The Pigeon Tunnel

by John le Carré

  What Johannes now did with the Russians at his door is today the stuff of legend. Wrapping the Imperial Archive in swathes of oilcloth, he loaded it on to a handcart and, disregarding a torrent of small-arms fire, mortar bombs and grenades, trundled it to a patch of soft ground, buried it and returned to his post in time to be taken prisoner.

  The case against him was, by the standards of Soviet military justice, irrefutable. As a keeper of Nazi files, he was by definition an agent of fascist aggression. Of his subsequent ten years in Siberian jails, he served six in solitary and the rest in a communal cell for criminal lunatics, whose mannerisms he learned to mimic in order to survive.

  In 1955, he was released under a prisoner-repatriation deal. His first act on arriving in Berlin was to lead a search party to the spot where he had buried the archive and supervise its exhumation. After which, he withdrew to recuperate.

  Now back to Globke’s New Law.

  What entitlements were not due to this loyal civil servant from the Nazi era, this victim of Bolshevik brutality? Never mind his three-times refusal to join the Party. Never mind that his detestation of all things Nazi had driven him ever deeper into Prussia’s imperial past. Rather ask yourself to what heights a young archivist with glowing academic credentials might not have ascended, had the Third Reich prevailed.

  Johannes Ullrich, who for ten years had seen nothing of the world beyond the walls of a Siberian cell, was deemed to have spent the entire period of his incarceration as an aspirational diplomat. He was therefore entitled to the pay rises commensurate with the promotion he would have enjoyed, including back-pay, allowances, pension rights and – surely in any civil service that most desirable of perks – office space of a size appropriate to his status. Oh, and a year’s paid leave, at least.

  Recuperating, Johannes reads deeply in Prussian history. He rediscovers his love of red burgundy and marries a delightfully humorous Belgian interpreter who worships him. Finally the day comes when he can no longer resist the call of duty that is such an integral part of his Prussian soul. He puts on his new suit, his wife helps him tie his tie and drives him to the Foreign Office that is no longer in Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse, but in Bonn. A janitor escorts him to his room. Not room, he protests, but a state apartment, with a 3-acre desk that he swears was designed by Albert Speer. Herr Dr Johannes Ullrich, whether he likes it or not, is henceforth a senior representative of the West German Foreign Service.

  To see Johannes in full flood, which was my good fortune on several occasions, you must picture a hunched, vigorous man in his fifties, so restlessly on the move that you could imagine him still pacing out his Siberian cell. Now he darts a quizzical glance at you over his shoulder in case he is being too much. Now he rolls his troubled eyes in horror at his own behaviour, lets out a hoot of laughter and takes another spin around the room, arms waving. But he isn’t mad, like the poor prisoners he was chained up with in Siberia. He is brilliantly, unbearably sane, and once more the madness isn’t in him, but around him.

  First, every detail of his state apartment must be minutely described for the benefit of the spellbound dinner guests gathered at my diplomatic hiring in Königswinter beside the Rhine: the imaginary Bundesadler, the black eagle with its turned head and red claws scowling down on him from the wall – he mimes for us its disdainful sneer over its right shoulder – the ambassadorial cutlery set with its silver inkwell and penholder.

  Then, pulling open an imaginary drawer of the Albert Speer 3-acre desk, he extracts for us the West German Foreign Office’s own confidential internal telephone directory, bound, he tells us, in finest calf. He is holding it out to us in his empty hands, head devoutly bowed over it as he scents the leather, rolls his eyes at its quality.

  Now he opens it. Very slowly. Each re-enacting is an exorcism for him, a choreographed purging of whatever came into his head the first time he saw the list of names staring at him. They are the same aristocratic names and the same owners who earned their diplomatic spurs under the ludicrous Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, who from his death cell in Nuremberg continued to proclaim his love of Adolf Hitler.

  They may be better diplomats now, these noble names. They may be reformed champions of the democratic way. They may, like Globke, have struck their deals with some anti-Nazi group against the day when Hitler fell. But Johannes is not of a mood to see his colleagues in this kindly light. Still watched by our small audience, he slumps into an armchair and takes a pull of the good red burgundy I have bought in his honour from the Economat where we diplomats do our privileged shopping. He is showing us that this is what he did that morning in his state apartment after he had taken a first look at the calf-bound, confidential West German Foreign Office internal telephone directory: how he flopped into a deep leather armchair with the directory open in his hands, silently reading one grand name after another, left to right in slow motion, every von and zu. We watch his eyes widen and his lips move. He stares at my wall. This is how I stared at the wall in my state apartment, he is telling us. This is how I stared at the wall of my Siberian prison.

  He bounces out of my chair, or better the chair in his state apartment. He is back at Albert Speer’s 3-acre desk, even if it’s only a rickety mahogany sideboard next to the glass door leading to my garden. He flattens the directory on the desk with his palms. There is no telephone on my rickety sideboard but he has picked up an imaginary receiver and with the help of the forefinger of his other hand he is reading off the first extension number in the directory. We hear the zup-zup of an internal phone ringing out. This is Johannes, zup-zupping through his nose. We see his broad back arch and stiffen and hear his heels snap together in approved Prussian style. We hear the military bark, loud enough to wake my sleeping children upstairs:

  ‘Heil Hitler, Herr Baron! Hier Ullrich! Ich möchte mich zurückmelden!’ – Heil Hitler! This is Ullrich! I wish to report myself back for duty!

  I wouldn’t want to give the idea that I spent my three years as a diplomat in Germany fulminating about old Nazis in high places at a time when my Service’s energies were devoted to promoting British trade and fighting communism. If I did fulminate about old Nazis – who weren’t actually that old, given that in 1960 we were only half a generation away from Hitler – then I did so because I identified with the Germans my age who, in order to get on in their chosen walks of life, had to make nice to people who had participated in the ruin of their country.

  What must it be like, I used to ask myself, for an aspiring young politician to know that the upper ranks of his party were adorned by such luminaries as Ernst Achenbach, who, as a senior German Embassy official in Paris during the Occupation, had personally supervised the mass deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz? Both the French and the Americans tried to put him on trial, but Achenbach was a lawyer by trade, and had secured some kind of mysterious dispensation for himself. So instead of being hauled before the courts in Nuremberg, he set up his own lucrative law firm, defending people accused of crimes identical to those he had committed. How did my aspiring young German politician respond to having an Achenbach watch over his career? I wondered. Did he just swallow and smile?

  Amid all the other preoccupations of my time in Bonn and later Hamburg, Germany’s unconquered past refused to let me go. Inwardly, I never succumbed to the political correctness of the day, even if outwardly I conformed. In that sense, I suppose I behaved as many Germans must have done during the 1939–45 war.

  But after I had left Germany, the subject refused to let me go. With The Spy Who Came in from the Cold long behind me, I went back to Hamburg and sought out a German paediatrician accused of taking part in a Nazi euthanasia programme to rid the Aryan nation of useless mouths. It turned out that the case against him had been cooked up by a jealous academic rival and was baseless. I was duly chastened. In the same year, 1964, I visited the town of Ludwigsburg to talk to Erwin Schüle, Director of Baden-Württemberg’s
Centre for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. I was looking for the kind of story that later became A Small Town in Germany, but I hadn’t yet got round to using the British Embassy in Bonn as its background. I was still too close to the experience.

  Erwin Schüle turned out to be exactly as billed: decent, frank, committed to his work. And his staff of half-a-dozen or so pale young lawyers, no less. Each to his separate cubbyhole, they spent long days poring over horrific evidence gleaned from Nazi files and the skimpy testimony of witnesses. Their aim was to award atrocities to individuals who could be brought to trial, rather than military units that could not. Kneeling before children’s sandpits they set out toy figures, each marked with a number. In one row, toy soldiers in uniform with guns. In the other, toy men, women and children in daily clothes. And running between them in the sand, a small trench to indicate the mass grave waiting to be filled.

  Come evening, Schüle and his wife entertained me to dinner on the balcony of their house set on a forested hillside. Schüle spoke passionately of his work. It was a vocation, he said. It was an historical necessity. We agreed to meet again soon, but we didn’t. In February of the following year Schüle stepped off a plane in Warsaw. He had been invited to inspect some recently discovered Nazi files. Instead, he was greeted by an enlarged facsimile of his Nazi Party membership card. Simultaneously, the Soviet government launched its own string of charges against him, including an allegation that while serving as a soldier on the Russian front he had shot dead two Russian civilians with his pistol and raped a Russian woman. Once again the charges were found to be baseless.

  The lesson? The harder you looked for absolutes, the less likely you were to find them. I believe that Schüle, by the time I met him, was a decent man. But he had to live with his past and, whatever it amounted to, deal with it. How Germans of his generation did that has been one of my abiding interests. When the Baader–Meinhof era broke upon Germany, I for one was not surprised. For many young Germans, their parents’ past had been buried, or denied, or simply lied out of existence. One day something was sure to boil over, and something did. And it wasn’t just a few ‘rowdy elements’ who boiled over. It was a whole angry generation of frustrated middle-class sons and daughters who tiptoed into the fray and provided the front-line terrorists with logistical and moral support.

  Could such a thing ever happen in Britain? We have long ceased to compare ourselves with Germany. Perhaps we no longer dare. Modern Germany’s emergence as a self-confident, non-aggressive, democratic power – not to speak of the humanitarian example it has set – is a pill too bitter for many of us Brits to swallow. That is a sadness that I have regretted for far too long.

  3

  Official visit

  One of my more agreeable duties while serving at the British Embassy in Bonn in the early sixties was escorting, or ‘bear-leading’ as the Germans have it, delegations of promising young Germans to Britain to learn from our democratic ways and – such was our proud hope – emulate them. Most were first-time parliamentarians or rising political journalists, some very bright, and all, as I only now remember, male.

  The average tour lasted one week: depart Cologne airport on the Sunday evening BEA flight, receive welcoming address from British Council or Foreign Office representative, return on the following Saturday morning. Over five close-packed days, the guests would visit both Houses of Parliament; attend Question Time in the Commons; visit the High Courts of Justice and maybe the BBC; be received by government ministers and Opposition leaders of a rank determined in part by the standing of the delegates and in part by the whim of their hosts; and sample the rustic beauties of England (Windsor Castle, Runnymede for the Magna Carta, and the model English country town of Woodstock in Oxfordshire).

  And come evening, they had a choice of going to the theatre or pursuing their private interests, by which was intended – see your British Council information pack – that delegates of the Catholic or Lutheran persuasion would consort with their co-religionists, socialists with their Labour comrades-in-arms, and those with more specialized private interests, such as the emerging economies of the Third World, could sit down together with their British counterparts. For further information or requests, please don’t hesitate to consult your tour guide and interpreter, meaning me.

  And hesitate they didn’t. Which was how it came about that at eleven o’clock of a balmy summer’s Sunday evening in a West End hotel, I was standing at the concierge’s desk with a ten-pound note in my hand and half-a-dozen well-refreshed young German parliamentarians leaning over my shoulder demanding female company. They had been in England for four hours, most for the first time. All they knew about London in the sixties was that it was swinging, and they were determined to swing with it. Thus far, a Scotland Yard sergeant I happened to know had recommended a nightclub in Bond Street, where ‘the girls played fair and didn’t diddle you’. Two black cabs had rushed us to its doors. But the doors were barred and padlocked and no lights burned. The sergeant had forgotten that in those long-gone days we had Sunday closing laws. Now, with my guests’ hopes dashed, I was appealing to the concierge as a last resort, and for ten pounds he did not disappoint:

  ‘Halfway up Curzon Street on your left-hand side, sir, and there’s a blue light in the window says “French Lessons Here”. If the light’s out, that means the girls are busy. If it’s not out, that means they’re open for business. But keep it on the quiet side.’

  To accompany my wards through thick and thin, or leave them to their pleasures? Their blood was up. They spoke little English, and their German was not always on the quiet side. The blue light was not out. It was of a peculiarly insinuating fluorescence, and seemed to be the only light in the street. A short garden path led to the front door. An illuminated bell button was marked ‘Press’. Ignoring the concierge’s advice, my delegates weren’t keeping it on the quiet side. I pressed the bell. The door was opened by a large, middle-aged lady in a white kaftan and bandana headscarf.

  ‘Yes?’ she demanded indignantly, as if we had roused her from her slumbers.

  I was on the point of apologizing for disturbing her, but the parliamentary member for a constituency west of Frankfurt was ahead of me.

  ‘We are German and we wish to learn French!’ he bellowed in his best English to roars of approval from his comrades.

  Our hostess was undaunted.

  ‘It’s five pounds each for a short moment, and one at a time,’ she said, with the severity of a prep-school matron.

  About to leave my delegates to their specialized interests, I spotted two uniformed constables, one old, one young, approaching us down the pavement. I was wearing a black jacket and striped trousers.

  ‘I’m from the Foreign Office. These gentlemen are my official guests.’

  ‘Less noise,’ said the older one, and they walked sedately on.

  4

  Fingers on the trigger

  The most impressive of the politicians that I escorted to Britain during my three years at the British Embassy in Bonn was Fritz Erler, in 1963 the German Social Democratic Party’s leading authority on defence and foreign policy, and widely tipped as a future chancellor of West Germany. He was also, as I knew from stints of sitting out Bundestag debates, a scathing and witty opponent of both Chancellor Adenauer and his Defence Minister, Franz Josef Strauss. And since privately I disliked the pair of them as much as Erler appeared to, I was doubly pleased to be given the job of accompanying him on a visit to London, where he would be holding talks with leading British parliamentarians of all persuasions, including the Labour leader Harold Wilson and the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan.

  The burning issue of the moment was Germany’s finger on the trigger: how much say should the Bonn government have in the decision to launch US missiles from West German bases in the event of nuclear war? It was this topic that Erler had recently discussed in Washington with President Ken
nedy and his Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara. My job, on assignment from the Embassy, was to accompany him throughout his stay in England and generally make myself useful as his private secretary, factotum and interpreter. Although Erler, no fool, spoke more English than he let on, he liked the extra thinking time granted him by the interpreting process, and was undeterred when he was told I was not a trained interpreter. The trip was to last ten days and the schedule was tight. The Foreign Office had booked him into a suite at the Savoy Hotel and provided me with a room a few doors down the same corridor.

  Each morning around five o’clock, I bought the day’s papers from a news vendor in the Strand and, with the Savoy’s vacuum cleaners whizzing round my ears, sat in the hotel lounge marking up any bits of news or comment that I thought Erler should know about ahead of the day’s meetings. I then dumped them on the floor outside his room, returned to mine and waited for the signal for our morning canter, which came sharp at 7.00.

  Loping along beside me in his black beret and raincoat, Erler cut an austere and seemingly humourless figure, but I knew he was neither of these things. We would walk in one direction for ten minutes, each morning a different route. He would then stop, turn on his heel and, head down, hands linked behind his back, eyes fixed on the pavement, reel off the names of shops and brass plates that we had passed, while I checked them for accuracy. It was an exercise in mental discipline, he explained after a couple of such excursions, that he had acquired in Dachau concentration camp. Shortly before the outbreak of war, he was sentenced to ten years’ incarceration for ‘planning high treason’ against the Nazi government. In 1945, while on a notorious death march of prisoners out of Dachau, he contrived to escape and lie low in Bavaria until the German surrender.