Circles of Time

by Phillip Rock

  “I think so. Once a reporter, always a reporter, I guess.”

  “For INA?”

  “Possibly. But not as a bureau chief. I can’t chain myself to a desk.”

  Paul lit his cigar and blew a satisfied stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “I’ll be seeing Kingsford in New York. Can I tell him you’re back on the payroll?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll see to it you get a raise. Just leave it to your uncle Paul.”

  Stories abounded in the streets of Berlin, a cavalcade of arrogant wealth and harrowing poverty and despair. The mark now stood at two hundred and fifty thousand to the U.S. dollar—the current rate posted in front of every bank, written in chalk on a small blackboard so that the figures could be erased as they changed, almost hourly. A story in every face—the angry eyes of ex-soldiers, the bewildered gaze of the elderly, the wizened faces of the starving young. But he knew as an editor that no one cared to read about it.

  He took a taxi to the INA office in Neu Konigstrasse on the other side of the river. Only the bureau chief was in, a tall, stoop-shouldered, gloomy-faced man by the name of Wolf von Dix who had taught German at the University of London in 1914 and had left England at the eleventh hour to report the war for the Frankfurter Zeitung. His dispatches on the horrors of the western front had been as heavily censored by the German military as Martin’s had been by the Allied.

  Dix swung his long legs off the top of the desk, polished his monocle with his tie, and then popped it back into place.

  “Well, Martin, of all people. What brings you to Berlin? On a Cook’s tour?”

  “No, just slumming.” He reached down into the chief’s ever-open humidor of cigars and took one. “How are you, Dix?”

  “Fine. Thanking God I’m working for a company that pays its salaries in dollars.”

  “Where are Kurt and Emil?”

  “In the Ruhr. Trying to get through the French army blockades. That ass Poincaré. Thank the Lord the British and Americans viewed with alarm, as the saying goes, or this country would have exploded. Things are bad enough without having the French marching through Essen.” He took a cigar for himself and clipped off the tip with a silver cutter.

  “Why did you quit, Martin? I was stunned when I heard the news. Did Kingsford ride you too hard for stories of girls in bathing suits?”

  “No, nothing like that. I just got sick of being cooped up in Fleet Street. But I’m back with the firm now, unofficially at the moment. A common, everyday, grind-out-the-wordage hack.”

  “Hardly that, old fellow. I read your Iraq story in the Daily Post. Very Beau Gestian. No wonder you couldn’t lock yourself back into an office after dashing about in the desert like Rudolph Valentino. You’re a romantic at heart, dear Martin. I suppose that’s what makes you such a good journalist.”

  Martin reached into his pocket, took out the little lapel pin, and handed it to Dix.

  “What can you tell me about this?”

  The chief held it up to his monocled eye. “Nice bit of workmanship. Real gold. Swastika emblem.”

  “I’ve seen the design before, but I can’t recall where.”

  “Common enough in Berlin during the Kapp putsch. Were you here then?”

  “Sure … now I remember. The Ehrhardt Brigade.”

  “Most of the Freikorps troops who came down from Estonia had a swastika painted on the sides of their trucks. I never knew why and neither did they. Just something they picked up the way troops will, I guess. Never saw the design worked into an expensive piece of jewelry, though. Did you find it in a pawnshop?”

  “No. A person I know had it in his pocket.”

  Dix handed the pin back. “This person—he wouldn’t happen to come from Bavaria, would he? Munich or Nürnberg?”

  “Munich—Bad Isar, to be precise.”

  Dix let his monocle fall into his palm and gave it another polish with his tie. “The Thule Society used the swastika as a symbol at one time, and so does the National Socialist German Workers’ party. You may have seen their two-page rag being peddled on the streets—the Volkischer Beobachter. They bought it from the Thule Society as a house organ. It comes out once or twice a week and people buy it for toilet paper.”

  “What is this National Socialist whatever?”

  Dix shrugged as he replaced his monocle. “I don’t know for certain. All we get out of Bavaria is unconfirmed chaos. There must be a hundred political parties down there, all with impressive-sounding names. All I know about the National Socialists is that they have about three thousand members—give or take a couple of thousand—and that they must have some money, though God knows how they get it.”

  “Is there anything in the morgue I could read?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Anna keeps that in order, and only she knows how obscure items are filed.” He glanced at the wall clock. “The girls will be back from lunch in a few minutes. Have a glass of schnapps and bide your time.”

  The female typists and clerks trooped in, chattering noisily, happy as only people could be who had the good fortune to be working for an American company. A middle-aged woman with iron-gray hair nodded respectfully to Martin as she headed for her desk.

  “Anna,” Dix called out. “Is there anything in the files on the National Socialist German Workers’ party—in Bavaria?”

  The woman paused by her desk, frowning. “We have copies of the Volkischer Beobachter, Herr Dix. And—I’m pretty sure—one or two items on the party leaders. I filed them under Eckart, D., and Hitler, A. Do you want them?”

  “Do you?” Dix asked.

  “If it’s no bother,” Martin said.

  THE JUNKERS MONOPLANE rose swiftly from the old military airfield at Tempelhof, banked low over the Berlin slums, and then headed south, rising to five thousand feet. The sun glinted sharply off its silver and black metal wings.

  “I love to fly,” Werner said happily, shouting over the engine noise. “I wish to God I’d had sense enough to go into the flying service. So clean in the clouds. The great tonic of air!”

  Martin looked through the window. A green and golden blanket of woods and fields far below. “It’s a long way down.”

  “Shot down, you mean? By a Camel or Spad! What a glorious way to die! A ball of bright flame, scattering one’s ashes in death! That’s how gods die—in flaming chariots pulled by winged horses. For four years I was rooted in the mud where men die like crushed lizards. No—no—I wish I had left the infantry and flown in a squadron with Richthofen—Boelcke—Immelmann! I know Hermann Goering, by the way—last leader of the Richthofen circus, winner of the Pour le Mérite, the Blue Max. A wonderful fellow. He flew our first company plane for several months right after the war. Our pilot today, Rudi, he flew Gothas and made three trips over England. Never saw anything but cloud and couldn’t find London—dropped all his bombs in the Channel. But he can tell some stories! That took guts, I can tell you.”

  It was too difficult to carry on a conversation against the hammering throb of the engine. The plane climbed, rocking on the thermals rising from the slopes of the Erzgebirge. And then they were soaring over the dark forests of northern Bavaria, the Danube, and then the river Isar flowing from the great barrier of the Alps and threading its way through the old city of Munich.

  A car and driver were waiting at the airfield to take them southward in the gathering dusk, past the city and along a narrow road that climbed into fir-shrouded hills.

  “Nearly home,” Werner said, lowering the window and breathing deeply. “One could get drunk on this air.”

  Martin reached into his coat for a cigar, his fingers touching a small envelope which contained the lapel pin. He drew it out and handed it to Werner. “This was caught up in your handkerchief. A gold swastika.”

  “Oh, that.” Werner took the envelope and slipped it into his pocket. “One of my party badges.”

  “Do you belong to many parties, Werner?”

  “No—but I contribute money to several, both
left and right wing. I can’t afford not to do that—the pendulum has swung too many times during the past couple of years. It’s cheap insurance to keep from being branded as an enemy of whatever faction comes out on top.”

  “The National Socialists—they’re nothing but a hate group as far as I can see. Pure rabble-rousing with no political aim at all.”

  “It would seem that way—if one merely listened to the speeches or read their little paper. They direct their message to the middle class and the unemployed—anti-Jew, anticapitalist, anti-Republic, pro-army, and pro-Bavarian. But most of that is pure rhetoric. The people are so numbed by events, they need strong words to shake them out of their lethargy. I find Herr Hitler, the true head of the party, to be an interesting man with a pragmatic approach to life. He may scream in the beer halls about how the capitalists are joining with the Jews to ruin the country, but he comes to me, the biggest capitalist he has ever met, and asks for money. Rhetoric, Martin, pure rhetoric. Rabble-rousing is merely a means to a finer and more noble goal.”

  “Which is?”

  “Why, what we all want. A strong and revitalized Germany.”

  “You seem to be very impressed by this man.”

  “I am, Martin. I am. Goering introduced me to him—brought him up to the villa last year. I’d heard of him, of course; everyone in Munich had heard of him even though he’s virtually unknown outside Bavaria. I thought he would be just another swaggering ex-soldier trying to organize all the roaming Freikorps gangs into another private army, but I was wrong. He’s a shy, soft-spoken man. Not well educated, but surprisingly well read. A genuine soldier, too. Iron Cross First Class. And merely a corporal, mind you, not one of those insufferable Junker officers. He earned his decoration the hard way with the List Regiment. Wounded on the Somme and again at Ypres. I recognized the type instantly—a good, faithful, reliable noncom who did his duty and never bitched about it. I had several like him in the grenadiers. We hit it off instantly.”

  “And you gave him enough money to buy the Beobachter.”

  “I have no idea what my money was used for then, nor what it is used for now. That’s none of my business.” He reached across the seat and patted Martin on the knee. “But enough political talk, Martin. Smell the pines. Inhale that zephyr of wine from the Tyrol. Tomorrow we’ll drive to Starnberger See and go sailing.”

  Werner’s villa in the pine forests above the gorge of the Isar was a small, baroque palace built by King Ludwig II in the misguided hope that Lola Montez would live there. She refused, and the place became only one of many ornate and expensive structures that the poor mad king scattered across Bavaria to remain unoccupied until after his death.

  It was not a happy home. The conclusion seemed obvious to Martin as he sipped a martini cocktail before dinner. Certainly all the elements for happiness were present—the beautiful and gracious wife; the two lovely sons, aged eight and six; the frolicking dogs and doting servants—but the strain between Werner and Carin shadowed it all. It was as present and real as the constant wind that came down from the distant peaks and moaned in chill streams through the pines.

  “You seem to live separate lives,” Martin remarked as he sat in Werner’s study late that evening. “Carin has her section of the villa and you have yours. It’s none of my business, of course.”

  “You have a right to comment, and I appreciate your concern,” Werner said. “The truth of the matter is that if I had not turned Catholic in order to marry Carin, we would be divorced by now. So, we have an arrangement of sorts. I split my life between Bavaria and Berlin. It is better for the children to remain here with their mother.” He gazed into the crackling fire. “But there is no need for that to mar your sojourn. This is a heavenly place, Martin. Treat these woods and mountains—the river—the lakes—as an oasis of order, tranquillity, and peace.”

  ON THE FINAL night of his stay, Martin sat in bed in his spacious but drafty room. His cigars and a crystal decanter of whiskey on the table beside his bed. A fire burned in the massive stone fireplace and the wind sighed under the eaves beyond the tall, leaded-glass windows. He was writing in his journal for the first time in over a week.

  Sunday night, May 24, 1923. Observations and reflections. Bad Isar, Bavaria.

  Werner was quite wrong. There are no oases of tranquillity left. There are only places of great scenic beauty that impart an illusion of contentment on the viewer. Bavaria, like almost every other place I know, is haunted by the past and dismayed by the future. I have never felt the impact of the war as strongly as I did the other day when I drove with Carin and the children up to Garmisch. Those magnificent mountains … the meadows and wildflowers. When we stopped the car in the little village of Oberau, we could hear cowbells far off across meadows and the bleating of sheep.

  The children, Max and Josef, held each other by the hand and ran off across the fields. Carin and I walked through the village, past the rococo church. In front of the church there stands a wooden display case with glass doors. In the case are the snapshots or class portraits of dozens of young men from the district who went to war and never came back. For some there were no photos, and in place of a picture, their names have been printed and pinned to the backing. And the sun falls on this depository of dead youth. And the wind blows and the cowbells clang softly in the valleys and sheep roam the high meadows, but the boys are dead and some of the warmth is gone from the sun.

  Carin married Werner in the spring of 1915. They had known each other since they were children. Carin’s father, Count Urfeld of Wurttemberg, owned the largest bank in south Germany and had financed many of the Rilke projects for Frederick Ernst. They were married in the Roman Catholic cathedral in Stuttgart and honeymooned in Innsbruck. Max was conceived then—Josef late in 1916 when Werner was given leave after the battle of the Somme. The night when little Josef was destined for the world was the last night Werner and Carin slept together—his decision, not hers.

  Well, that is another tiny tragedy of the war, it seems to me. One that will never appear in any statistics regarding casualties. The war changed men, sometimes drastically. It warped and seared the soul as well as the body. Werner, when he finally got out of the hospital, felt that his body had betrayed him. His body, Carin told me, became an obscenity to him. The little excrement bag taped to his side. The terrible scars running from rib to crotch. When Carin wanted to go to bed with him, he sneered at her, saying that only a whore would sleep with a man who smelled of shit. And so a hand grenade tossed into a trench alters more than a soldier’s life.

  But the rift between Werner and Carin developed in other ways beside sex—or the lack of it—in their marriage. She does not like Werner’s political meanderings, nor the assorted people who come to the villa in quest of backing. She especially does not like Hitler and the National Socialists. She does not like virulent anti-Semitism and made it quite clear to Hermann Goering one night at dinner that she would not permit such talk in her house. Goering, apparently, told this to Hitler, and when he comes to the villa he never says a word about the Jews or tells one Jewish joke.

  I find Adolf Hitler to be pretty much the way Werner described him. Shy, polite, constantly watching his manners, a bit awed by the signs of wealth he finds at the villa. Rather acting like a village postman who, for some unaccountable reason, has been invited to tea at the manor. They tell me he’s a fiery, almost hypnotic speaker in front of a crowd; but at the dinner table, or after dinner in Werner’s study, he talks in a monotone, skipping from one subject to the next, rambling on and on—a mélange of theoretical platitudes and patriotic fervor.

  I found him interesting only when we discussed the war. Werner told him that I had been a war correspondent on the Somme, and he was interested in knowing what events I had covered there. He had been at Pozieres and Bazentin Wood, and both of us had witnessed a tank attack in September which the German artillery had smashed—“Thank God for our wonderful gunners,” Hitler said with a laugh, “or we’d have been cru
shed like toads.” He had then, and still retains, an admiration and respect for the Tommies, but his hatred of the French is intense. He can’t speak of them without trembling with suppressed rage.

  I can understand Carin’s dislike—not so much for the man, but the quasi-military aspects of his party. It’s unusual for a political movement—if indeed that’s what it is—to gather about it so many martial trappings. I asked Hitler about that, and he told me that the vast number of ex-soldiers who had formed into Freikorps groups to fight the Communists felt more comfortable in a military atmosphere. These men had been welded into a common body, the Kampfbund, or into a sort of praetorian guard, the Sturmalteilung, formed to protect political meetings from interruption by Red Front rowdies. A vast store of military uniforms that had been destined for German troops in Tanganyika had been acquired. The pale brown shirts and forage hats gave the National Socialists a distinct air—that plus the swastika armbands. “It makes a man feel important to march with his fellows in a smart uniform and under a banner that is a symbol of a cause.

  Hitler appears to be a fervid believer in symbols and slogans. On the swastika flags—the backenkrause black on the flags, set in a white circle surrounded by red—he has emblazoned the words “Deutschland Erwache!” A noble and patriotic sentiment, but the only storm troopers I have seen were marching through the Hofgarten in Munich chanting, “Death to the Jews!”

  Werner dismisses that as a sop to those virulent anti-Semitic Russian émigrés who contribute large sums to the party. Carin doesn’t believe it and neither do I.

  The wind blows. A soft rain falls. And high in the mountains, locked in a wooden box at Oberau, are the fair and pleasant faces of the dead.

  HE FLEW BACK to Berlin with Werner. Neither man felt like conducting a shouted conversation over the racket of the engine. They sat across from each other, staring out through opposite sides of the aircraft. When they landed at Tempelhof, they shook hands, Werner looking both somber and uncomfortable.