by Anna Funder
‘You must be Ruth,’ he said, blinking and extending his hand. ‘Hans has told me all about you.’ I held his small hand and nodded. I thought, for some reason, of a ferret.
And that, I suppose, was where the five of us became joined–a five-pointed constellation, held together by forces we could not see–Dora, Toller, Hans, Bertie and me.
‘Sit down, everybody,’ Dora said, brisk as usual. The personal matters, for her, could wait.
Perhaps it was because she was the most brilliant speaker in the party, or perhaps it was simply because we met in her room that Dora had assumed the leader’s role. I don’t think Hans wanted it for himself, but it didn’t sit too well with him either. He motioned Bertie to the armchair and pulled Dora’s desk chair to one side for himself. I was on the bed. Dora remained standing, her hands on the back of a bentwood chair, shifting her weight from hip to hip.
She began by listing the activities in our campaign to release Toller: letters, meetings, posters, speeches. Before she’d finished, Hans’s knee was jigging up and down, out of his control. Like many returned men, he had a need for action in his blood; if he sat still too long, things could come into his mind he did not want there. But that wasn’t it. I looked at him and I felt it too. In the same room as Bertie, our efforts seemed suddenly amateurish, undergraduate. By the time it was Hans’s turn to speak he’d subtly switched from being part of our campaign to being its critic. He complained about our nightly sorties gluing up leaflets, ‘only to make work for the police who rip them down’.
‘Any suggestions then, maestro?’ Dora asked, her voice cool. Suggestions, of course, should have come before we were in such illustrious company.
Hans leant his chair back on two legs against the wall, practising moving a pencil over his knuckles. He glanced at Bertie. ‘Why don’t we get Toller’s own views on his situation, and put them in the paper?’ he said. ‘Let the man speak for himself.’
Dora flicked her head sideways, a practical gesture to push back her hair that doubled as a sign of impatience. ‘I hardly think the prison authorities are about to let him campaign for his own release,’ she said.
‘He’s allowed visitors, isn’t he?’ In one swift movement Hans righted his chair and collected the pencil from the floor. ‘An interview might just do the trick.’
I looked from Hans to Dora and opened my hands, warding off dissention. ‘Perhaps Toller could write to the newspaper himself?’ I said.
Bertie cleared his throat. The bickering stopped. ‘I don’t think,’ he said slowly, ‘that would work.’ He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose with his forefinger. ‘The prison censors wouldn’t let him say anything important, and even if he did, the newspapers wouldn’t print it.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps Hans’s idea isn’t such a bad one.’
I don’t think there had ever been anything between Dora and Hans; I never asked. This was another kind of sparring. Dora suspected Hans of egotism, of putting himself at the centre of everything–starting with his war reporting. I argued with her that Hans had simply been using his own experiences to show the stupidity of battle and the honour of the men in the face of it. ‘Still,’ Dora had said, ‘if you look closely, Ruthie, it’s all about him.’ That, I suppose, was something I didn’t mind.
‘Why don’t I give it a shot?’ Hans continued in his unruffled way. ‘Can’t do any harm, can it?’
I looked at Bertie, who was silent, then back to Dora.
She put her cigarette down in the ashtray and turned away, picked up a stack of leaflets from her desk. ‘I suppose not,’ she said eventually. ‘We’ll save you a bucket and a pile of these–’ she swivelled sharply around, slapping the leaflets against her hand–‘for when you return.’
Hans never really returned, I would say now. Or not as part of our group. The next day he borrowed someone’s motorbike for the ride through the countryside to the prison where Toller was being held. He sweet-talked his way past the governor and, flanked by guards, walked through six sets of doors that were laboriously, idiotically unlocked before him and then relocked behind him, before he got to the famous prisoner. Toller was seated in a wicker chair under a horsehair blanket, his whitewashed cell lined with books. Swallows had built a nest between the bars of the high window. Our hero was still in his twenties but his hair was turning grey.
Back in his room Hans worked hard on his piece. He reported to the nation on its great hope, whose soul, he declared, ‘soars above captivity and loneliness’. Toller’s time in solitary confinement, he wrote, ‘has focused his poetry upon his only free companions, the swallows’. He ended: ‘I walked out of there a free man but the beating heart of Germany remains inside.’
The interview was a sensation. Under huge public pressure the authorities gave in and offered Toller early release. Hans’s star rose too: two major national newspapers wanted him to write for them.
But the victory was hollow. Toller refused his freedom. And he did so in a letter to the newspaper. ‘So long as my companions arrested with me are still in here,’ he wrote, ‘liberty has no meaning.’ Toller went so far as to dissociate himself from the campaign for his freedom, ‘if it is intended for me alone’.
The next time we met it was just the three of us; Bertie was on one of his fact-gathering trips. Dora could not bring herself to congratulate Hans.
‘Worked out well for you,’ she muttered.
‘That’s unfair, Dee.’ She ignored me.
‘How could I know he’d be offered release?’ Hans shifted his shoulders.
‘That was the aim, wasn’t it?’ We looked at her, shocked by the bitterness in her voice.
‘Well…’ Hans opened up his hands. ‘I–we didn’t know he’d refuse it.’
None of us had foreseen Toller’s solidarity with the other prisoners. Dora’s eyes moved involuntarily to the WANTED poster then blinked quickly away. Her voice was small. ‘Back to work then,’ she said.
A week later Hitler and his National Socialists tried to take Munich in a coup. Hitler ended up in the same fortress as Toller, but of course for a much shorter time. The authorities were always more lenient on coups from the right.
Not long afterwards, I left with Hans for Berlin. He took a room in a shared flat; I stayed with Aunt Else. I worried that Dora would think it some kind of betrayal of her for me to be with Hans. I told myself this couldn’t be right, there was no logic in that. But the heart has its own logic, fierce and undeniable.
Before I left Munich she held my arms, an ironic smile playing on her lips. ‘The one thing I’d say you haven’t developed here,’ she said, smoothing a stray curl off my forehead, ‘is an adequate distrust of flattery.’
‘I suppose I’ve not had the practice,’ I replied. I did not see her for a while after that.
The next time we were together was the spring of the following year, when Dora moved to Berlin to work in the office of the parliamentarian Mathilde Wurm. I had started studying French and history and literature at the University Unter den Linden, and Dora leased a flat of her own not far from there, near the Reichstag.
By then she had a boyfriend too–Walter Fabian, the editor of a union journal in Dresden. Dora had sent me letters about him, describing him as charismatic and funny, and ‘always the best-connected man in the room’. She had been writing for his publication, which he ran, she said, ‘like a wily king runs a country’. Walter kept a dossier of compromising information on government officials, which meant he could often publish articles others would not have dared. I hoped that her being in love meant she would have forgiven me for whatever disappointment I’d caused by going off with Hans.
When I entered her flat Walter was there on the couch, sleeves rolled up, sorting papers. He had a round, clean-shaven face, a fine, domed forehead under a receding hairline, and piercing, sky-blue eyes. He sprang up, adopting Dora’s easy intimacy with me too, as if I were a little sister. ‘Hello Ruthie,’ he said, hugging me close.
At some point I can’t
remember the two of them slipped off to the registry office in Dresden, with a typist from the journal as witness. I don’t think either of them was set on marrying–it had something to do with the residency requirements in Dresden, given that Dora wanted to keep her flat in Berlin too. They loved each other but at the same time they insisted that marriage would change nothing. It didn’t. Walter was serially unfaithful (he had, I believe, four wives in the end). Dora made light of it, saying the marriage withered after a year from inattention, ‘like a house-plant’. But I knew marriage was something she did not want to try again.
That first time I met Walter at her flat was just after Toller had been released. He had served out his full term. When I accidentally smashed a glass in the kitchen I went to the cupboard for a broom. Something slapped against the door as I opened it. Hanging on the inside was the WANTED poster. Not on display, but not quite put away either.
TOLLER
‘They were asking after you at Epstein’s last night, Joseph said.’
Today Clara is late, because she went first to the shipping office. She wears a deep-pink blouse, open at the neck. I wonder if a secretary is to a writer as a model is to an artist: a muse, a breathing presence to make us feel our blood, a small piece of the beauty of the world we wish to rise to. Her thigh presses into the table.
‘I…’ I look up at her sideways. ‘I had some reading to do.’
Clara knows this is not true, that I didn’t do any reading.
‘Also some packing?’ I venture, as back-up. Two half-packed suitcases lie open on the bed.
‘Good then,’ she says. She wants to believe in that version. Now that I have a departure date, we are nothing but to the point with one another. She has the steno pad out already.
‘I’ve been wondering,’ she says, that crease between her eyebrows again, ‘why, when you talk about the war, or the revolution, you use the present tense?’ Her voice is gentle, but she has clearly prepared this question for me and she will go through with it. ‘Is it still going on in your mind?’
‘No.’
How can I explain to her that what I have written down has often become all that I remember? I threw a skein of ink on the page to catch the truth, but made only a sieve and it slipped through. I need the present tense like magic, I want Dora’s voice in my ear and her scent in my face. I need for her to live on, outside the limitations of my scribbling.
‘It’s because,’ I say, ‘I do not wish to spend these coming days… I just can’t bear to say “she was” all the time.’ I feel red heat in my face as soon as the words are out.
‘I see.’ Clara nods as if this were perfectly understandable. She chews the inside of one cheek. ‘Still. If we are going to put these new parts into the book, the past tense would be less confusing.’
‘Yes,’ I find myself saying. ‘You’re probably right. It’s just…’
My own life was always raw material for something else. It was never as real as when I remade it, into a play, a book. For this reason I fear I never gave the world its due. My psychiatrist said guilt towards the world is the black-winged rustle of my disease. But that does not stop my sick thought from also being true: my life and everyone in it were grist for my mill. And the greatest irony, the mother of all ironies, is not lost on me. Though I fed the world and those I loved into my work, it never, quite, lifted away from the circumstances of its birth–the war, the revolution, my imprisonment–into something eternal. Audiences loved the plays because they showed them the chaos of their times, but they are barely performed these days. I have lived on in the gap between my ambition and my talent, like a critic. I do not wish to write Dora into a poor version of herself.
‘…it’s just that I do not wish to write Dora into a poor version of herself.’
Clara is sitting with her hands together, under her chin. Her voice is soft. ‘There’s no version now. Nothing.’
I nod. She picks up the pad and starts to take it down.
The morning of my release, prison guards escorted me to the Bavarian border. I took a train to Leipzig, where that evening my play Masses and Man was opening. I walked the streets like a ghost awoken from a five-year sleep. Women were wearing their clothes looser and their hair shorter. Better-fed children indulged a yo-yo craze, and telephones in cabinets had appeared on the pavements.
In prison I suffered as men suffer, but I was able to write as I have never written since. In five years I wrote four plays and a book of poems. Since writing was forbidden, I did it after the lights were turned off, with a candle under a blanket, on toilet tissue that was smuggled out by visiting friends. And there my life unfolded further into its contradictions. My play Hinkemann is about a man who returns emasculated from the war, but it made women want to heal me, love me, take me home. I became famous and fêted all over Germany while I was the most solitary man alive.
In Berlin Masses and Man had been shut down on the opening night, after clashes between nationalist anti-Semites and socialists threatened to turn the theatre into a bloodbath. Actually, a bloodbath crossed with a pigsty–the nationalists came armed with rotting vegetables and chewed bones. The revolution was over, but it seemed I’d managed to resurrect the violence of it and bring it right inside the theatre. The woman in my play believes revolution can be accomplished without violence; her tragedy is it cannot, and then we all–pacifists and nationalists alike–have blood on our hands. Meanwhile the bankers stimulate the war effort by setting up brothels behind the lines. True of course, but unmentionable, and it drove the right-wingers insane. In Leipzig, the Union Repertory was daring to put the play on because its members could stand guard against any brawlers.
I slipped into the theatre after the lights went down and found my seat. Then I panicked–what if someone recognised me? What if my presence made the violence I expected worse? And what if the production was awful? I sank deep in my seat. Then, slowly, I relaxed, as the audience gasped, applauded–recognising themselves in the costumes of soldiers, of prisoners, in shrouds. It was exhilarating. I risked a glance at the rows of faces behind me, all turned up to the light. I felt the same thrill I’d felt speaking to the masses in Munich from the back of a truck. It was the power, if I am honest, of a dictator. Of finding, catching, twisting something inside them.
When the bankers started dancing to the music of chinking coins around the stock-exchange table, the heckling started from the back seats. ‘Traitor! Saboteur!’
People turned their heads. Rowdies were standing up in the last five rows, wielding batons and pelting things at the stage. Something splattered in the aisle right next to me. Then the mob began moving down the aisle towards the stage, but union guards ran in with truncheons and forced them out. All the while the actors bravely kept going.
Halfway through the second act, a murmuring set up in the audience. My neighbour whispered to me, ‘They say Toller’s out–he’s here!’
‘He is?’ I sank my head into my chest. The whisper grew into a chant. ‘Toll-er! Toll-er! Show us, Toll-er!’ It was all so strange, so soon. A spotlight leapt off the stage and roved over the audience. It found me. I was pulled up, moving on a sea of arms; I thought they would quarter me. I could see nothing outside the circle of light. Then I saw they were smiling and it was madness, like a wedding. They passed me hand over hand till I was set down on the stage. By now the audience was stamping its feet. The actors made room for me as if I were a bomb, a miracle, as if I needed more space than they. In the front row a woman keened and pulled at her clothes.
I held up my hands.
The room quietened.
‘Apologies for the interruption,’ I said. The place exploded into laughter. ‘I am very moved,’ I continued, and suddenly I was. ‘This play was written in isolation, in a kind of death. It is you,’ I gestured to the cast, and out to the audience, ‘who bring it life. Thank you.’
I walked off into the side curtains, expecting the players to take up where they had left off. But it started again, the
banging and the calls. ‘Toll-er! Toll-er!’ I went back out. Things were being thrown on stage, but not vegetables this time–there were scarves and gloves and corsages and God knows what. I raised my hands again. ‘All I can say is, the spirit of justice is alive and well here tonight, in Leipzig, in Germany. I thank you.’
Backstage I was in darkness, alone. The chanting continued, but my knees felt unreliable. I couldn’t go out there again. I put a cigarette in my mouth and went to light it but both my hands were shaking and the matchbook was stuck together. I couldn’t get it open, and when I did I couldn’t control the flame. I put one hand under the other to steady it but together they shook even more.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw something move. A girl, watching me. A woman.
‘Well done.’ Her voice was low, matter-of-fact. She took two steps and placed her hands around mine, slipped the matches from them and struck one.
‘I’m Dora,’ she said, the flame between us lighting our faces.
‘Ernst.’
She laughed, bright and big. ‘I know.’
I hadn’t been this close to a woman in five years. She was small and fine. Her eyes were calm, as if she knew me.
She touched me lightly on the arm. ‘Stay right here.’ Then she walked out onto the stage, hands held high into the light.
A stagehand sidled up behind me. ‘Who’s that?’ He pointed with his chin.
‘Her name is Dora.’
‘And she is…?’
I turned to him. ‘You don’t know?’
He shrugged.
We both looked on. When she had subdued the crowd the woman announced, ‘We have been honoured here tonight by the presence of the greatest playwright of our generation.’ They erupted again. The woman smiled, opened out her hands. ‘And now,’ she spoke over them and they hushed, ‘what he wishes is for the play to go on.’