Black Roses

by Jane Thynne

  A clatter of trucks and shouting from further along the street heralded a series of lorries containing a detachment of Brown Shirts who jumped out brandishing paint pots, intent on despoiling the windows and doors of the store. A large caricature of a Jew with a gigantic nose had been painted on one window and thick streaks of paint were dripping down others as the men laboriously spelt out slogans saying “Drop Dead Jew”, “Danger to Life”, “Jews to Palestine”. Mostly it was spelled correctly. Some passers-by stopped and smiled, others gawped, but most continued with their heads down, mentally abandoning any plans for Saturday morning shopping. They seemed to melt into each other, a vista of turned backs and cold shoulders, undulating away from the trouble.

  The storm troop commander, a tall, blond man with a leather crop that he kept swatting on his own calves, was supervising the hanging of a banner between two lampposts reading “The Jew Is Our Enemy”. Clara stopped to watch as he strutted along, the whip switching impatiently against his polished boots, with a smile as thin and vicious as barbed wire. He must be in his twenties, no older than her own brother, with rosy cheeks and flaxen hair that conformed precisely to the Aryan archetype and eyes as narrow as shards of ice. Until recently he might have been a country boy, with only farm animals on which to exercise his whip, but now, in his smart uniform with the silver shoulder cord glinting in the sun, he looked like a man who had found his vocation. A poster boy for the Sturmabteilung.

  At that moment a shop manager emerged from the department store and began to remonstrate with him. He was a fat little man in a three-piece suit and a scarlet spotted handkerchief blooming flamboyantly from his breast pocket. He spread his small hands in a pleading, conciliatory gesture and cocked his head to one side, like the maître d’ of a restaurant explaining why the fish would not after all be available that evening, but perhaps sir would enjoy the chicken instead. He kept gesturing to the storm troopers who were desecrating his shop, as if suggesting they be directed to paint their messages a little more tidily, or perhaps confine their efforts to a single door, rather than slapping the paint all over his windows which would be such an effort to remove once their perfectly justified demonstration was finished. The commander towered over him, head cocked and smile still fluttering on his lips as though politely considering his petition, until in a sudden movement he lifted his crop and lashed it down the side of the manager’s head.

  ‘I do not take lessons from Jewish vermin!’

  The man staggered to one side. Blood was already beginning to seep from a savage stripe on his cheek. His eyes widened, as if more in astonishment than pain at the commander’s swiftly executed stroke. Clara, rooted to the spot, felt an involuntary gasp of shock escape her, at which the commander looked round.

  His pale blue eyes passed over her Jaeger coat, the chestnut hair tucked beneath her navy felt hat and the shopping bag hanging from her arm, as if he was assessing whether she, too, should be subjected to his whip. She returned his stare and a shudder of something she had never felt before, sheer hatred, went through her like a knife. The emotion rose up in her so that her head was pounding, and the blood rushed in her ears. It took all her effort not to reach forward and snatch the whip from him and bring it down on his own head. What must it feel like to depend on this man’s tender mercies? To be beaten like a dog? She really couldn’t imagine.

  Without taking her eyes off him, she stepped forward past the manager, who had propped himself up against the window and was holding his handkerchief against the side of his face in a stupor, and made for the great brass door.

  By now the entrance was obstructed by five storm troopers with huge placards hung round their necks. The one nearest her, a bear of a man with a dull, angry look in his eye, had a sign saying, “Germans defend yourselves, don’t buy from Jews”. As she tried to pass him he moved to block her way. He was so close she could smell the stink of sweat on his shirt and the buckle of his belt dug into her side. She dodged and he moved again, leaning against her so that she was pressed against the shop door.

  ‘Ausländerin!’

  She had not used the “foreigner” explanation before, but it worked. He did a double take and shifted slightly, just enough for her to slip past and enter the shop.

  The store was thinly populated, and the assistants seemed more formal, and distant than usual, as if embarrassed. Clara’s heart was pounding against her ribs and she had lost any appetite for shopping, but almost at random she chose a beret in cherry red and smiled at the salesman who stood behind the till. He served her with the barest of courtesies, without meeting her eye. His face was rigid with a kind of extreme self-restraint, as though every fibre of his being was straining to step outside and order the hooligans away. She noticed that he was wearing a row of medals, and when she looked around she saw that several other staff had medals pinned to their clothes.

  ‘Can I ask what medal that is?’

  ‘This is the Iron Cross.’ Her question seemed to have animated him and he met her eye. ‘First Class. Herr Hitler holds the second class, I think. And Frau Mann here,’ he gestured to a stout woman behind the till with terror in her eyes, ‘wears the Emperor’s Service Cross and the Cross of Honour for being a soldier’s widow. She received it from Hindenburg himself.’

  Clara was still shaking when she left the shop and boarded a tram. As it proceeded onto the Ku’damm she stared out at the smart stores and the Saturday morning shoppers without seeing them. She felt a sudden sharp longing for Swan & Edgar in Piccadilly, where she would be taken by her mother as a child to buy school uniform, followed by tea and Fuller’s walnut cake in Lyons on the Strand. It was the first time since she had been in Berlin that she felt any kind of nostalgia for London. She thought of the Thames moving slowly beneath the morning light, wet leaves gleaming beneath the lampposts on the embankment, and the comforting smell of oil and damp clothing on a red bus. And how unthinkable it would be to find a banner saying “The Jew Is Our Enemy” draped across Oxford Street.

  When she got back to Frau Lehmann’s there was a letter waiting for her propped up on the hall table. For a wild moment she imagined that her father had managed to track her down, but on closer inspection she saw the envelope bore a Hamburg postmark.

  “Dear cousin Clara, what a surprise to hear from you after all this time!”

  It was Hans Neumann, the son of her uncle Ernst and the cousin she had never met. She took the letter up to her room and read it on the bed, with her legs curled up on the green eiderdown beneath her. Hans, it emerged, was working as a teacher at a Gymnasium in Hamburg. He enclosed a photograph of himself surrounded by three grinning children and a pudgy wife, and went into a schoolmasterly amount of detail about the achievements of his gifted offspring, who seemed to play enough instruments to staff an orchestra on their own. There were pages and pages of it, in his meticulous, spidery scrawl. “My wife Lieselotte was the daughter of the mathematics master in my first teaching post! . . . Ute, Franz and Jacob have been selected to perform in the city’s foremost string quartet. Ute has also competed for the school in athletics.” If Clara cared to come to Hamburg he would be delighted to put her up and give her a guided tour of the city. She made a mental note to postpone that visit indefinitely. It wasn’t until the end of the letter that he came to the part she had asked about.

  “Our grandparents, you must know, longed to see more of you. They were a lovely couple and it must have been very sad for you not to see them as you grew up. It was your father, I understand, who was reluctant. They always suspected he disliked the fact that our grandmother was a Jew . . .”

  Clara almost dropped the letter right there. She tried reading on but it was hard to focus on the rest of Hans’s news with that short, spiky little word banging through her mind. A Jew. She read it back, incredulously. Grandmother Hannah! Why had she never known? She thought of the Jewish girls she had known at school, who held mysterious Friday evening dinners with their family and were excused hymn-singing and Religiou
s Studies; their mothers, who wore sable stoles and too much jewellery. She pictured the men she had seen in the east of Berlin with their flapping black coats and yellowed faces, and the shopkeeper that morning wearing his iron cross. Then she thought of her tiny, smiley grandmother with her high-collared blouse, black hair polished to a shine, the slow accented voice rich and dark as bitter chocolate. How she had carried a little box of sweets in her bag, to be smuggled to the children, confidentially. A Jew.

  A Jew in a country that hated Jews. Those banners in the street, that Brown Shirt with his riding crop, the filthy slogans daubed on the walls. Klaus Müller’s disdainful laugh. Until now, all that had nothing to do with her. Only now, she saw, it did.

  “It’s in the blood.”

  That was what her father had said when he saw her honeyed complexion turn brown on the beach. Jewish blood must be what he had meant. Yet Hellene Neumann had carried her inheritance in silence. She had loved to tell the children about her German childhood, but that part of her story had stayed unspoken. Clara did not need to wonder what power her father had to enforce that silence. Her mother had always been subservient to his whims, always anxious to keep the peace. Smoothing over arguments, quieting the children’s squabbles. It was a tendency Clara had detested, resolving that it would be different for her.

  She stood up and looked at herself in the mirror, and felt a new identity emerge from its silvered surface, gradually sharpening like a grainy photograph in a developing tray, gathering nuance and perspective. She was no different from the person she had been that morning, and at the same time she was entirely changed. She had come to Germany to feel closer to her mother; in the process she was learning more about herself than she could ever have imagined. It was from Grandmother Hannah that she inherited her cheekbones, her watchful eyes and her sharp, defiant chin. Perhaps, too, her inclination to perform. Yet no one had mentioned that Clara’s inheritance did not stop there. She thought again of her mother’s adamant objection when she first mentioned wanting to go on the stage.

  “Acting is not the kind of thing I’d want a daughter of mine to do.”

  She should know. She had been acting for half her life.

  Chapter Nineteen

  When she walked up from the station at Neu-Babelsberg the following Monday Clara noticed immediately that changes were taking place. The squat red-brick building opposite the main entrance was being renovated. Granite door posts and pseudo-medieval porch lights had been fixed to the frontage. Outside, a van was parked and chairs, tables and filing cabinets were being carried in. A white BMW sports convertible was parked next to it.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Clara asked Becker.

  ‘The minister is setting up an office here. He wants to keep a close eye on everything.’ He checked her pass, even though he knew her by sight now, and nodded her through with a wink. ‘There are a few things the Doktor likes to keep an especially close eye on.’

  Normally, the studio complex was a mass of people, passing busily through the corridors into studios and dressing rooms. Today, the place seemed unnaturally quiet. People were moving tight-faced down the corridors, with briefcases and arms full of scripts. A couple of well-known actors who would normally take the gaze of others’ as their due, hurried past, heads down, as if loath to draw attention to themselves.

  Albert had a new office up on the fifth floor, with a sofa and a bigger picture window giving on to the great hall. Clara found Helga lounging there, riffling through Filmwoche. She looked up and smiled broadly, waving a whisky tumbler. Something about the flush on her cheeks suggested it was not her first drink of the day.

  ‘Good news! We’re celebrating. I’ve got a part! There’s a new movie called Barcarole, using that Czech girl Lida Baarová. Oh, come on,’ she said as Clara looked blank, ‘you must have heard of her?’

  ‘Is she the one whose photograph has just gone up in the foyer?’ The girl looked very young, with serene, classical features.

  ‘That’s her. Anyway, she’s to play next to Gustav Fröhlich. I’ve got a massive crush on him. And I’m to play a beautiful temptress.’

  Throughout this Clara noticed that Albert was sitting at his desk, with his head in his hands.

  ‘Albert, is something happening?’

  ‘Oh, that,’ said Helga. ‘Yes, there is some other news.’

  ‘He’s finally done it.’ Albert picked up a memo and read aloud. ‘ “As a result of the national revolution now taking place, it is now Ufa policy to terminate contracts with Jewish employees”.’

  He looked up. ‘They’re going through the place right now. They’re going from set to set and announcing that those who don’t have pure Aryan blood must leave the studio immediately.’

  ‘Everyone’s saluting like crazy,’ said Helga, flapping her arm upwards in mimicry of a Nazi salute. ‘Don’t they just remind you of seals at the zoo?’

  ‘Most people with any sense have left already. Erik Charell is going. Erich Pommer is already gone.’

  ‘Erich Pommer?’ Clara thought of the formidable producer of The Blue Angel, Metropolis and most of Ufa’s greatest hits. ‘Surely not?’

  ‘He’s had his contract rescinded and he’s headed for England, apparently. He’ll survive. He can work anywhere. But that’s only the beginning. There’s to be a new Reichsfilmkammer headed by You Know Who which will control everything to do with the film industry. There’s a lot of people today tidying their desks.’

  ‘And leaving their offices,’ said Helga. ‘Which is how Albert came by this one.’

  Albert gave a tiny shudder.

  ‘The good news is,’ said Helga, tossing her head, ‘Ufa’s going to be producing more patriotic films. Featuring healthy Aryan actresses.’

  ‘They like good hips and blonde hair. Perhaps you should think of having yours dyed, Helga,’ said Albert acidly.

  ‘Nonsense.’ She ran a hand through her hair. ‘I’m not a Jew, thank God. And, besides, they love brunettes too.’

  Clara felt a creeping horror. ‘Isn’t anyone going to protest? Are you all going to stand by and watch everyone get fired?’

  ‘Protest! Are you mad? You think we want to end up in Prinz Albrecht Strasse too?’ Prinz Albrecht Strasse 8, a formidable barracks of a building on the border of Mitte and Kreuzberg, was being taken over by Goering for the headquarters of the Gestapo. ‘Besides,’ she added testily. ‘if you’re a baker and you don’t like the government, you don’t stop baking bread. Why should actresses stop acting? You’re not Jewish, are you? You don’t need to worry.’

  Despite the alarm coursing through her, Clara remained impassive. Not a flicker of fear, she knew, appeared on her face. For once she was glad of her deep-rooted instinct to repress her emotions, to bury her secrets deep within her and affect a composure she didn’t feel.

  ‘Bauer told me a joke,’ continued Helga. ‘He said that before the Nazis, an actress’s career depended on her favours to Jewish playwrights. The good thing is, that’s no longer the case. The bad thing is, it’s the Nazis’ turn now.’

  ‘And you laughed, I suppose,’ said Albert glumly.

  ‘Of course I did. I laugh at all his jokes. Walter might be a monster but at least he’s an ordinary monster with ordinary tastes. If you know what I mean. Some of the others are far worse. Someone was telling me Geli Raubel said you wouldn’t believe what Hitler made her do. That kind of thing is too obscene for the filthiest nightclub in Berlin, let alone with your niece! No wonder she did herself in.’

  ‘Geli Raubel,’ Albert explained to Clara shortly, ‘shot herself in Hitler’s apartment two years ago. Apparently he keeps a portrait of her beside his bed.’

  ‘And they say he once beat his dog to impress a girl.’

  ‘This is hearsay,’ Albert mumbled.

  ‘But he rather likes being beaten himself.’

  ‘Helga!’

  ‘As for that Emmy Sonnemann. I feel sorry for her with Goering on top of her. He must weigh a hundred and twenty k
ilos. He does love his Currywurst.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Helga!’ Albert sprang to his feet. The colour had bled from his face and his starved figure seemed to be trembling. ‘What’s wrong with you today? You’re a terrible one for gossip. You should be careful what you say.’

  ‘Oh, who cares?’ Helga’s delight at the prospect of work had caused her to throw caution to the winds. ‘The Nazis are no better than anyone else. What about Herr Ley? Didn’t he make all his money selling contraceptives? He must know a thing or two about decadent desires.’

  Albert advanced, as if physically to silence her.

  ‘Oh stop it Albert. I’m only having a joke! Perhaps you should concentrate on getting yourself a girlfriend before people start to talk.’

  Albert threw her a shocked look but didn’t answer. Clara stepped forward.

  ‘Albert’s right. You could be overheard.’

  ‘So what? Who’s going to inform on the girlfriend of one of Doktor Goebbels’ most important aides?’

  She kicked up her leg, expensively clad in new stockings. ‘Bleyle Strumpfhose! The special ones that never run!’

  ‘A present, were they?’ said Albert sourly.

  ‘Don’t ask me questions, I won’t tell lies,’ she said, happily.

  The white of Clara’s knuckles gripping the handle of her bag was the only outward evidence of her apprehension. She turned to Albert.

  ‘There is just one thing. You said all foreigners were to be banned. That has to include me.’

  ‘I think, said Albert, ‘you’ll find you are exempt from this particular ban.’

  ‘Why? I’m half-English, after all.’

  ‘How do you think you got the job?’ laughed Helga.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Clara looked over at Albert, who glanced away defensively, but not before she had caught his eye.

  He sighed. ‘Herr Lamprecht had a call, from Klaus Müller. He was left in no doubt that a part for you would be a good idea.’