by Gavin Scott
“What about the universities?” asked Forrester. “Presumably you’re not letting Nazi professors back there?”
“Absolutely not,” said Clare. “We don’t want them anywhere near education, or broadcasting, or journalism. But that doesn’t stop them trying to get back in.”
“If I wanted to find out about a particular professor,” said Forrester, “how would I go about it?”
“Control Commission Education,” said Clare. “Ask for a chap called Templar. They’re near the Ku’damm on Wilmersdorfer Straße.”
Forrester went to sleep after a while, and they woke him as the plane was coming in over the city because, as the flight engineer remarked, “We thought you might want to have a look.”
Berlin in the first winter after the war was indeed a remarkable sight. The initial impression was that the buildings had melted, their bricks flowing down into the streets like toffee, an illusion the covering of snow only reinforced.
As they came lower, Lynch remarked that the individual buildings looked like a big collection of opened cardboard boxes, and it was true: it seemed that every roof in the city had been blown off.
Tens of thousands of gaping windows gazed sightlessly into the whirling snowflakes. There was scarcely a vehicle to be seen on the streets. As they flew over a vast empty space near the centre, Forrester was puzzled for a moment – and then he realised it must be the Tiergarten, Berlin’s Hyde Park. “Last time I saw that it was covered in trees,” he said.
“The Krauts cut them down this winter,” said the flight engineer, “just to keep warm.”
“There’s the Brandenburg Gate,” said Lynch with all the excitement of a child. He consulted a map. “Which means that must be the famous Unter den Linden.”
But all the linden trees had gone too, and the devastated avenue now led from the shell-shocked triumphal arch to the wrecked cathedral and the tottering remains of the Hohenzollern Palace by the River Spree.
Forrester’s home town of Kingston upon Hull had borne the brunt of Luftwaffe attacks from across the North Sea. But nowhere had he seen devastation like this. The Germans had sown the wind, he thought, and now they had reaped the whirlwind – or, more accurately, it had reaped them.
“Going to need a lot of Gilbert and Sullivan to cheer this place up,” said Lynch, suddenly doubtful.
“I’m not sure cheering them up is really what we’re here for,” said Clare. “Cleaning them up is more like it. And it’s going to take a bloody long time.”
And then the plane was landing at Tempelhof Airport. Twenty minutes later they were walking through the vast, echoing halls of the airport terminal through which Hitler used to swagger after triumphal flights over conquered nations. Now it was so cold that frost covered the gigantic walls and their breath condensed in the frigid air.
MacLean had arranged for Forrester to be given a billet in a building on Fasanenstraße requisitioned for officers, and an army driver took him there. What struck him first as they entered the wrecked city were the remains of imitation Greek and Roman columns, disfigured by hundreds, indeed thousands of bullet holes and shrapnel gouges. Statues of victorious warriors, usually missing arms and sometimes heads, leant drunkenly from shattered plinths. Grandiose porticos which had once been the entrances to the corridors of power now guarded nothing more than mounds of debris. Ghostly roof-beams supported non-existent roofs. One apartment block he passed was just a triangular corner section five storeys tall; bizarrely, it was in these corners that the big European tiled stoves had been built, and there they remained, one above another, as if offering to try to heat the whole freezing, broken city.
Burnt-out tanks lay half-buried under bricks; anti-aircraft guns still pointed at the sky, waiting for attackers who had nothing left to attack. There was a seeping odour of dampness, of charred remains, of brick dust.
On the splintered remains of the few trees that still flanked the pavements were hundreds of scraps of paper: messages asking for news of lost loved ones; offers to swap crystal chandeliers and Turkish rugs for things that could be eaten or worn; pleas for work or marriage or suggestions of the availability of other pleasures. And around each tree were little crowds of people making notes; thin people, their faces gaunt, their clothes ragged.
Around them, ignoring them, worked the Trümmerfrauen, the rubble women, their hair tightly bound in scarves against the dust, steadily picking up the bricks from the fallen buildings, knocking off the mortar with rusty hammers in their frost-reddened fists and stacking the bricks into neat piles. With millions of German men still in Russian prison camps and millions more dead, wounded and in hiding, it was the women who had to literally dig Germany out of the abyss into which it had plunged itself.
“If you’ve got the right chits you can get 200 cigarettes a week from the Naafi,” said the driver, a Geordie called Flint with a cheerful, ugly face, “and twenty of those’ll buy you pretty much any woman in Berlin. If you run out of ciggies a can of Spam’s a very acceptable substitute, so it’s not hard to have a good time in this place, whatever it looks like.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” said Forrester, as they drew up outside the elegant turn of the century villa on Fasanenstraße – exactly the sort of place Forrester had seen as a child in the illustrations for Emil and the Detectives.
There was a large, elegant hall with parquet floors, across which it was easy to imagine respectable German bourgeoisie bowing and clicking their heels to each other at the turn of the century. Now the wood was scuffed and scratched by hobnail boots, and a dark-haired captain in a British Army greatcoat boomed into the field telephone. The man looked familiar to Forrester, but he couldn’t remember from where.
“I need seventy gallons of printer’s ink by Thursday,” he was insisting. “And I can let you have half a ton of coal in exchange.” He listened for a moment and then said, outrageously, “No, I can’t, I’m in Hamburg. Sorry. But my chaps’ll be round to pick up the ink Wednesday night. Bye.” The captain hung up, meeting Forrester’s eye and grinning to include him in the barefaced lie.
“Well, Berlin isn’t too far from Hamburg, is it?” he said, and strolled out.
Forrester found his room, deposited his kit, washed up and sat on his bed looking down into the garden, which seemed, under its carpet of snow, to have remained miraculously untouched. Where to start? With Templar at the Control Commission as Clare had suggested? The offices of the Social Democrats, the party for which he was planning to stand for election? But he could hardly stroll into party headquarters and begin asking questions without alerting Dorfmann to his presence. Besides, would people in his own party be likely to say anything against him? As he asked this question Forrester realised what he should be doing. The Social Democrats might not have a word to say against Dorfmann, but what about his likely opponents in the election? The Christian Democrats? The Workers’ Party?
An hour later Flint had driven him to the headquarters of the Democratic Workers Party in a wrecked building in Kreuzberg, in a street where women were operating a rusty hand pump to fill buckets and jugs with icy water to lug back to their ruined apartments. The smoke from cooking fires rose from piles of rubble where families without apartments were making their homes, their children playing on burned-out tanks. Forrester made his way gingerly down a flight of broken stairs into a basement room where a tired-looking man was turning the handle of a Gestetner duplicating machine. The room was freezing, the green linoleum was pitted with cigarette burns and there were broken chairs propped in forlorn rows against the walls where makeshift political posters had been pinned. An old woman sat typing furiously at a desk propped up on bricks.
The man pulled a sheet out of the Gestetner and examined the blotchy mess on the cheap, yellowing paper. “No-one will be able to read this,” he said. “I think the ink has frozen.” He turned as he heard Forrester come in and straightened automatically as he saw the uniform.
“Your name?” said Forrester, steering his German in
to the Prussian accent he knew would be most effective here.
“Gellsen, sir,” said the man, cringing slightly. “I have a licence for the Gestetner.”
“I dare say,” said Forrester. “But I’m not interested in that. I’m looking into the background of Peter Dorfmann, who’ll be standing on behalf of your opponents in this district.”
Gellsen’s watery eyes flickered with wary interest. “You want to know if he was a Nazi?” he said.
“I want to know everything about him,” replied Forrester. He had been about to say “anything” but he realised it was the wrong approach. Authority was supposed to be uncompromising. Anything else would look like weakness.
“Well he kept his job at the university under the Nazis,” said Gellsen. “So he must have been one of them.”
“You know perfectly well that not everyone who helped the party was a member,” said Forrester sharply. “There were plenty of significant figures who avoided joining. But he may have spoken at gatherings, spouted government propaganda, that kind of thing. I imagine you’ll have been looking into that for the election.” But even as he made this assertion Forrester doubted it. Apart from the typist there was no-one else there. This was not exactly a centre of humming political activity.
“Naturally,” said Gellsen. “For myself I never trusted the man, though as for hard evidence—” The woman at the typewriter coughed discreetly, and when Gellsen glanced at her she inclined her head. He went over and listened as she whispered. He looked at Forrester doubtfully.
“Fräulein Mundt has some information,” he said. Forrester turned to her. Her face was pinched and pale, hair tightly wound into a meagre bun. He realised she wasn’t an old woman at all: hunger and strain had made her look twenty years beyond her real age.
“He was unjustly promoted during the war,” she said. “Over the head of a better qualified professor.” Forrester nodded without enthusiasm. This sounded like the kind of academic rivalry that went on all the time, everywhere.
“I see,” he said. “For political reasons?”
Fräulein Mundt’s eyes glinted behind her glasses, clearly fearful she was about to lose the chance of doing someone down. “Everything was political,” she said. “Who you knew was political. Who your friends were was political. Dorfmann can only have got that job because he had friends in high places. He was not the best man.”
“Who was?” said Forrester.
“Professor Schopen, of course,” said Fräulein Mundt, as though Forrester should have had this information at his fingertips. “He was my professor. He was the best. But he had no friends at party headquarters.”
“Write his name down,” said Forrester, as much to give himself time to think as anything. “Write down where I can find him.”
“He is still at the university,” Fräulein Mundt replied, writing something on a scrap of paper. “But not the head of his department, which he should be.” As she gave the paper to Forrester she said bitterly, “Professor Schopen knows more about The Sorrows of Young Werther than a dozen Dorfmanns!”
As he walked up the basement steps back to the car, Forrester had the sinking feeling that his efforts to save Clark were descending into an academic quagmire about who knew the most about Goethe. But it was his first lead.
“Berlin University,” he said to Flint. “On Unter den Linden.”
At the junction of Kommandantenstraße they had to wait while a long line of trucks, each marked with a red star, lumbered past, laden with machinery that looked as if it had been torn up by the roots.
“Lathes and stuff from German factories,” said Flint. “On their way to Russia. Doesn’t look like they’ll be much use when they get there, does it?” Forrester was inclined to agree: whoever had removed the machinery had clearly preferred the sledgehammer to the oxy-acetylene cutter, and nobody had bothered to wrap the equipment to protect it against the snow. By the time the war-booty had travelled a thousand miles to the east it would be so much scrap.
Beside them, as they waited, was a group of children carrying sacks full of scavenged firewood; on the other side of the road a woman was pulling a cart with a long cardboard box on it. “Berlin hearse,” said Flint drily. “Whoever that is in the box, she’ll have to leave him at the cemetery till the ground thaws up a bit – it’s too hard to dig graves now.”
The children came over to the car. “Was hast du für mich?” asked a small boy, and Forrester remembered the signs in England exhorting him to save any chocolate he came across “for the children”.
“Bugger off,” said Flint, but he also reached into the glove-box and pulled out half a dozen boiled sweets, which he threw to the children as the Russian convoy finally cleared and they were able to move again.
“Poor little bastards,” said Flint as he changed gears. “No place for a kid, this.” Then they were driving down Unter den Linden, with the Brandenburg Gate at one end and the wreckage of the Palace at the other.
At the university, students were lined up in the courtyard, each, bizarrely, carrying a piece of torn cardboard. As Forrester left the car he couldn’t resist asking the girl at the head of the line what the cardboard was for. “For the windows,” she said. “Without the cardboard, the wind blows through where the glass used to be. The professors have asked each of us to find a piece of cardboard and bring it. That is not so easy.”
Beside the line a man was selling textbooks from a barrow; or at least the remains of textbooks – many were charred, and most were missing their covers. And yet the students were examining them eagerly, exclaiming over finds, turning the pages with as much enthusiasm as if they had been pristine copies, fresh off the press.
“Can you tell me where I can find Professor Schopen?” Forrester asked, and soon he was making his way through the wrecked corridors, where lectures went on in bombed-out halls and students listened more attentively than they did at Oxford, while the wind moaned through the cardboard window-coverings.
Professor Schopen didn’t even have a building. He was lecturing in a wooden hut in a rubble-filled courtyard when Forrester finally found him. He was wearing a tattered overcoat and a scarf that looked as if it had been knitted out of sacking, and the spectacles perched on his nose had been broken and mended with dirty string. He also wore a hat against the cold, and had Forrester seen him crouched in a doorway he would have been tempted to throw him a pfennig.
“All intelligent thoughts have already been thought,” Schopen was saying as Forrester entered. “What is necessary is only to try to think them again.” Beneath the professor’s overcoat Forrester could see layers of newspapers wrapped around his thin body. But his students were hanging on his every word.
“You see, a person hears only what they understand,” the old scholar went on, “and age merely shows what children we remain. Goethe taught us that daring ideas are like chessmen moving forward. They may be beaten, but also they may start a winning game. Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words – that is our goal.”
The students wrote assiduously, stubs of pencils filling sheets of old bills, torn magazine pages, account books they must have found among the ruins. Their faces were haggard; some of them still bore the marks of wounds. But none of them, at that moment, seemed to care. As their professor spoke they were in a world of artists and philosophers; a world their country had for twelve long years turned its back on. Schopen was coming to the end.
“And now I think we have done our duty to great thoughts for today,” he said, “and I am beginning not to be able to feel my feet, let alone the tips of my fingers, so I will end this lecture and thank you very much for your kind attention.” As he gathered up his papers, the class applauded.
As Schopen came abreast of him Forrester said quietly, “When ideas fail, sometimes a word comes in to save the situation,” and held up his army pass. To his surprise Schopen took it from him and examined the photograp
h closely, then looked at Forrester’s face.
“I love those who yearn for the impossible,” said the old man.
“I’m assuming Goethe wrote that,” said Forrester. Schopen smiled.
“Very little comes from my lips that did not once emerge from Goethe’s. For example, have you ever thought that ‘an overly sensitive heart is an unhappy possession on this shaky earth’?” Schopen’s wise old eyes met Forrester’s, and suddenly, quite without warning, he felt a strong desire to tell this ragged old man everything that was in his heart: his guilt over Barbara, his secret desire for Margaret Clark and how his efforts to save Gordon Clark were partly to make amends for it, his desperation to return to Crete and find his real purpose in life.
But he did not. Instead he found himself saying, as if he were a policeman, “I’m investigating Dr. Peter Dorfmann. I understand he was unfairly promoted over your head by the Nazis.”
Schopen smiled. “They say sixty million people have been killed in this war. Almost every city in Europe has been bombed and shelled; many have been razed to the ground. Six million Jews have died. And you expect me to complain about not getting a promotion?”
“What I want to find out is how close Dorfmann was to the Nazi hierarchy,” said Forrester.
“I have no idea,” said Schopen. “How could I know?” He looked at Forrester innocently, but Forrester sensed he was holding something back.
“You could know because he was a close colleague,” he said. “You could know because you are an intelligent man. You would have heard him in casual conversation. You would have seen people he associated with.”
Schopen rubbed his fingers together – the tips were indeed blue with cold. “It has been said of the Germans that they love to denounce one another. It’s true. I saw it when Hitler ruled us; I see it now the Russians and the Americans and the French and the British are here. I am determined not to be such a German.”
Forrester was silent for a moment.
“I respect that,” he said. “But you know this man is being groomed for power. If he was part of the Nazi regime, in whatever capacity, he should not be given power.”