The attic is the only place in the house where I can really feel at ease, just like Johannes. Now that the electricity is back on, I have carried several of the old radiators up there. They stand in line, smelling sourly of dust and red-hot metal bars. I also dragged Johannes’s portable Brennenstuhl lamp into the attic and hung the wound-up flex on a hook on the wall behind the sidecar, which I have emptied of old rubbish so that I can sit in it myself, reclining on the torn faux-leather seat. Lately, I have spent much of the day seriously examining Kaufmann’s own writings, not only the diaries but also the books from his library, which Sigrid Kaufmann after the war insisted that Johannes should come and collect from the farm. A series of faded red Baedeker guides interest me in particular; Johannes had put them on one of the shelves closest to the floor. One of these books is a guide to the German Baltic coast, another to Tirol, Vorarlberg, Westliches Salzburg und Hochkärnten, a third to Southern Bavaria and a fourth to the Black Forest. The fifth and last is simply called Baedekers Generalgouvernement. Glued to the inside of the cover, a map expands to show the occupied inner regions of Poland, with all the Polish towns and rivers named in German. Inside the book is a twice-folded receipt from Deutsche Buchhandlung Alfred Fritzsche, Adolf-Hitler-Platz 23, Krakau. The bill came to fourteen zlotys, and the sum is followed by the stamped word Bezahlt next to an unreadable signature. Kaufmann must have bought the book himself when visiting Krakow. And he has clearly read it attentively. In one chapter, entitled ‘Landschaft, Mensch und Wirtschaft’ (‘Landscape, People and Industries’) and written by a Dr Ernst R. Fugmann of the Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit (Institute for German Development in the East) in Krakow, there is a long account of the Polish agricultural and animal farming sector, in which certain passages have been marked in the margin with long, strong lines in pencil:
The Yield. Thus, it follows that it is impossible to overemphasise the erroneousness of assuming that Poland as a whole is a highly productive agricultural region […] Even though practically all of the land in the General Governorate, if cultivated in the proper manner, could produce greater yields corresponding to at least half as much again of today’s yields and with similar increases of animal, notably cattle farming, the age-old affliction has still deeper roots in so far as the current subdivision of the farm holdings and arable land, and the almost fatalistic state of mind of small-scale farmers steeped in docility, predispose improvements in land use to succeed only if established on a wider basis of dedicated and extensive education provided by the German Agricultural Authority, with its advice and schooling applied to every aspect of agricultural matters. Overpopulation, which in the region of the General Governorate has been estimated to be approximately 4.5 million = 47% of the rural population, and which consists of a massed labour force that is not only free and unrestricted but which might actually constitute an obstacle to increased farming yields, has in this context come to be of particular concern to the Reich.
The receipt is not dated but, if the book was published in 1943 as stated on the inside page, then Kaufmann’s field studies on the modernisation of Polish agriculture cannot have taken place any earlier than that. I turn to his diaries from 1943, and it is not long before I come across a note from Warschau 13 juni:
– arriving by train from Posen, lodge at Hotel Bristol –
He presumably stayed there because the Baedeker guide to Warsaw said the Bristol was one of the better hotels in the city and rated its restaurant as good for Germans. After the four-day stay in Warsaw, which goes without comment, the diary lists the names of hotels and dates he stayed there during his almost four-week-long travels through, to begin with, south-east Poland and then what is present-day Ukraine: to Radom, Częstochowa and Krakow, where Kaufmann is ‘detained’ for a day and a night because of ‘overload on the rail services’; finally, he goes to Lublin and Lemberg (Lviv), where the entry on 7 July states that his outward journey ends. During those weeks on the move, Kaufmann makes detours to villages and small towns, where he meets with people whom he describes in the diary as ‘functionaries’ and who are likely to have been senior party officials. Kaufmann seems to have examined everything along the way with the greatest interest. In his notebook, one page is devoted to a drawing of an old-fashioned harvester and another to a mill powered by water released from locks further upstream. In a hand-drawn column next to the drawing, the water volumes and pressures at each lock gate are exactly recorded. Where did he want his studies to take him? Johannes said that Kaufmann was often away from the island during the war years but, for some reason, I had come to believe it was due to his workload at the ministry. Johannes told us children of only one journey: that is, when Kaufmann went to Berlin in November 1942 in order to persuade Hitler to increase the total German export quota for crop seeds, a great diplomatic achievement and very significant in a country with shortages of almost everything. I do not have to look far to find the episode in a diary. The visit to Berlin takes up two separate, page-long sets of notes in Kaufmann’s characteristic hand with its tall, upright capitals:
22.11 We arrive in B in bad weather. Disturbances within atmospheric strata led to a rough plane journey, fog on arrival. Radio contact with B interrupted several times. 23.11 To see the trade secretary at the legation. We have a three-hour meeting at the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. During the meeting, a message from the Chancellery to say that I am expected there. Earlier message states that the Führer has informed himself of my report but that he was not present in Berlin at the time of our negotiations. The visit appears to have been arranged at very short notice. We are taken in a motorcade to Voßstraße, where I am escorted by a private secretary to an inner suite of chambers where the Führer is in conversation with three gentlemen. He comports himself in these situations with an unassuming ease that is remarkable, and moves with a light step that one might have thought was that of a considerably younger man. Also, how frank and modest he seems. Our talk lasts for almost twenty minutes. Now and then, he interjects a humorous comment or serves himself from the dish of cakes provided for us. Since I did not have time to prepare a more detailed exposition, I have to speak from memory, but H. allows himself to be distracted only on a few occasions, when one of the other gentlemen in the room addresses him in a whisper about some matter of state.
In his diary, Kaufmann’s tone as he narrates the story of the meeting is straightforward and unguarded. It sounds as if the possibility of a German defeat never occurred to him and as if he regards this ultimate victory as a historical necessity; meanwhile, all efforts in support of this end, including his own, are natural stages of preparing humanity for the better life that awaits after the end of the war. ‘Those who travel from the east into the Reich already have an impression of the General Governorate that is much determined by a sense of coming home, while for those who travel from the Reich east-wards, it is like a first greeting from the world to their east,’ so Governor General Hans Frank writes in his Preface to Baedekers Generalgouvernement. Kaufmann came from the west. What did he take note of when he arrived? Did he see in all the old family farms, with their overgrown forest clearings and undrainable meadows and fields, so many mirror images of the poverty on the islands of his youth? Or did he see possibilities, ideas for innovation? A world freed from the overpopulation that Dr Fugmann insisted was an obstacle to effective cultivation of the rich soil, with its potential to yield good harvests? In his meagre diary notes, there are no answers to questions about what Kaufmann actually thought about the population policies of the Nazi Party, about the extermination of Europe’s Jews (I assume this process is the cause of the recurring train delays he records) or the raids by German SS units in eastern Poland and Ukraine, which laid waste to whole villages and towns in exactly the areas he travelled through towards the end of his journey. Kaufmann seems to have kept his eyes open for practical details only; at least, that is the kind of thing he writes up in his diaries. However, it is also clear from the notes that, in parallel with hi
s extensive travelling, he was utterly absorbed by another idea, the project initiated in the first year of the war, which had become known on the islands (perhaps rather misleadingly) as the ‘second colony’. His plan was to offer children from crowded, dirty homes in the inner cities the opportunity to come and stay in the countryside, with access to milk and fruit and fresh vegetables. To that end, Kaufmann had already arranged to reopen the old West Island phalanstery, the communal lodgings shut down and locked in the early thirties. It was there and in the Sanatorium that he would welcome every summer hundreds of children, who would all have to show themselves as ‘deserving’ by working on his farms. What I wonder about is if there might not have been some kind of link between the travelling he undertook and his charitable project, which on the face of it seems quite unselfish; a link that is not at all obvious when all you go by is what enters into his diaries. Though one thing I do know: Kaufmann saw the need for reciprocity, as he puts it in his notes. At the end of August 1943, he arranged for a group of functionaries (that word again), whom he had met on his journey, to make an official visit to the Inner Islands. The programme included a tour of the children’s colony. I know from Johannes how the visit turned out in practice, because he was told to collect the guests from the mainland and take them to West Island, not an easy job since not all the visitors were steady enough on their feet for a trip on the wobbly cable ferry that, even in the 1940s, was the only connection to the outlying islands. Once arrived, refreshment would be laid on. Photographs would be taken. To round off the excursion, there would be a grand banquet at the Mains Farm. Rumour had it that Vidkun Quisling, the Minister President of the pro-Nazi government, and Jonas Lie, his Minister of Police, were among the guests, something Johannes persistently and vehemently denied. After all, the story was that Kaufmann never let a German across the bridge. Though that is nonsense. As everyone knows. Simonsen and Brekke have told of how a company of prisoners from Grini, all sentenced to hard labour, were drafted in to shore up the barracks on West Island and lay water and sewage pipes to the island. But perhaps it is more useful to get a grip on why Kaufmann should be so keen to prove his debt of gratitude to the German industrialists and party officials, rather than harp on the purity of his motives? Could it be that he saw in the colony his own version of the thousand-year Reich, where blond, bare-legged children and their rumbustious play took over in the old Sanatorium area? Or was it to distract attention from what must not be seen: the physically enfeebled, terminally ill daughter who lived upstairs? Asking Johannes about this kind of thing was pointless, and his jovial expression never changed. In front of us children, he preferred to return to his memories of that amazing day and evening. And it really was a magical evening to Minna and me, half asleep with our heads resting on the kitchen table. The Mains Farm Road was lit by real torches all the way from King’s Road up to the farm, Johannes told us. There was no wind that evening and the torches flared with tall, bright and smokeless flames. At the top of the slope, the entire farm was illuminated. Throughout the night until the morning, you could hear the foreign visitors call out and laugh in voices as clear as glass. It was almost as if you could pick up every word they said, Johannes would tell us, and every time I had a vision of the farm about to cast off from its moorings and move away into the night, like a gigantic steamship about to cross the Atlantic.
The Tempest Page 10