One day, returning from a walk to Funchal, Charles catches a chill. It seems nothing, at first. He is a young man, only thirty-four years old. But as the days go on, Charles finds he cannot shake off this particular cold. Eventually, a doctor is called up from town, and then another. Charles’s lungs are infected. Linseed and mustard plasters are ineffective. His mind wanders into delirium. Once, he imagines some Austrians have come to visit, and Zita pretends to busy herself with the imaginary guests. Another time, he states that he is King of Hungary. A Hungarian priest is there at the end.
The news breaks soon after. The front pages of the newspapers in Vienna are edged with black. The Neue Freie Presse declares that Charles’s passing represents the end of ‘a piece of history that was once life… a life we shared’.
Zita is alone now, the mother of seven children and her eighth on the way. It is a miracle her faith remains intact. Her husband is buried in the local church.
MUNICH: The question of another semi-stateless Austrian, only a year or so younger than Charles, is discussed at the highest political level in Bavaria: should the authorities let him stay in Germany, where he has become a nuisance to public order, or should they expel him to his homeland and let the Austrians figure out what to do with Adolf the troublemaker?
Deportation to Austria would surely make it impossible for him to continue leading the NSDAP. Worried that the Bavarian authorities might swoop in at any moment to deport him, Adolf avoids his apartment and takes up residence with the family of his bodyguard. At a meeting of the main Bavarian parties called to discuss Hitler’s case only the leader of the Social Democrats opposes his deportation. It would be undemocratic, he says.
MOSCOW: Mayakovsky’s latest contribution.
Every morning, at dawn, a man sees a stream of bureaucrats heading to their offices in the city, the forest of acronyms in which any normal person would get lost in an instant.
Some to Glav –
Some to Com –
Some to Polit –
You try and get a meeting with one of the bureaucrats–but, unfortunately, they are at another meeting already, and who knows how long it might last. A hundred more staircases to see a second bureaucrat and then the same response: ‘he’s at a meeting concerning the purchase of a bottle of ink by the District Co-Op.’ Come back in an hour. One hour later, neither the secretary nor the secretary’s secretary is anywhere to be found. So you head back to bureaucrat no. 1: ‘he’s at a meeting of the A-B-C-D Commissariat.’ In anger, you storm to the commissariat to find–not bureaucrats, but half-bureaucrats, their bodies sliced in two. The secretary explains: they were double-booked, so one half went to one meeting and one half to another. It’s all quite normal. You should not be surprised.
This is a poem that Lenin likes. ‘I am not an admirer of his poetical talent’, Vladimir admits of Mayakovsky at the end of a speech at a metalworkers’ congress he has decided to address (whatever the doctors might have to say about it), ‘but I have not for a long time read anything on politics and administration with so much pleasure as I read this.’ It hits a nerve. ‘We have huge quantities of material, bulky works, that would cause the heart of the most methodical German scientist to rejoice’, Lenin says. ‘We have mountains of paper, and it would take Istpart fifty times fifty years to go through it all’–but what we need is efficiency, executive control, ruthless administration.
Throughout the winter Vladimir’s notes and dictations are peppered with imprecations against the bureaucracy. Vladimir needs someone who can lean on others, club the bureaucrats into doing their jobs properly, keep the Politburo’s more theatrical and individualistic members under control. Someone who gets things done. He knows such a man.
SPRING
BERLIN: An Italian arrives in the German capital on a fact-finding trip. Or is it tourism? Benito Mussolini, now one of the most powerful men in Italy, is taken on a guided tour of the city, affirms its title as ‘the world capital of bad taste’ and writes up his observations in Il Popolo d’Italia.
He takes in a play at one of the city’s theatres and marvels at the Germans’ appetite in its restaurants. ‘It’s incredible how much these people eat!’ he writes, half-admiringly. He is impressed by Berlin’s underground railway, and by the apparent prosperity of the city (despite being accosted by a number of war-wounded beggars). He wonders at the Germans claiming that they cannot pay reparations when there are so many motor cars on the street.
Mussolini enjoys being an observer. He hangs around the Brandenburg Gate for half an hour to verify whether it is true, even now, that no one dares go through its central arch–a privilege reserved for the Kaiser–and delightedly concludes that it is. He is unconvinced by claims of republican stability. The current form of German government, he notes, seems to please neither the militarists who want a return to the old regime, nor the extreme left who would like to see the country ruled by workers’ Soviets. The majority accept the republic, maybe–but they certainly do not love it.
As part of his tour Benito visits the imperial palace–a huge, imposing but artistically ‘mediocre’ building, he tells his Italian readers. In one of the rooms hangs a portrait of a King, the canvas slashed with a knife. ‘Bolshevik vandalism’, his guide tells him. Looking at a portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm, with his moustache in its full, bristling, wartime glory, Mussolini asks the guide: ‘Do you believe that the Kaiser will come back to this castle?’ ‘Never’, the guide responds: ‘Men like me who spent five years fighting in the war don’t want that man back here.’
On his return to Italy, Benito prepares for the third anniversary of the foundation of the Fascist movement in Milan. There are rallies and marches, like those D’Annunzio used to hold in Fiume. But who cares about D’Annunzio now? Mussolini is the man to watch.
NEW YORK: Edward Bernays reports the latest sales figures of Freud’s lectures in America. Over seven thousand books have been sold.
KORZINKINO VILLAGE, NEAR MOSCOW: Two and a half million Russians are being fed by the American Relief Administration every day. Vladimir decides it is time to strike at another Russian institution.
Plans have been prepared for churches and monasteries to be raided and stripped of their icons, their gold, their crosses. The peasants will be too hungry to protest, Lenin reasons, and the gold and silver can be sold abroad and the money used for electrification and other things (certainly not to buy food, though that will be the excuse). The campaign begins. But there is resistance. Lenin insists it must continue. ‘It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh,’ Lenin writes, ‘that we can (and therefore should) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.’
Resistance will be crushed. The Patriarch will be spared for the moment, but the GPU keeps an eye on his friends and acquaintances. The more priests who are executed, the better, Lenin writes. ‘We must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not dare to even think of any resistance for several decades.’ The letter is to be kept secret, he instructs. No copies.
DOORN: The park around Huis Doorn is looking rather bare from the Kaiser’s tree-chopping exertions this spring. A visitor suggests he take a break. Wilhelm explodes in anger. How dare he! ‘It’s been like this my whole life!’ he shouts. ‘Whenever I’ve had a plan, someone else comes along who claims to know better and tells me to back off… Those times are over’.
When not outside chopping things with an axe, the Kaiser wields his pen instead, writing angry notes in the margins of the slew of war memoirs now being published in Germany. He is livid at how his actions are so misrepresented. Wilhelm’s own memoirs are published that year and slated as a transparent exercise in self-justification–though they sell rather well. His ego is massaged by a visit from his Finnish lady-friend from the previous year. ‘If German women were like Finnish women’, she coos, ‘they would have worked on their husbands to convince them to make sure of Your Majesty’s re
turn to the homeland’.
Surrounded by sycophants, unquestioning old retainers and those who share his conspiratorial world view, the Kaiser sinks deeper into the morass of his own prejudices. People are sensible chaps if they agree with him, and dunces if they do not. Exile strengthens his predispositions to believe what he wants to, and dismiss the rest. He imbibes the latest racist or anti-Semitic tracts from Germany or elsewhere–the works of Henry Ford in particular–with enthusiasm.
On the side, Wilhelm starts writing to a German Princess whose husband has recently died. This will be his secret, he determines. Neither his family nor his entourage are told of the burgeoning epistolary romance. They would probably tell him to stop it, if they knew.
WEXFORD, CO. WEXFORD, IRELAND: ‘Our country is now in a more lawless and chaotic state than it was during the Black and Tan regime’, Michael Collins admits in April. Wherever he goes, roads are blocked and railway lines torn up by those who hate the treaty he has signed. He is heckled when he speaks. The air is thick with recrimination. Would-be assassins weigh up their chances. Intimidation is rife.
In Dublin, a contingent of the anti-treaty IRA occupies the Four Courts, the heart of the Irish legal system, and fortifies it against recapture. ‘We are absolutely independent of Mr de Valera’s political organisation’, their leader claims. De Valera welcomes their defiance nonetheless. He needs their support, he needs their fury. ‘Yours is the faith that moves mountains’, he tells a meeting of his followers, ‘the faith that confounds cowardly reason and its thousand misgivings.’ He treads a delicate path: one moment seeming to support outright insurrection against Michael Collins’s provisional regime, the next proposing national unity–but on his terms. ‘Ireland is yours for the taking’, de Valera urges: ‘Take it.’ So the country slips and slides towards civil war–without quite slithering over into the abyss.
Any historic transition brings a certain amount of disorder, Collins tells an American journalist. ‘In Poland, Germany, Estonia, Finland and in practically all of the European countries that underwent change as the result of the European war,’ he notes, ‘there were many months of fierce civil war which was only put down after vigorous fighting and appalling loss of life.’ Nothing so bad has happened–or will happen–in Ireland: ‘Our methods may be different but the results will be equally satisfactory.’
Neither side wants to take the blame for the fatal, final step towards a civil war. Collins and de Valera meet to try and paper over their divisions and give unity a second chance (and take the fight to the British in the north). Collins is frustrated with his erstwhile friends. ‘We did nothing at the conference yesterday–except talk, talk, all the time’, he writes to Kitty. ‘And the country! But they never think of the country at all–they only think of finding favour for their own little theories, they only think of getting their own particular scheme accepted.’ Nonetheless, in May a deal is struck. An election will be held. Both pro- and anti-treaty sides will participate. An electoral pact between them should mean that the outcome will give both sides roughly the share of the seats in the Dáil that they have currently. A Sinn Féin stitch-up, it is true, but one which keeps the possibility of party unity alive a little longer. (Churchill gets wind of the idea and warns of the ‘worldwide ridicule and reprobation’ such a deal would bring–so far removed from the principles of a democratic, open vote.)
An agreement here, a pact there, a statement somewhere else: Michael Collins has made too many promises to too many different people to keep all of them at bay. His promises are like a house of cards, waiting for a gust of wind to make them collapse. In London, the British worry whether he will ever be strong enough to enforce the treaty terms he signed half a year ago–or whether he intends to dishonour that agreement now, by preparing an Irish constitution which tries to circumvent it. They plan for the worst.
MUNICH: On balance, Munich’s mainstream politicians conclude, it is better not to turn the scoundrel into anything more than he is. Hitler should not inadvertently be turned into a martyr by over-zealous suppression. It is better to ignore him. He is allowed to stay in Bavaria. But the political sages have not reckoned with Hitler’s own view of himself. His martyr complex is fully formed. In the run-up to his thirty-third birthday, it turns into something even grander.
After a few weeks’ absence, Hitler is back in public–giving speeches, choosing enemies, picking fights, slandering all and sundry. The audience in the Bürgerbräukeller laugh at the mention of Bavaria’s current premier, who declared in a recent parliamentary debate that, ‘as a human and as a Christian’, he could not be an anti-Semite. He has got it all wrong. Speaking for himself, Adolf explains that it is because he is a Christian that he must be an anti-Semite. ‘My Christian faith’, he announces gravely, ‘tells me that my master and saviour was a fighter.’
‘We have been called–no, decried–as rabble-rousers’, Hitler tells party members. But what about Jesus Christ? Did he not chase the moneylenders out of the temple? ‘Two thousand years on, I can see the true enormity of His struggle for this world, against Jewish poison,’ Adolf announces, ‘for which He had to bleed on the cross’. Just as Jewish leaders chose to denounce Christ two thousand years ago, Hitler shouts triumphantly, so they are denouncing anti-Semites today. Nothing has changed, the mangy field-runner cries: Jesus Christ was an anti-Semitic rabble-rouser who argued against the worship of money, and the Nazis are just the same.
On Adolf’s birthday, a week or so later, a little surprise party is organised. He is delighted to receive one particularly special present: a German Alsatian dog, a replacement for the little canine friend he lost during the war. The dog is named Wolf. Hitler’s bodyguard takes care of him for a while. There is not enough room for Adolf and his dog in the Führer’s one-bedroom apartment.
PARIS: As his train arrives from Belgium at the Gare du Nord, Albert Einstein is advised by a friendly French policeman that a crowd of journalists is waiting to ambush him. He escapes across the railway tracks and makes it to his hiding place–a fifth-floor flat on the Rue de Humboldt, near Montparnasse–without being intercepted. Albert has been entrapped by journalists too many times. A famous German scientist in Paris cannot be too careful. If his trip is to be a success, he must be disciplined.
As it turns out, Albert has a wonderful time in Paris. He lectures at the Collège de France–in French–to a carefully selected audience. The great Polish-French scientist Marie Curie is there, along with the cream of France’s scientific elite and a former French War Minister. (No Germans are invited.) When, as he puts it, he has trouble ‘extracting from his throat’ a particular French word, he is prompted or else replaces it with an English one. Such liberties are excused, for the French find him nonetheless a captivating speaker, with the far-off look of a mystic seer in his eyes, talking without notes, his voice low and vibrating with energy, his hands constantly moving as if drawing out the invisible thread of his argument. There is no shortage of French scientists who want to show him the town: on his last night in Paris Einstein stays out till two in the morning. He is taken to the theatre to see Molière’s The Miser and Marivaux’s A Game of Love and Chance (the racy Les Fauvettes is long forgotten now). A caricaturist trawling the cafés of the Left Bank for business produces a comic portrait of Albert for free. A pretty young Frenchwoman asks Einstein whether it is true what she has read in the papers–that he has the most powerful mind in all of human history. It seems genius is an aphrodisiac.
To his new French friends, Albert admits to having felt apprehensive about the trip. The new nationalist French government is determined to ensure Germany pays its financial dues in full, and has little sympathy with German requests for leniency. In Germany, Einstein has been accused of disloyalty for visiting the land of his country’s enemies. Albert takes the precaution of writing a letter to the German Academy of Sciences before he goes, emphasising that he has sought advice from Walther Rathenau himself. But by the end of his Parisian sojourn, he is sure
he made the right decision. The French he meets seem open-minded and friendly. (A debate with the philosopher Henri Bergson, who sees philosophy as having some say in the interpretation of phenomena such as time, is civilised: both sides feel they have made their point.) The old spirit of internationalism seems alive and well in Paris. If his visit can help improve political relations between France and Germany, so much the better. Albert obviously does not come across Léon Daudet, editor of Action française, de Gaulle’s paper, who writes a scathing series about the trip in which he refers to Einstein as ‘our inter-stellar visitor’ and ‘the Moses of Calculus’. Daudet asks how many bombed-out houses will be restored by Einstein’s visit: none. Anti-relativists exist in France, too.
But Daudet is too quick to judge. Before returning to Germany, Albert goes on a pilgrimage. Leaving Paris one morning at the crack of dawn, he is driven out to the region of Dormans. The scene is not quite the same as back in 1917, when Churchill drove up and down the front here, and saw nothing but a sea of ensanguined mud. Nor the summer of 1919, when Woodrow and Edith picnicked by the bleached skeleton of a war horse. Such remains have been cleared up by now, or nature has turned them to dust. In some places, the line of the trenches is only visible through the wheat as a continuous gentle dip in the landscape, as if tracing an ancient Roman road. It is the ruined buildings which are more shocking. And the sad trees, left bare by the lingering effects of poison gas. ‘German students–no, students from all over the world–should be taken here to see how ugly war is’, Einstein remarks to his French hosts. It is one thing to read about it, but you need to see it with your own eyes.
The cathedral at Reims is still missing its roof, blown off by German artillery in 1914. At lunch, Albert refuses wine. In the afternoon, travelling north across the landscape towards Saint-Quentin, where there are no trees at all any more, he is silent. That evening, Einstein is put on board a train to Cologne. ‘I will tell everyone there what I have seen here’, he shouts by way of a farewell as the train pulls out.
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