And of course there were dozens of Richthofens present, from the very old on down to the very young. There was no "our family" and "their family", just "us". Cousin Wolfram fell into two categories, but other military members of their not all-that-military (until now) family would participate. Wolf Manfred had seniority and would be the ring-bearer for his uncle, but he would be escorted by two other Manfreds, his first cousins, Ilse's and his own eldest sons. Alas, Ilse's husband Major von Reibnitz had also passed away two years ago; with Mother, Ilse, and Doris all present there would be a tragic sub-theme, never mind himself . . .
All the same, with everyone's heart set on it, the wedding would be a joyous occasion indeed.
The procession stopped. There had been murmurs from the back of the church even as the radiant bride in all her white glory was led up the aisle. Now, after the simple service that joined them in the ties of matrimony, Bolko and Viktoria joyously marched back down the aisle, stepped out ahead of the family and friends, outside the church . . . and stopped dead.
The Oberburgermeister had promised and had delivered, the town was virtually shut down for the great Richthofen wedding. There was no ordinary traffic.
Of the great fliers of the war, one had not been invited, but he was there anyhow. Göring stood there, outside the church, in his comic-opera brown uniform, all his medals pinned on, his arm lifted in that salute. Long ranks of storm troopers in that uniform flanked him, their arms outstretched. "On this glorious day, we, the SA-Gruppe Silesia, extend the heartiest National Socialist greetings to the bride and groom!" Göring bellowed. "Heil Richthofen! Heil Hitler!"
"SIEG HEIL!" the storm troopers bellowed in response. "SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL!"
Manfred, still thinking that for once someone else was going to be the center of attention, had said and done nothing. Then Mother's sharp voice cut through the sudden leaden silence. "How dare you!" she cried. "How dare you!"
That cry broke his thralldom to politeness, and he scrambled down the steps. For the first time since the end of the War he found himself face-to-face with Göring. He had put on a lot of weight. Manfred had heard less than flattering rumors of his convalescence and some of the habits he had acquired during it.
"What is the meaning of this!" Manfred said, his suddenly-released anger bubbling out. "This is a private occasion! How dare you intrude!"
"Why shouldn't we do honor to an Aryan hero?" Göring said, almost lecherously.
Manfred held his tongue and looked up and down the line. It was quite a mixture; old Stosstruppen, never quite got over the War; broken-down old drunks, now with a safe home; a few young idealists who actually resembled the posters he saw now and again. All in that silly brown uniform, that sedulous aping of the military.
Göring thrust out his arm again, and the storm troopers followed suit. "Heil Hitler!" he cried again, and the men bellowed back "SIEG HEIL!!!" Then they turned right-face, Göring stomped to their lead, and they marched off, singing some horrid song about holding a red flag.
Manfred squared his shoulders and went to see the new bride. Her eyes brimmed with held-in tears at this violation. "I am sorry this happened," he said, his voice low and reassuring. "I had nothing to do with it. I am sorry your day has been ruined."
She took Bolko's arm and pulled herself to him, then turned and looked into her husband's eyes. "We are strong," she said. Bolko set his mouth grimly, humiliated.
Behind him he heard Udet grumble, "Damned liar."
He turned to look as the couple scrambled off to their carriage for the ride to the reception. Udet, his medals contrasting with his morning coat, started at the glare, then said, "Hermann. He was lying about his combats. Why do you think he wasn't at the last reunion?"
So that was a little bit of relief to snatch from the bitter taste Göring's little exhibition had left in his mouth. "You see what I meant," he said.
Manfred spent the evening in the study, the lights out. His evil mood was on him again. He had not felt that way since those days when he had concluded that the War was lost, that he would have to keep on fighting until it was over, one way or another. Over for him personally, or over for the country. Had the former happened . . . Now there was a new war to deal with, a war within his own country. He had held his hand once, at Darmstadt, though he was revulsed by the Bolsheviks.
These were Bolsheviks, in method if not in doctrine. But then, were the doctrines all that different? Some people called Noske a Bolshevik himself, yet the Bolsheviks roundly disagreed with that judgment. There was a difference. Even those within Noske's party who were more like the Bolsheviks at least admitted the validity of government; they wanted to make it work their way, not destroy it. His duty, as an officer and now as a citizen, was to defend his nation. Twelve years ago it had gone so far as to have Germans fighting one another. He had held his hand once. Could he do it again? Or would he have to fight his own people?
Bolko and Viktoria were off to Jamaica for their honeymoon. It might be a good idea to let things slide for a while himself.
Michael Pretorius checked into his suite in the Algonquin. After that movie with the two brothers, directed by that man out West, Howard whoever, Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen the Red Battle-Flyer, or Red Baron, figured that he might be harassed. Not by the movie producer, who had driven both Rickenbacker and Udet away with his constant nitpicking. But others would not be as considerate. Then too, from all reports Lindbergh had to hide himself, as with this new house he was building out in the country. It was interesting, when it was not somewhat upsetting, to see an altered image of his own life.
Nevertheless, the first afternoon, just as he was going out to enjoy the pleasures of streets without men in brown uniforms, the telephone rang. A high-pitched, fussy voice said, "Baron von Richthofen? Woollcott here."
It took him a moment to remember the owlish man who had dominated the lunch meeting so long ago. He evaded, "Excuse me, sir, I think --"
"You can't fool Aleck's spies! Ordinarily I wouldn't call a guest myself but I know you could shoot down any assistant of mine! Now will you come along buckety-buckety to my office for a little discussion?" He gave directions, and feeling somewhat doomed, Manfred accepted them.
There was a will of iron under that life preserver of fat, and Manfred soon found himself booked to appear on the Town Crier Show the following Tuesday. He did not take a cab back from the radio network offices, but decided to take that walk.
The peace worked both ways. There were no men in brown uniforms demanding donations or keeping certain shops unpatronized. Hardly anyone wanted to stop and beg for some trinket by which to remember the Hero of the War. Peace, isn't it wonderful.
An anonymous foreigner, one among the thousands who came to the great city, strolled down the street. On which there was a rather large establishment, of its sort, selling magazines. Manfred was free (until Tuesday, anyhow); he decided to review the literature.
"Literature" in the broadest sense. There were magazines about flying; ones that evaluated different sorts of aircraft, reported on new models, and advised their readership on what to buy. Or to wish they could buy. It was not surprising that the reports from the homeland said things like, "This February, the new transport plane from Junkers Flugzeugwerke was demonstrated at Tempelhof Airfield in Berlin by Germany's and the world's number one air ace, Manfred von Richthofen (see picture) . . ."
At least the factual magazines were only embarrassing. The fiction ones could get downright annoying. Particularly when the gallant hero was shot down, and as he crawled from the wreckage of his plane, bloody but unbowed, he would wave his fist at the red Dr. I doing a victory roll overhead and bellow, "Curse you, Red Baron!" It did not help that most of those stories were set in places he had never flown, at times when he had not been flying a Dr. I . . .
There weren't any more Air Wonder Stories. Publication, he understood, was a risky business. It wasn't much money for him to write articles, and it was a bother; he had to pay the st
enographer, spend hours thinking and dictating -- actually, if you added everything up, it was a financial loss, but it was a clear gain in image. But he still wrote for Hugo.
The man in the glass booth pointed at them as the second hand touched twelve on the clock. The announcer who was with them in the studio rang a handbell three times, and said, "Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! The Town Crier is now on the air!"
The owlish man sitting in front of the huge microphone said, "This is Woollcott speaking. My guest tonight is Germany's 'Red Baron', Manfred von Richthofen, who is here in the U.S. in the latest stage of his quest to dominate the civil use of aircraft as he did so well the military use. When I was a reporter for The Stars and Stripes during the War, I learned that the pilots of our Air Service respected him immensely, as a fighter pilot and as a man. Now that I have him here before me, I can tell you that they had every reason to think so, and I am coming to agree with them."
Manfred felt a bit embarrassed at having agreed to do this, but it had seemed like a good idea at the time. Woollcott went on, "I understand that you've been doing a lot for civil aviation since the war."
Manfred said, "Some, anyhow. It seemed such a waste to have all this machinery and organization in place during the War, geared up to produce airplanes, and not doing anything." And he explained about the companies in Germany and the civil transports they were making. (Naturally, the various hopes of military production had to be kept confidential.)
"Our Lufthansa airline offers services across the country and to neighboring countries. We are not so large as to be able to have several airlines, as you do here. My fellow aviators Rickenbacker and Lindbergh are working with some of your airlines, and I have done my part for popularizing air travel with Lufthansa.
"Air travel is becoming cheaper and more efficient. I can imagine a day when passenger trains and ocean liners are obsolete, and great air liners travel from Berlin to New York on a daily basis. The world will be opened up, and with it its people's minds; the remotest places will be as accessible as the corner store is today."
Woollcott said, "Thank you, and now we'll pause for a moment. Chrysler Jet-Flo makes for a smoother, quicker ride than any other automobile on the road. Thousands of drivers have discovered the ease and pleasure . . ."
After the commercial break, Woollcott turned to a different, darker aspect of humanity. "The news we hear from your country is not altogether good," he said. "These Nazis are threatening the public order, are they not?"
Manfred felt a thrill of disgust run through him at the thought of those people. Collecting his resources he spoke, "I would like to think that our new government is strong enough to survive them. The government survived the five years after the War, which were a horror.
"I am not sure people here understand how bad it was. Your Civil War left most of the country untouched. We had private armies, rebels, marching soldiers in every town, at every house it seemed like. My own father was threatened in Berlin by rebels; others terrorized my mother in Schweidnitz.
"Then there came the great inflation. I still have some of those Notgeld -- how would you say it, 'emergency currency'? -- notes that were issued during that time. Prices made no sense; one had to set out with a briefcase of money just to be able to make the day's purchases. The banknotes themselves were flimsy, printed quickly -- on one side, even! -- lest they lose more value before being sent out.
"The currency was debauched and with it the people were debauched. I saw decent girls from good families selling themselves on street corners and perhaps I had better not go into the ugly details. Decent bourgeois, who had lived decent lives and took thought to the future, were utterly ruined and turned into beggars, or drug addicts. Our entire society became focused on the moment, and all our traditional values, the ones that had built and sustained us for centuries and made us a better nation, were abandoned.
"All the same, we survived. Now we have a functioning society and government and economy, even if they are not as good as we would wish them to be. I am concerned, though -- every decent German in concerned -- about losing this, about the threat of foreign-inspired parties imposing their rule on Germany."
"Thank you, Baron von Richthofen. Doesn't it worry you that democracy is a -- recent transplant in Germany?" Woollcott said. How he managed to combine a foxy look with that large face and high voice was strange, but he did.
"Recent? Germany has had full manhood suffrage for over sixty years, even before, if you will excuse my candor, some of the American states."
Enough of the radio. He flew out of New York across the broad American plains to this resort he had been recommended, a place with the typical exuberant American name of "Moose Woods Lodge". American hunting trophies would make a nice addition to the collection downstairs. Upstairs had a few of those too, but he wasn't going to be hunting for any more of that sort.
Or so he hoped. Everything should be all right in Germany now. Those matters were the provenance of the Reichspräsident and his advisors. They could run the country, and he could look after his businesses, go hunting, and watch the children grow up. Nothing more, the trivia of a full and rich life.
BOOK TWO
A WORLD BETWEEN
CHAPTER 6
Reichspräsidentenpalais, Berlin, Brandenburg, Germany, Friday, January 27, 1933
While the Reichspräsident and his advisors debated serious issues Manfred tried to think about trivial things. Anything to take his mind off the peculiar and extraordinary situation into which he seemed to have been inserted. He sat in a chair in the waiting room, as if a very junior Leutnant being sent to meet the Oberst over some discrepancy in the mess bills. But he was not a junior Leutnant, but a hero and a tycoon. And with a life, a family, sons, his brother and mother and the rest of the family. He had other issues to deal with. Writing, for example.
That man Gernsback -- now why was he thinking of him? -- that clever Luxemburger Gernsback had tempted him into writing articles on the Wonder of Flight for his Air Wonder Stories, then when that came to an end, other magazines, his, and others. In return for his work, along with the small check he got free copies of the publication, which he skimmed. Usually. "If Lieutenant Allard had worn that ridiculous cloak in the cockpit, he would have found himself unexpectedly bailing out without a parachute," he had said in a letter. The magazine's shadowy hero had supposedly been a great pilot of the American Air Service, and that wild laugh would have been no more than an ordinary mark of battle fatigue. A lot of pilots had functioned with worse quirks. As for the other matter, well . . . Taking such things seriously was out of the question but as a respite from his problems, and the problems of the world, they were wonderfully well suited.
The boys, on the other hand, devoured them, wrote their own letters, and begged Daddy to get them even more magazines. Garish magazines with extravagant titles were shipped in packages from New York to Schweidnitz, for the Richthofens. Young Manfred had had to be taken firmly in hand and told to sign himself "Manfred Eduard, Freiherr von Richthofen", lest his words be taken for his father's. "You need your own life and image, son," he had said by way of amelioration.
Not to mention the time they had been in England and had had a few hours free, so he took them to see a movie he happened to know about. "Marx," young Lothar had said, reading the poster. "Is this a Communist movie, Father?"
"Na, na, you can trust these fellows, they are good Germans."
He had laughed himself sick at the comical American ball game and its absurd relationship to higher education. Arthur had mentioned the story of their new film in a letter and tried to explain the game. (Now that was the strangest thing about Arthur's letters: all the long, complex words were spelled correctly but the short words were those of an illiterate; so much for Woollcott's friends.) They were bringing out another movie this fall and he had hoped he would get to see it in America.
Bolko was thinking seriously about moving to America. "I understand that this town in Nevada is going to have some
big casino action," he had said. "It's inland, dry, Viktoria's health will be so much better."
The health that would be so much better was her mental health. She was as upset about the Nazis and Bolsheviks as the rest of them, and wanting to be a mother added that concern. At least they had their own house in Schweidnitz. In fact, there was a "Richthofen Block", where Bolko and Viktoria lived in one house, Doris and her children in another, and Ilse and her three children in yet another. The neighbors were family, they were safer.
That was one thing he had reminded the boys. "You have seen where Herr Lindbergh's child was kidnapped. You must learn to protect yourself; there are people out there who would hurt you to hurt me." Some of them not even for political reasons.
Young Manfred had brought down his first stag last fall, and for that he got to sit at the head of the table while everyone dined on his venison. In the War, his own hunting had been a necessity; now it was a pleasure. Teaching it, however, was a pleasure with a necessity attached. While the boys were learning to handle rifles, they also learned to handle pistols.
Perhaps Bolko had the right idea. There were Richthofens in America, though one heard things about them; surely the aviation industry would make him welcome, and those few people who went after Germans with sticks could be kept away. Only, Mother would say he ran away.
"Oh Manfred, if you had only been well, what you would have done about that Revolution," she had said. He was well now, and a Revolution loomed, a war between Red and Brown with everyone else told to choose sides. It didn't have to be . . .
The door opened. "Herr von Richthofen?" Papen said, stepping partway out. "The Herr Reichspräsident has one final offer."
A Man and a Plane: An Alternate Germany Page 10