The Night of Shooting Stars

by Ben Pastor

It’d happened only a couple of times before, after major drinking bouts at the German embassy in Moscow. But that was before the war, when the Soviets made young military attachés drink too much in an attempt (failed, in his case) to loosen their tongues. A very unpleasant sensation, which he tried to remedy by reading through the diary entries of the last few days. Piecemeal, through the reticence and self-imposed censure of his own words, he began to reconstruct the events, at least in part. Like clear-cut blocks of ice emerging from a flat sea, the endless hours just behind him surged back. Grimm, Nebe, Salomon, Kupinsky. They struck him as a sequence of infinite horror.

  Still, they belonged to another life, as if he’d died and this morning a different Bora had come into the world, utterly indifferent to risk, remorse, fear, pain. He was once more aware, recalled every detail, and felt exceptionally calm.

  Whatever his destination, Nebe would soon send someone to pick him up. Only as he shaved did the thought of Salomon being dragged away from the Buddhist Centre hit home. Silent tears rolled down his cheek, and he had to look away from the mirror so as not to see himself weep. He was my commander. He trusted me. How frightened he must have been, how he must have believed that I betrayed him. Darkness, the lonely lake-shore, the bitter odour of water – he could sense them as if he were there. And Kupinsky, once again the weak link, destroyed for ever.

  At 6:30 a.m., the sun was red and enormous, four fingers above the horizon. As he stood by the window, clasping the horn button of his collar, it seemed to Bora the image of a giant wheel, like the one described in the Tao. Ah, yes. Didn’t Max’s surname, Kolowrat, mean “wheel”? The same ancient term indicated the sun’s disc, the swastika, all that revolves around an immutable hub and creates or destroys as it goes.

  When he left the hotel, there wasn’t an iota of all that he had done and experienced during the past week that he did not recall.

  *

  Outside, an unmarked car waited for him. It was driven by an auxiliary, whose orders must have been to reply in monosyllables.

  In the back seat, Bora found his P38 and the extra magazine, the only sure sign that he would not be executed this time around. The day was beginning; enemy pilots were revving their engines for the next raid over Germany. Of all the times Bora had left a city without the certainty of seeing it again, this was the most melancholy. However things went, to this Berlin he would never come back. It wasn’t just written with a blunt pencil: it had been written in ink long before. There had been other leave-takings like this one in his career: without advance notice, crude extractions from the mandible of Time. Paris, Moscow, Rome … little more than names now in his inner geography.

  The auxiliary did not look into the rear-view mirror; between the shoulders squared by the uniform, her neck was delicate. A neck easy to break, and just as easy to pull back in a kiss. Bora thought of Emmy, who was travelling to her next assignment, if she hadn’t already arrived there. Bora looked at the girl’s shiny hair, gathered under her army cap; not because he was interested in her, but to keep from looking outside. He did not want to memorize the quarters effaced by war, risking a comparison with what they had been, and what they would become.

  How long can we last, whether or not this plot succeeds? Nine, ten months at most. Then the Russians will come. Uncle Reinhardt-Thoma, forced to do away with himself, escaped before the catastrophe. But my parents, like the rest of Germany, will be spared nothing.

  The solution was to pull away from people and things. Colleagues, brother officers who had meant so much to him, receded not from his care – he would die for them – but from his attachment. As for material objects, he owned few that were exclusively his own, aside from books and what boyish belongings remained in the family rooms he’d inhabited as a boy in Leipzig, Borna and East Prussia. Did the awareness of this make him feel free? No. The first and last time he’d felt free had been in Spain.

  At Schönefeld, unexpectedly, an army surgeon awaited him with a first-aid kit. Bora saw what was coming, and immediately said, “I’d rather not. I don’t react well to painkillers.”

  “Frankly, Colonel, we don’t care.”

  A massive dose knocked him out for the duration of the flight. When he landed in Italy, a second shot woke him up quickly, after which he was functional again.

  Thursday, 20 July 1944. 5:30 a.m. Note: today, had the Weimar Prophet kept his word to Glantz, the Encyclopaedia of Myth was to be delivered for publication. God knows where the Glantzes (and Eppner, and his Russian Ostarbeiter) are today!

  I write for the first time since my return to Italy. The men were thrilled to see me back, especially Luebbe-Braun. He was relieved to hand me back the responsibility of command, which I had occasion to exercise at once.

  Hyperactive as the second shot made me, I immediately started visiting the outposts up and down the line; the situation is such that it will keep us busy day and night. The knee bothers me, but never mind. Here at least I can comfortably get around in army shorts, and when I mentioned a “minor car accident” in Berlin, nobody here asked for details.

  Speaking of minor accidents, a personal note: in Trakehnen, the same year Uncle Reinhardt-Thoma told me the facts of life, Peter and I had the great idea of accelerating the dismantling of an old barn. I suggested to my younger brother that we use fire, so, thanks to my (scant) understanding of chemistry, we combined petrol siphoned out of a tractor with phosphorus used as a fertilizer in the fields. All went inside a makeshift container, an empty vodka bottle left behind by the Polish seasonal workers. Once we’d stuffed its neck with sackcloth, drenched it with fuel and lit it, I threw it hard against the barn to see what would happen. The outcome surpassed all expectations, as the conflagration all but destroyed the rye field behind the building.

  I needn’t report the difficulty of explaining it to the General, whose comment to Nina on that occasion was that unless I joined the army, I’d turn out to be a perfect delinquent as an adult.

  Anyway, punishment aside, the idea seemed a good one. Nine years later in Morocco, I merely perfected it for my Foreign Legion comrades bound for Spain.

  What other use to the common cause could an arch-Catholic German lad be, a greenhorn Abwehr volunteer fresh out of military school? In Aragon, holed up as we were between a farmers’ cooperative and a depot of broken-down trucks, we mixed white phosphorus and fuel inside bottles of Afri-Cola and corked them up with rags. They provided our chief ammunition for nearly a week, allowing us to halt the advance of the enemy and temporarily borrow from him the saying “No pasaran”. I’m actually not proud of the invention, because it’s a desperate weapon and a cruel one, especially for those caught in burning vehicles. But that’s the way it went.

  Yes, contrary to later claims by others – the Finns, the Soviets – it was we, Francisco Franco’s legionaries, who first used the so-called Molotov cocktail against Russian T-26 tanks in Spain. The nickname signified our intent to counteract the communist coalition supported by Stalin’s foreign minister, the wily Vyacheslav Molotov. In Stalingrad, towards the end, as long as we had fuel to spare, my men and I again resorted to it. Four nights ago, it came in very handy in Dahlem.

  It’s because of such dubious exploits, and because I have the reputation of being a lucky commander, that my men are irrationally optimistic. But I – I simply wait. I wait as if I am lying in the dark and a noise from somewhere in the house has alerted me: who is it, what will he do, and when? I see myself all too clearly as a soldier in our New Germany: restless but loyal, ruthless but upright, involved in that which suffices to make me guilty but not to damn my soul. Saving my soul is all I can do, until the vice tightens once more. All I can do is hold my breath.

  “Holding his breath” wasn’t easy. Doing so without showing it tasked him. An hour after putting away his diary, Bora blessed a fierce enemy attack on his position, because it took his mind off his expectant worrying, off the conspiracy.

  It was only late that night, through army radio and official
communiqués, that he learned of the failed attempt on Hitler’s life, and of the first executions. Stauffenberg (and surely Haeften) had been the first to die. In the weeks and months to come they would be followed by thousands more, including Heldorff, Olbertz, Dr Bonhoeffer’s son – pastor of St Matthew’s – the two Schulenburgs. Arthur Nebe, too, and even the old and ailing General Beck, whose chauffeur had shadowed Bora through Berlin streets.

  The day had been bloodily won in his sector, so much so that congratulations from divisional headquarters came down the wire. Before sharing those, Bora had to read a pre-written note condemning the conspiracy, first to his dumbfounded officers and then to his soldiers, who after hours of fierce fighting seemed less concerned with the Führer’s life than their own. He ignored as unreadable the discretionary addendum that had been wired in, verses by a Leipzig-area poet:

  The People and its Leader are linked as one,

  Firm as a rock stands the Third Reich,

  Closely knit, tow’ring in the rays of morn,

  Glimmering like the costliest Holy of Holies,

  My Führer, lit up by your God-sent smile!

  *

  Around two in the morning, Bora sat outside his tent, inactive for the first time in twenty hours. Of all the members of his regiment, he was the least surprised by what had happened, yet his grief for the way things had gone had power enough to stun him. At the foot of the cliff below him, a deep hollow swarmed with a sparse luminosity resembling fireflies, although it was too late in the season for fireflies. Whatever it was, it gathered in clusters like will-o’-the-wisp, or ignis fatuus, such as floats over bogs and shallow graves. There was no still water on the thirsty mountainside; but both armies hastily dug graves every day. Bora looked into the hollow in order not to raise his eyes to the sky, an unusual reluctance on his part. He knew which constellations spotted the night above him. It was the crumbling arc of meteors, the ineludible destiny of shooting stars he’d rather not see. Shooting stars are short-lived. But at least they move, while the firmament lets you believe that nothing will ever change.

  He felt sick at heart, lonely and loveless and for once completely adrift. Four days later – though he didn’t know it yet – the Hitler salute would become mandatory in the armed forces, an unprecedented humiliation. Hundreds – thousands – would die in Hitler’s purge. The war would go on. The Russians were days away from East Prussia. Six months at most, and, casting an ever-wider net, the SS would get at him, too. Bora was grateful for this scrap of Italy he was still defending; if he could, he’d kiss every rock and ravine and high-perching trail of it.

  In his tent, at the bottom of his army trunk, where he replaced it whenever he stopped reading it, Bora kept Niemeyer’s first autobiography, written as Sami Mandelbaum (and salvaged from the material returned to Nebe). He’d for some reason memorized the opening sentence: “Ever since I was a child, I knew I was different from everyone else. My gift was such that I tried to smother it, so that I would not see, would not perceive what the future had in store for me. My dear late father’s name was Isaac; my esteemed mother’s name, Perl —”

  We destroyed that world, he thought tonight, which Niemeyer falsely claimed for himself as long as it suited him; now we are destroying our own world. Thanks to men like Nebe, whatever his late repentance, we have brought devastation everywhere. What can we expect in return? My stepfather told me once that mine is a generation of vipers. If so, who laid the eggs from which we were hatched? Only from vipers is a viper made. Sergeant Major Nagel, hard as steel, whom I have known these four years, including in Stalingrad, was the only one who had nothing to say after the news of the failed attempt. I supposed that it was because of the magnitude of the event (Hitler is a father figure for many of us). Instead, a while ago he took me aside and whispered, “I’m so glad you came back, Colonel.” My God, he’d feared for me, as if in his loyalty to me he understood everything! At that moment, his words meant more to me than anything else in the world.

  When, out of the dark, the same Sergeant Major Nagel noiselessly approached bringing a canteen half-filled with coffee, Bora thanked him, and took a sip. Tilting up his face to swallow the lukewarm drink, he closed his eyes, as if in so doing he could shut out and cancel the star-ridden night.

  §

  Arthur Nebe, with his good friend, co-conspirator and biographer Hans Bernd Gisevius, managed to escape the first wave of arrests. However, while Gisevius was eventually able to emigrate to neutral Switzerland, thanks to American support, Nebe remained in hiding in Germany. At first, thanks to his skills as a policeman, he succeeded in staging his own death. The Gestapo, however, caught up with him and executed him at Plötzensee Prison for his role in the 20 July plot, the same prison where he’d jailed so many through the years. He died by hanging on 21 March 1945, eight weeks before the end of the war.

  §

  Nina Sickingen decided to remain at her husband’s side in Leipzig until the end of the war, when the city fell to the Americans after a fierce battle, immortalized in Robert Capa’s action photographs. It was in their house that he shot the famous set of pictures of the American G.I. felled by a Nazi sniper. Before Saxony was handed over to the advancing Red Army by the western Allies, Nina and the surviving members of her family moved west to Bavaria, as her eldest son had advised her to do. Following the General’s death in 1951, she accepted Max Kolowrat’s marriage proposal and eventually made her home with him in Munich.

  §

  As for Max Kolowrat, following the promise he’d made to Martin Bora, he stayed in the German capital during the torturous last weeks of the conflict. He was among the city dwellers who bravely, even if to no avail, tried to protect their quarters from the Soviet onslaught. During the post-war occupation of Berlin, his facility with foreign languages and writing talent earned him the position of interpreter in the British Sector. In due course, even before marrying Nina Sickingen, he reverted to his role as a successful journalist and travel writer.

  §

  Emmy Pletsch met and married a young army surgeon in September 1944. He went missing in action on the doomed Italian front a month later. Although she suffered from loneliness and privation living in the vicinity of her native town, her advanced pregnancy saved her from being raped during the battle for Germany in the spring of 1945. Shortly thereafter, she gave birth to a son in a Soviet-run army hospital. After reuniting with her husband in 1946, she shared the experience of all Germans living behind the newly erected Iron Curtain. Incidentally, of the two children born to her in the early 1950s, she named the younger boy Martin.

  §

  Roland Glantz was still awaiting trial when the war ended. He was liberated and miraculously reunited with his wife. In the following years, fate partly compensated the publisher for his losses. The boxes of esoteric writings by Walter Niemeyer still in his possession provided him with enough material to create a successful series of journals on astronomy and predictions, eventually resulting in considerable pecuniary success.

  §

  Ida Rüdiger really did have friends in high places. She escaped from Berlin just days before the Red Army reached the city limits, and reached Patton’s forces on the border with Czechoslovakia. The widespread presence of female personnel among the western Allies allowed her to quickly reinvent herself as a make-up artist. She eventually created her own line of cosmetics, christened “Ostara” in memory of her old lover Walter Niemeyer.

  §

  Gerd Eppner was not so fortunate. A few days after Germany’s unconditional surrender, having survived arrest, internment and liberation, a stray soldier attracted by the precious watches he carried robbed and murdered him. What made it worse for the once proud second lieutenant in the Foot Guards was that his killer was not a drunken Russian but a German straggler on his way home.

  §

  Lieutenant Colonel Namura returned to Japan before the fall of Berlin. In the terrible days after the nuclear bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
ill-advisedly but knowing exactly what he was doing, he joined the conspiracy of army officers who opposed the unconditional surrender of Japan. During the night of 14 August 1945, the rebels unsuccessfully tried to storm the Imperial Palace and secure Hirohito’s recorded message of surrender. Dictated as it was by an exasperated patriotism, the revolt failed, and the leaders of the conspiracy committed suicide. The German-Japanese copy of Chushingura, the legend of the Forty-Seven Ronin, was found in Namura’s pocket.

  §

  Dr Wirth and his wife perished in the last, devastating air raids on Berlin. The same fate met Willy Osterloh in his native Hamburg, to which he had decided to return. One survivor was Peter’s wife, Margaretha, who naturally got her way and all that she wished for – a husband, a house and five children. In time she grew bored with it all, but that’s another story.

  As for Paulina Andreyevna Issakova, she vanished at the end of the war. In this, she shared the fate of countless labourers from the territories of the USSR under German occupation. Her name does not appear on any document, either in Germany or in the Russian Federation.

  §

  On the night following Stauffenberg’s unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life, Martin Bora added an entry to his diary which revealed his feelings, and reflected on what would befall him in the months to come:

  There is that saddest hour before dawn, which resembles evening gloom. We sense no intimation that the day is at hand. A good number of us, I believe, have lived in this dusk for years. We do not take a look around, for fear we might discover that there is no sign of light in the east, and that, conversely, a dark night is coming on.

  All true, save perhaps the excessive pessimism of the last few words.