by Michael Dean
In addition to rote memory skills, another feature of autistic savant make-up is ritualistic behaviour reflecting a desire for order. Savant NS would often, as a child, ‘line up alphabet cards in the correct sequence on the floor, and if his parents moved any
of the cards he would become visibly upset.’
This reminded me of one of Henni Hoffmann von Schirach’s anecdotes about Hitler. Calling him ‘more Prussian than the Prussians’ she mocked his frequently expressed desire for ‘order’, which, with his soft Austrian accent, he pronounced Ortnung not, as in high German, Ordnung. On one particular occasion, von Schirach relates, Hitler was so incensed by the inaccurate placing of cutlery at table that he re-ordered everything until the glasses stood ‘like soldiers on parade’ and even the roses were all facing the same way.
‘Are you inspecting the desert spoons?’ von Schirach asked him.
‘Naturally,’ Hitler said. ‘Ortnung starts here.’ (von Schirach, Preis der Herrlichkeit, page 195, my translation.)
There is certainly no suggestion that other sufferers of Savant Syndrome are in any way like Hitler. Savant Syndrome, as the name suggests, is a syndrome, not an absolute condition – i.e. there are degrees of impairment and degrees of compensatory excellence. My postulate is that the impairment was not sufficient to stop Hitler functioning in society, although it was noticeable in his social behaviour. The degree of compensatory excellence was sufficient to be recognised, but insufficient to be seen as abnormal. The condition, it is worth repeating, is very rare. When the programme about Stephen Wiltshire went out, it was estimated that there were perhaps twenty-five people like him in the world.
So, if Hitler was an autistic artist-savant, what difference does it make? It would mean that a world war was unleashed by a man with narrowed affect, emotional flatness, impaired social skills and lack of empathy. What is certain is that for twelve years the world went to hell, and it might be worth having another look at Hitler’s drawings, to see if they can help us to understand why.
Author’s Note
Some chapters of this novel originally appeared in The Crooked Cross (Quaestor 2000), sometimes in a different form and in a different order.
Because this is a work of fiction, the demands of drama have sometimes taken precedence over the reflection of real events.
The following characters are fictional: Katya Bachuber, Anton Elsperger, Christa Forster, Erwin Forster, Helga Forster, Lotte Glaser, Kaspar Glaser, Magda Glaser, Old Frau Glaser, Cajetan von Hessert, Carola von Hessert, Ello von Hessert, Rüdiger von Hessert, Herr Klein, Sepp Kunde, August Kunde, Mrs Luckacsckova, Martina (typist), Emmi Raschke, Frau Sauer, Herr Vollmer, Ascher Weintraub, Magda Weisshaupt, Herr and Frau Weitig.
All other characters, and people named, have their origin in non-fiction sources, although in some cases everything about them, including their first names, has been invented. Among the main characters, this applies to Gerhard Glaser and Karl-Heinz Forster.
Thanks to Katherine Taylor, for research help in Munich. My wife accompanied me on research trips, where she noticed more than I did, and made several helpful suggestions. This book is dedicated to her, and so is the author.
Michael Dean, January 2012
Books read or consulted while the novel was being written
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The Enemy Within
Michael Dean
For Judith
1
It was a world, the market was - Waterloo Plein Market in Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter. A five-days-a-week, precarious, self-contained, noisy, laughing, stinky world of canvas-roofed stalls forming higgledy-piggledy thoroughfares.
There were stalls selling foodstuffs, flowers and trees, manufactured goods, garments, furniture, household articles, toys, iron, jewellery, tyres, tools, wood, tobacco, wirelesses, medicine, perfume, books, clocks, spectacles, musical instruments, bicycles, second-hand articles and bric-a-brac. Among other things.
Each stall was the lifeblood of its barking trader, standing outside it as crowds milled and jostled by. Every now and again, a face in the crowd peeled off to buy, to trade. It was trade that made the market a world, thought Hirschfeld, and made the world a market. Trade, the forger of contact, the enemy of war.
Trade implied a code of morality, which its prophet, Adam Smith, had set out in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Hirschfeld had read it for the first time when he was seventeen, at Rotterdam Trade Academy. It had been a revelation to him. It had set him on the path to where he was now – Secretary General for Trade and Industry.
Hirschfeld nodded to himself, as he stood on the edge of the market, assailed by the smells of human-kind. The main one was rotting fruit. But you could always smell water in Amsterdam, borne on the breeze: the blue smell from the Amstel River, the brown smell from the canal – the Niewe Heerengracht. And the faintest odour of herring, wafting over the Oude Waal and Rapenburg from the IJ harbour, where the international ships came in.
Holland was a tiny dot on the map, but it was at the hub of trade, the centre of the trading world, at the mouth of the Maas and Rhine. It treated all countries the same - well, varying only with their ability to pay and with what they could supply.
Holland was neutral – a neutral country. That was fundamental, as much part of Dutch identity as the colour orange, as the blessed Queen, Wilhelmina …. Except that Wilhelmina was now in London, and the colour orange, while not yet banned, was strongly discouraged by the Occupying Authority.
Weaving a practised way through lines of bicycles, ridden at walking pace, Hirschfeld made his way into the market. A young Orpo, in the green uniform of the German police, brushed lightly against his arm as he passed. The Orpo stopped, apologising profusely in passable Dutch, his fresh face twisting in annoyance at himself for his unintentional rudeness. Hirschfeld blinked and smiled. In perfect, unaccented German, he told him everything was fine.
*
The Secretary General picked his way fastidiously over the carpet of squashed and rotting fruit, and walked down the middle lane of stalls. The crowds were so thick he eased his way through them sideways. To his right, a man was selling gramophone records from a broken hurdle converted to a stall, morosely growling out his wares in Jewish Dutch. He sported a thick, boot-length coat and flat cap, despite the sunshine pearling the high Dutch sky.
Of the 191 traders in the Waterloo Plein Market, Hirschfeld recalled, 181 were Jews. The statistic pleased him: like all statistics, it created shape and proportion; painted a picture, so to speak. Statistics gave structure and context to life.
The clock mounted on a lamp-post ahead of him showed ten o’clock. His meeting with Rost van Tonningen and Rauter was not until midday. The Secretary General had planned a detour first via Batavia Straat, to visit Tinie.
Tinie … Tinie’s sex … The smell … The smell, the sex, always took him back to Berlin. Eight years ago now, his first time back. He had been born in Germany. He had a German name – Hans-Max Hirschfeld. That’s why he was there, in Berlin, as the Netherlands’ chief
economic negotiator with Germany.
That fellow with the cough, Walther Schellenberg, was in charge of entertainment for the Dutch delegation. Hirschfeld could hardly wait. He had sat in the luxurious pagoda of the Adlon Hotel, half-an-hour early, nursing a throbbing erection. They went to a cat house on Giesebrecht Strasse; cleared of all other clients.
Lisette, her name was. She’d do anything, say anything, be anything. Hirschfeld found out what he wanted that night. He thought of Tinie again. He had stopped, lost in prurient dreams of her.
He was distracted by Old Mother Bril, appearing from a cross-lane between the stalls, pushing her vending cart through the crowd. It had, Hirschfeld estimated, around 30 apples in the pannier which held 240; plus plums, cherries and oranges. From the small range of produce left on the cart, the Secretary General deduced that she was on her way back to the produce market, at Marnix Straat, for her first refill of the day.
Old Mother Bril wore a knee length garment, which could have been anything, and stubs of gloves which left her fingers free. The old lady kept moving, inching her cart forward. The peddlers were forbidden to stop their carts to trade – that would have made them stall-holders. Police from the station on Jonas Daniel Meyer Plein moved them on, if they caught them stopping, then noted the transgression. After a few breaches of the rule – nobody knew exactly how many – they would be called to the magistrate and fined.
Old Mother Bril gave him a gap-toothed smile – yellow teeth appearing at the bottom of her leathery face. ‘Good morning, meneer Hirschfeld! Some fruit for you today?’
‘Good morning, Mother Bril.’ Hirschfeld doffed his hat.
The Secretary General did not particularly like fruit, but he bought an apple, paid with a stuiver, nodded to her to keep the change. He bit into the apple with evident enjoyment before she moved on, in her perpetual motion to stay legal. Slightly embarrassed at eating in public – and the apple was a juicy one, a credit to Mother Bril’s suppliers – Hirschfeld continued his way along the stalls. He pushed his thick horn-rimmed glasses up his nose; eating the apple had made them slide down.