia. In Austria. And in Germany later. And I have to say that to a certain extent they were justified. Because what happened in Germany was a reaction against the Eastern Galician Jews. Amongst themselves they were fine but towards the non-Jew, towards the Goyim, anything was allowed. I can remember when Hitler came to power and we were invited to the Avalon Hotel to watch the big and highly impressive march through the Brandenburg Gate with torches, Unter den Linden. It must have been ’thirty-two or ’thirty-three. You were drawn into it and you went with it.
‘The first of May nineteen thirty-three that was when the world fell in on us. My father was not allowed to go into the office. I decide, said Hitler, who is a German and who is a Jew. And yet my father felt himself to be a Prussian German officer. He died in nineteen thirty-five in Switzerland. That was a turn-up for the books, by golly!
‘We spoke English at home. When I was five we had a French mademoiselle and a year later an English miss. Her name was Miss Natalie, she was heavily built and an excellent short-distance sprinter. I could jump like a flea. I went in for swimming, skating, skiing. But I was no good with a round ball.
‘So when I went to England I was in trouble. I started in the scrum and then played three-quarter. In the summer there was rowing. Either I rowed stroke or number seven. There was absolutely no feeling of foreignness.
‘My father, you see, though a German, was an anglophile – and we were educated like Prussian princes. He spoke English a great deal in the house. My father coming back from London, I remember, with a carving set from Aspreys. My father’s evening shirts were washed and starched in London. This was not out of the ordinary. So what I learnt was a cross between English and Prussian manners. One side relaxed and the other very strict, very formal.
‘I took to the life in England like a duck to water. Everyone was friendly and polite. It was a pleasant, peaceful country and we drank cider in the local pubs. No one was interested in one’s background. That was private. I was never struck by the feeling: “You don’t belong here – bloody foreigner, get out!” We were simply human beings. I remember for our set books we had Gulliver’s Travels and Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale. “He fethered Pertelote twenty tyme/And trad hire eke as ofte” – What does it mean, Sir? I played Julius Caesar though I was only one of the soldiers who ran upstairs and shouted, “Caesar is dead!” Contrary to the German school, I simply blossomed like a primrose after the rain in the English school. I learnt to do double somersaults of self-confidence and assurance. But I never knew what was what. I remember catching a train from sooty Paddington. I read the Daily Mirror. Why? Because I liked “The Adventures of Jane”.’
Von F had been something of a sleuth. He was interested in the disguises of the past. Some might take pleasure in detecting ancient Saxon place names hidden beneath modern variants or corruptions. Just so young von F was keenly interested in the roots of Saxon settlement, particularly amongst the Lusatian Sorbs, or Wende. Place names, and in particular the presence of Slavic place names in German territory, were a source of huge concern to scholars in the thirties. Young von F was original in this as in so much else. He was not much taken with the secrets of place names beyond the river Elbe. He left that to others. He took his Abitur in the spring of 1927 and had it marked ‘good’. Having matriculated he decided on pursuing his interests in the interpretations of peoples. In anthropology and ethnology. But surprisingly then the only place for him to begin his studies in earnest was at Leipzig, where the chair had just been occupied by the greatest German authority of his day, fresh from Vienna, Professor Otto Reche.
Although von F began his studies in Munich, where he learnt to fence and loved to bicycle along the Isar, which busily bisects the city, it was in Leipzig where he found his scientific desires most closely met in the lectures of Professor Reche. He did not stay there all the time. German universities allow their students considerable freedom after they have completed one semester. Young von F was to spend seven semesters at no fewer than four universities before completing his doctorate.
The life of the German student of those times is difficult to convey. Young von F would astonish his Oxford friends by recounting a typical day: ‘After a cup of coffee, to the gym for an hour’s fencing. Then to the range for some shooting. Small-bore usually. Then classes for an hour. Philosophy. And that meant Hegel. Poetry and that meant Hölderlin. Before lunch, from about eleven to twelve, a ride. Lunch to follow and then the ins and outs of fencing, a theoretical class. Usually, in the evenings, we went to the theatre. Oh, yes, I had a lot of fun.
‘What are these scars? Do you mean here? Ah, those are duelling scars, I’m afraid. An affectation of German youth. In the old corps mine were won. In Göttingen. In the Mensur. A duel, that’s right. Yes, precisely. The scars were not obligatory. Well, not exactly. But they came, eventually, if one behaved correctly. They show one to be what we used to call satisfaktionsfähig. How would you translate that? Capable of giving satisfaction, perhaps? And these here on my cheek, beside my mouth, date from an encounter with a certain Pfeister. He drew blood once. I did so twice. Its mate, the one you see running parallel to it, I got on a different occasion. About a year later, when, on a return visit to Munich, I was challenged by a certain Brackmann. We’d fallen out. Oh, yes, you guessed it. A young lady, of course. Perdita she was. A tiny vaporous blonde with ice-blue eyes. I don’t suppose she was worth it. But that’s besides the point. It was a question of honour. The Mensur was banned, as you probably know, by the Weimar government in the twenties. But students of the corps had been doing it for hundreds of years and no government decree was going to stop them. May as well have banned the devil drink. And we were often drunk, my lord, yes. Drunken is what we were.’
Young von F spoke beautiful supple English when he came to Oxford, with only tiny lapses. Such a likeable boy! Very tall, six foot four in his black silken socks, a huge shining forehead under a mass of blond curls, large liquefying sea-blue eyes which, when they softened in reflection, were gentle and almost feminine. Of course his English was good. His father an officer, a gentleman, a manufacturer of sanitary ware. And, most unexpectedly, a Jew. This had came as a tremendous surprise since von F’s family had absolutely no knowledge of it until the Nazis sprung it upon them. Even the Nazis seemed less than sure, since after his father’s suicide in Switzerland in 1935, they appeared to have forgotten all about it. They had never objected when von F returned to Germany, had they?
His mother had been half American.
An heiress, one Daisy Milteagan from Savannah, Georgia, whose fortune had been made in what young von F called ‘perishables’. In fact, slaves. It irked Max to detect this embarrassment in the young German when he described where his family had made money. Retrospective moral judgements in historical matters were vulgar. One did what one did at the time.
Young von F arrived in England in March 1936. He had graduated summa cum laude at Leipzig and his doctoral thesis was commended by the examining board. It read The Broad Pelvis: A Saxon Bequest. Though the work of a very young man, there were further accolades for this thesis from the great Professor Reche himself, who applied to it the term ‘elegant’ and, if that were not enough, Professor Reche helped to secure von F’s future as an anthropologist and ethnographer, by going even further and calling it ‘incisive’.
That these encomiums were not misplaced is shown by the degree of quite brilliant anticipation revealed in the work of the young von F. He had a gift undoubtedly. And this was to be proved again later in his life, a gift for being wise before the event.
In ethnographic circles in the thirties in Germany a storm was blowing up. Studies of Saxon remains showed a high incidence of dislocated hip joints. This phenomenon is not unusual in people who possess broad pelvises. But what electrified debate in Germany in the thirties was the suggestion that in those territories east of the Elbe river and, worse still, even in parts of Germany itself, Slavic settlements in ancient times preceded the arrival of Saxon settlers and they were responsible for clouding the gene pool, issuing in the dominant trait of the wide pelvis. Though this discussion was not openly aired at the time, it worried the best scientific minds, most of which were firmly committed to the idea of widespread Saxon settlement east and west of the Elbe from the very earliest periods. Von F’s ‘elegant’ suggestion was that Saxon settlement had been so extensive and went back so far into the past that the very notion of ‘Slav’ dissolved under scrutiny. In his words, ‘Saxon fact prevailed over Slavic perhaps’.
It was young von F’s pioneering work in this field which later allowed eminences such as Professor Otto Reche to show conclusively that the dislocated hip joint was not a genetic ailment inherited from earlier, impure Slavic forebears and to go on to suggest convincingly that the reason for it was that Germans had lived east of the Elbe for so long that to speak of Slavs at all as a specifically ‘racial’ category, was unscientific. It’s true that young von F never went so far as his former mentor in asserting that the settled German territories to the east of the Elbe – here he used a cunning English pun to make his point – were ‘enSlav’d’ by barbarian riffraff. No. Von F was always temperate in his science as in his politics. He wished only to follow the truth. Let others draw conclusions from basic and good scientific research. That was the scientist’s job.
Von F took up residence in Nonce Hall, Oxford, in the summer term of 1936. Nonce, though founded in the mid-sixteenth century, came to be represented in the twentieth by a rather gloomy collection of smoky Victorian buildings in the centre of town. The college possessed no view of the river. Its quad was dark and damp, even in May. It had a reputation for philosophical astringency, logic and epistemology. This was tempered by a political radicalism, especially among numbers of the younger men. And although the thirties was a lifetime away from the gaudy excesses which swept through the university in the years after the Great War, there hung about Nonce an air of sexual intrigue, particularly bisexual adventure, which had scandalised and heated the town from time to time. Not for nothing was the ‘new’ School of Philosophy, Politics and Economics seized upon by the students of Nonce with enthusiasm. For well above the usual pursuits of college life – rowing, sex and snobbery – the men of Nonce were determined to be modern.
Young von F flung himself into Oxford life. He went punting on the river and managed to pick it up pretty quickly, which is saying something in a man of his height. It was a well-known fact that men over six feet four often experienced difficulty with the poling technique. To punting he added hunting, at Blenheim no less, with Tubby Semple, an amiable loafer who was never known to do a stroke of work and widely respected for it. And it was perhaps von F’s depiction of poor Tubby as ‘a being of low but amiable mind’ that, even at this early stage of his Oxford romance, set him apart from his English counterparts in ways which were to tell deeply over the years he spent at Oxford.
Unlike several of his colleagues he also slept with a number of women, and with some of them repeatedly. Take Cynthia Pargeter whom he met through his membership of the Socialist Club. It was to Cynthia that young von F confessed feeling a mite suspicious about the British capacity for having ‘a good time’. Later Cynthia was to tell Max that young von F had in fact often remarked: ‘They possess a measure of seriousness but not high seriousness.’ What she did not tell Max was that they had both been naked at the time and that young von F had been lightly scoring her body with a succession of kisses beginning with each of her ears and then descending via her chin in a straight line which bisected her breasts, allowing as he did so his cheeks to brush her nipples at the same time, ending in the fur of her groin. Nor did she tell him that she lay back and took a very firm hold of his very rampant penis while he did this which meant that von F was forced to arch his back above her till he looked, thought Cynthia, like a giant white naked caterpillar.
After this manoeuvre, which von F liked to refer to as the ‘decline of kissing’, he generally entered her at her urgent insistence. The lovemaking of von F and young Cynthia Pargeter was noisy and unabashed. She called his name, getting louder with every answering stroke from him. He whispered in her ear in German and generally, at the moment of climax, he would intone, somewhere between a sob and a prayer, a fragment of some poem, with beautiful diction, softly in her ear. Only later did she find out it was Hölderlin, his favourite.
All she said of this to Max some time later – ‘I’ve never known anyone so divided. Wherever his body was you could be sure his mind was somewhere else.’
Oxford, then, was lovely. But Germany was serious. And it was Ralphie Treehouse, a friend from the Socialist Club, later a high flyer in the Foreign Office, and two years von F’s senior, a man who had himself spent several years in Germany, who drew attention to the irremediable nature of von F’s Germanness.
‘Teutonic from T to C,’ Treehouse remarked at the time. His later comments were to be much harsher. ‘Show him the moonlight and he thinks of Beethoven. Talk to him of Germany and you get Goethe. Well, who could talk of Germany and tell me where it is? Deutschland? Aber wo liegt es? Exactly. Where is it? I wouldn’t let his lovely English fool you for a bloody moment. The man’s pure Hun.’
Even so they all liked him. Ralphie Treehouse especially.
At about this time young von F retreated into the music of Haydn and Beethoven. He slept just as often with Cynthia but he no longer practised the decline of kissing. He rounded fiercely on Tubby Semple for making jokes about ‘that jolly silly little bugger, Hitler’ and he told Ralphie Treehouse, already then beginning his dizzying ascent in the Foreign Office, that he grieved for his country though he thanked God for science which was pure, impersonal and might still be turned to the good of man.
Treehouse remembered him years later. ‘He held up the tools of his trade to me – a pair of callipers and a micrometer – which he carried always in a brown leather bag. I think the case came from Argentina. I seem to remember, in his thorough way, that he insisted on telling me about the system of measuring by which you could say, work out somehow, a person’s sex and race with very great accuracy. You could tell simply by checking on the measurements. And you could do it, he insisted, long after a person was dead and buried. By the measurement of the bones or even of scraps of bones, even splinters or charred remains, you could go on to tell whether the person in life had been caucasoid, negroid or mongoloid. I believe it was a system developed in the nineteenth century in France by somebody called Bertillon. It all sounded pretty rum to
me. But that was von F. And when he got going, there was no stopping him.’
Von F became a fellow of Nonce College and might have stayed there for ever. Indeed he’d often announce his intention of doing so. But Hitler had other ideas. And from one day to the next, without telling anybody, and without warning, young von F decided to return to Germany. He sailed from Southampton in the late months of 1938. His friends were appalled. Only Cynthia was there to see him off. They paused in London though, the route was circuitous, and went to a thé dansant at the Palais de Danse in Tottenham Court Road. Afterwards they shared a blissfully deserted carriage and by the light of the reading lamp which showed first green and then grey as the train swayed through the night, they made love for one last time. It was done without their usual finesse, a greedy tearing at each other, much constricted by their despairing sense of time running out, as well as the ludicrously small confines of the compartment. She took him in her mouth. He upended her, literally stood her on her head, and, with her thighs pressed tightly against his ears, closing off the hateful hurrying wheels of the train, forced his tongue deep into her vagina. ‘England pendant,’ he called it. Then, when they found that making love in any conventional position was out of the question in that awkward space, he lay on the floor and stuck his long bare legs out of the window. Carefully she mounted him and while he lay back and closed his eyes, she brought herself very slowly and carefully to a climax, checking every inch of his penis, in much the same way as he had once moved down her body in the decline of kissing.
Serenity House Page 15