Magnus

by Sylvie Germain

  And he always watches out feverishly for an explosion of ardent red, acid yellow, garish orange.

  He ruminates on the world and more than ever on the accusations levelled against his father, as well as the circumstances of his death, which have remained obscure. But a mist always overlays his thinking, impedes his questioning, affection and abhorrence towards this man and now it is constantly warring inside him.

  He summons up all the memories of his father he has hoarded. And having trained his memory since recovering from his illness to register the smallest details and keep them fresh in his mind, he manages to visualize the departed’s figure, face, gait and gestures. This exercise in visualization demands a great deal of concentration and is carried out with his eyes shut. Behind the boy’s eyelids, his father appears the way he was before his downfall. Franz-Georg avoids calling to mind the hunted outcast he subsequently became. That memory, his son relegates to the shadows. It is too painful, it heralds too cruelly the process of decline from fugitive to phantom. Indeed, his father is no more than a wandering phantom across the ocean.

  He not only tries to resuscitate the deceased visually, he strives even harder to bring back to life his voice. That massive voice with the capacity to envelop him in a mantle of breeze-filled darkness more ample and more tender than the night. ‘Yours is a language of whispering breezes,/Your path interwoven shafts of light,/Whatever your mouth but quiets with a kiss/ Grows heavy-eyed and sinks into a slumber …’ How could that same voice be a voice of terror that shouted at hundreds and thousands of prisoners, that exterminated them?

  He decides to learn Spanish, the language of the country where his father spent his last days, and he studies the geography of Mexico. The name of Veracruz stands out like the mainmast of a sailing vessel shipwrecked on the horizon, against a pale sky. He weaves a shroud round his father’s lost body out of the words he gathers looking through books, consulting an atlas and a dictionary; out of a foreign vocabulary he constructs a tomb for that voice forever silenced.

  His mother’s voice sounds shrill and breathless. It no longer has the warm inflections of the past when she used to relate to him their family legend, nor those crystalline notes that once tinkled in her laughter. The legend is discarded and all happiness ended.

  Coming home from school one afternoon, he finds his mother sitting at the table opposite a visitor he has never seen before. Indeed, visits have become increasingly rare in recent months. Thea says, ‘This is Franz-Georg.’ Then pointing to the stranger, ‘And this is my brother Lothar.’ Lothar stands up but the boy remains motionless on the threshold. He is completely baffled. What brother? His mother has never mentioned him in the family epic. He has only ever heard – and heard plenty at that – of the two young soldiers whose first names form his own.

  The man is tall, fairly heavily built, dressed with sober elegance. Franz-Georg sees no resemblance in him to his mother, grown so slight and wilted. But when the man smiles at him, he detects a family likeness. In the days when his mother was cheerful and affectionate she had the same smile.

  ‘Lothar has come back from England, where he’s been living for twelve years, to meet you,’ says Thea. And she adds, ‘You’re going back with him to London. Your case is packed. It’s all arranged.’

  She makes this astonishing announcement in a detached tone of voice, her gaze fixed on the grey wall where a portrait of Clemens hangs.

  ‘What about you?’ asks Franz-Georg, emerging from his stupor.

  ‘Me? I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here. The journey would be too tiring for me. I’ll join you later, when I’m feeling better.’

  But the rasp of death already detectable in her weary voice betrays her pathetic lie. No one is fooled. Her brother and son watch in silence as she absents herself in contemplation of her husband’s photograph, or rather the greyness of the dirty wall, the emptiness of her life.

  At last she turns to her son and says with a forced smile, ‘That scruffy Magnus of yours will be going with you, I’ve even cleaned him up a bit for the occasion. He’s in your case.’

  Hearing this, the boy realizes without being able to explain it to himself that his mother had just said her goodbyes, and that any attempt to persuade her to go with them, or to delay or indeed cancel this sudden departure with an uncle who has turned up like some rabbit produced out of a magician’s hat, would be pointless. A final goodbye. Having brought him back into the world when he was little by the power of her story-telling, she is now driving him off with the harshness of a few words.

  Note

  The Schmalker family:

  Wilhelm Peter Schmalker, born 1877 in Berlin. Professor of medicine. In 1902 marries Friedericke Maria Hinkel, born 1884 in Zwinkau. Both died in 1945.

  Five children were born of this marriage:

  • Lothar Benedikt: born 3/5/1904. Pastor. In 1931 marries Hannelore Storm. In 1938 emigrates to England with his wife and their two daughters.

  • Paula Maria: 7/2/1905–11/2/1905.

  • Thea Paula: born 21/12/1905. In 1927 marries Clemens Dunkeltal (died in 1948 or 1949?). Died in September 1950.

  • Franz Johann and Georg Felix: born 18/8/1921. Members of Hitler Youth. Enlisted in the Waffen-SS, took part in several battles. Both died at Stalingrad, in November 1942, within three days of each other.

  Fragment 8

  Lothar explains to his nephew it would be better if he gave up the surname Dunkeltal that could be damaging to him. He suggests adopting the name of Schmalker, which would more firmly root him in his mother’s family with whom he has now been offered a home. And he also suggests choosing another first name, Felix, for instance, an attractive word combining the idea of fruitfulness with that of good fortune. He has had his share of tribulations. It is time for him to start a new life, with a new name meaning ‘happy’.

  But there is nothing new or cheerful about this name. It was given to Georg as a second name – the boy has a detailed biographical knowledge of his young uncles. It does not much matter that the name did not appear on any official documents and might perhaps never have been spoken, it has nevertheless already been given to a member of the Schmalker family and is therefore fraught with gloomy associations. Franz-Georg points out this detail to Lothar who seems unaware of it, unless he is only pretending. Lothar lets the remark pass, and leaves his nephew free in the end to choose whatever first name he likes. To Franz-Georg this second supplanting of his identity that is being urged on him feels like an assault, and he thinks of his father who juggled with various names and ended up dying as someone called Felipe Gomez Herrera. Grown-ups are truly incomprehensible, and sometimes terribly annoying. After long and glum reflection, he finally opts for a first name of universal currency – mankind’s first name, Adam. Lothar congratulated him on this choice.

  His aunt Hannelore shows no particular feeling towards this young intruder who has escaped the downfall of Nazi Germany where at last, thanks be to God, the Dunkeltal couple have come to grief. She observes this undesirable nephew with circumspect and keen attention, anxious to discern what he thinks of everything that has happened, to what extent he has been influenced by his parents. But she refrains from questioning him or even alluding to Clemens’ sorry end and Thea’s wretched demise, her death coming a few weeks after her son’s departure. Hannelore feels a mixture of pity and wariness towards this adolescent orphan who has lost both parents, his country and his name. She doubts it is enough to give a boy of nearly thirteen a new identity, and to drop him into an environment radically different from the one he has always known, in order to cleanse him of the horrors of History with which he has grown up and to console him in his twofold bereavement.

  But Adam, silently echoing Hannelore, lets nothing of his own feelings show and never refers to his recent past. The two of them remain on their guard, with questions and things unspoken lying heavy on their hearts.

  Yet as the days go by Adam discovers the dark side of the Schmalker family and
by extension the hidden face of the Reich that his mother celebrated and his father served with zealous self-abasement. It is Lothar who gradually informs him of the facts, amazed to observe to what extent the child has been kept in ignorance of almost everything, and also how complicit he has been in this false naivety, even if he can guess the reason for it. The time for children’s stories is over. Like it or not, Adam has grown up and cannot continue to take refuge in the childhood coziness of not knowing for fear of having to confront the truth.

  Reality then finally catches up with him, in a foreign city, in the midst of an emigrant family deeply afflicted by the insane cruelty that has raged in their country of origin and with which some of their own members have collaborated. And he learns the reasons that gradually led Lothar and Hannelore to flee Germany, taken hostage by Hitler.

  One and half years younger than Lothar, Thea had been very close to her older brother until she met Clemens Dunkeltal, a medical student at the university where their father was teaching. The romantic Thea had fallen hopelessly in love with this brilliant scholar who had had to decide between medicine and singing, for which he was clearly talented. As for Clemens, he was primarily flattered by the opportunity to become part of Professor Schmalker’s family. The year 1928 was a memorable one for him: he became the son-in-law of an eminent professor and acquired his membership card of the German Workers’ National-Socialist Party, led by his mentor Hitler. Thea’s parents, of old conservative middle-class stock, nostalgic for the days of Empire and hostile to the Weimar Republic, at first regarded their son-in-law’s nationalist fevour with indulgence, and even a touch of pride. Thea herself unreservedly approved of everything her husband said and did. As for the twins Franz and Georg, still little boys at that time, they soon looked up to this martial man with naive and enthusiastic admiration. That left Lothar, the eldest son, whose interest in theology and ethical questions was somewhat at odds with the barbarous political creed belched forth by the author of Mein Kampf, which Clemens had warmly recommended to him. His relations with his brother-in-law very rapidly deteriorated, any discussion between them degenerating into an argument, which upset his parents and infuriated Thea. Thus the closeness there had been between the two eldest children of the Schmalker family came to an end.

  The discord between them became even more acrimonious when Lothar brought home his fiancée of non-Aryan origin. Hannelore belonged to a Jewish family who came from Bohemia and converted to Protestantism when they moved to Berlin in 1898. Animosities intensified in 1933 when the Nazi regime tried to curb the country’s churches, both Catholic and Protestant, and forced the Lutheran churches to form a united ‘German Church’ from which all non-Aryans were excluded. A resistance movement immediately started to gather round several strong personalities, Pastors Martin Niemöller, Otto Dibelius and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, giving rise to the ‘Confessing Church’ and to the organization of clandestine seminaries. Lothar, who had met Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1925 while studying theology at Berlin university, joined the ranks of the opposition in January 1934. His becoming a member of the Confessing Church – the only authentic one because it preserved the freedom of the Church and respected the real values of Christian spirituality, flouted by the idolatrous and criminal German pseudo-Church that owed its allegiance to the regime – made definitive the rupture with his sister and brother-in-law. Lothar’s deliberate separation of himself from his family came as a relief to Clemens who was very much put out by this seditious relative, attached to his Bible like a donkey tethered to its post, and to cap it all married to a Jew.

  Each went their own way, Clemens and Thea out in the open to the resounding drum-rolls of the conquering Reich, Lothar and Hannelore aligning themselves with a clandestine resistance whose courage failed to make up for the lack of underground combatants. Intoxicated with promises of glory, or preferring to keep a low profile in the face of a brutal power, the population complied en masse with the prevailing pernicious ideology.

  In 1937 the Nazi repression hardened and led to a wave of arrests in dissident circles. Pastor Martin Niemöller, among many others, was imprisoned, summarily tried and finally interned at Sachsenhausen, and then Dachau, and all the parallel seminaries run by the Confessing Church were shut down. That same year the Catholic Church which, not appreciating the criminality of the Hitlerian enterprise, had signed the Concordat with the Nazi State four years earlier, published the encyclical ‘With Passionate Concern’. But the Führer cared nothing for these proclamations of virtuous indignation and just carried right on, crushing any obstacle that lay in his path as he marched towards the podium of savage gods.

  Endangered as a dissident, forbidden to engage in any pastoral or educational activity and, even more pressingly, worried for his wife and the future of their two daughters, aged five and three, Lothar decided to emigrate in the spring of 1938. But he was aware when he went that he was leaving a clear field for Clemens, who was a bad influence on Franz and Georg. Wilhelm and Friedericke Schmalker had long since come to their senses and apprehended with increasing dismay to what extent the regime whose rise to power they had greeted with a certain satisfaction was actually based on lies, madness and brutality, but try as they might to warn their two youngest sons the boys would not listen. The already aging parents had lost any degree of authority over their fanatical offspring for whom Hitler was a god, Clemens their role model, and war their vocation.

  War, or the delirium of crime raised to the level of a sacred mission. Franz and Georg had joined the Waffen-SS with the faith of young crusaders, and they had ruthlessly killed, burned, massacred in the name of this creed steeped in blood. Franz was killed in combat, in all the glory of his raging passion, but Georg had at that same fatal moment abruptly lost his faith. With his brother’s shattered face before him, he had suddenly seen the true countenance of their war god: a piece of torn and bleeding meat. Although this was something that he, death’s enthusiastic henchman, had often seen before, he had never attached any importance to it. For him, his victims, dead or alive, had no face. Even the sight of his comrades killed in battle had not affected him so deeply. He had only one twin brother, Franz, his double, his second self, his own heart’s echo. Franz alone could open his eyes by having his mask torn off, that of the supposedly new man, revealing the raw flesh of his poor mortal’s face. So this was war, nothing but this, insanely this.

  A radical reversal then occurred in Georg. His belief in the superman celebrated by his party all at once evaporated, stricken with inanity, giving way to a faith in man, ordinary man, just as he is in his imperfection and vulnerability. He threw down his arms and refused to take part in any more fighting. This refusal, in which he persisted, was seen as tantamount to desertion, for which he was tried and found guilty, and soldier Georg Felix Schmalker was stripped of his rank, condemned to death and summarily executed.

  Clemens, having learned of the affair, strove to hush up the scandal of this shameful end, as much to spare Thea (who with regard, to the twins to whom she bore a jealous love, had long since usurped Friedericke’s role of mother) as to avoid damage to his own career. But the family did finally get wind of this secret nevertheless. It gave the parent a little glimmer of consolation in their grief, but Thea denied what had happened and proclaimed her two brothers to be just as united in a heroic death as they had been throughout their lives.

  Lothar had vowed to return to Germany as soon as Nazism was defeated, to be at his parents’ side at last, and to take part in the rebuilding of his country and particularly of the Lutheran Church. But his parents were killed in the bombardments that brought victory and many of his friends had died, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who after two years in captivity had been hanged on 9 April 1945 at Flossenburg, the last camp to which he was transferred. Reduced to ashes, his incinerated body was scattered in the wind.

  But the wind over the Reich carried so many human ashes that it bore down with enormous weight on the country in ruins, a stinking wrap tha
t obscured the sky and suffocated the earth. In the sky of the collapsed Reich extended a vast cemetery, invisible but palpable, being extremely greasy. And in this cinerary sky drifted all the members of Hannelore Schmalker née Storm’s family. So for her, it was out of the question to return to that country she ceased to regard as hers. She did not want to live beneath a canopy of incinerated flesh and unconsoled tears – unconsoled, and incurably inconsolable.

  Sequence

  Only he who cries out in defence of the Jews and the communists has the right to sing Gregorian chant.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Death fugue

  Black milk of first light we drink it in the evening

  we drink it morning noon and at night we drink it

  we drink and drink

  we dig in the air a grave not cramped to lie in

  A man lives in the house he plays with snakes he writes

  to Germany when it darkens over he writes your golden hair Margarete

  he writes and steps out and the stars glitter he whistles up his hounds

  he whistles out his Jews to dig a grave in the earth

  he commands us strike up for the dance…