But I must stop this or you will lay down the papers and agree with my original intention not to write at all. So now I will go back, as I sometimes have done when we talked together in the evenings with our apéritifs beside us. I will return to the time of childhood and begin with my name.
TWO
My father christened me Conrad because at a very special moment for him, when his single-track mind was sure that his young wife had conceived the night before, he happened to be reading a novel by Joseph Conrad and came upon the description of a certain woman that “she was simply a person to whom life spoke imperatively in terms of love.” This my mother told me twelve years after I was born.
He was sitting alone on the sand of a Baltic beach and he was on his honeymoon. On this July morning the air shone as though it were polished, the sky was without a cloud, and the limp sails of becalmed yachts broke the blue of a glassy sea. My father reread the sentence from Conrad, looked up while he pondered it, and saw a dense cloud of black coal smoke rising up beyond the horizon. He laid down his book and concentrated on the smoke.
Only one kind of ship could make that much smoke and he watched while the masts, the funnels, and finally the hull of the latest battleship in the Imperial German Navy came over the horizon. A high bow wave showed that she was steaming at full speed and when she shifted her course my father nodded, knowing what it meant. I have seen a picture of that ship and I can tell you she was harsh, ugly, angry-looking, but formidable. My father’s interest in her was purely professional. He picked up the Zeiss binoculars he was carrying and watched her guns point up to a forty-five-degree angle and waggle as they steadied in for the range. Then he saw eight globes of orange fire burst out on the far side of the ship, the four midship globes outlining the stark lines of the hull and the upper works. Ragged balloons of black smoke were spewed out and hung in the air long after the ship had steamed beyond them. A minute and a half passed before the booming shock of the salvo struck the shore.
My father knew all about this warship and only a fortnight earlier he had dined with her officers in their wardroom. He also knew she was going through her first trials and was firing at a series of towed targets that he could not see because they were beyond the horizon. He watched her fire three more salvos at three-minute intervals and nodded with professional approval. Her guns were new and her officers were not straining them by too rapid fire. The ship altered course once more and headed north and he watched until her hull went over the horizon and disappeared. Then he returned to his book and reread the sentence about the woman to whom life had spoken imperatively in terms of love.
This new battleship was a proud and very expensive instrument of the first great fantasy that seized the people of my native land in the early days of the century. In his own and much less expensive way, my father was another.
He was a naval officer born in the old Hanseatic town of Rostock in a family connected with the sea for centuries. His hair was golden blond and cropped short, his eyes were bright blue, his face was lean and high-colored, his body tall and hard from exercise. He was an educated man, far from insensitive, who loved art and music. His discipline was awesome and it was bolted to the only things he had been trained to value – his service, his country, and whoever might become his wife. I have always been a worrier, but when my father was in his prime he never worried about anything more complicated than the gunnery system of the ship in which he was the chief officer. He had studied mathematics and optics at Göttingen and mechanical and electrical engineering in Hamburg and he had advanced so rapidly in his profession that he had been promoted over the heads of officers many years older than himself.
Father’s morality was so meticulously compartmented that he never suffered from any interior moral conflicts until after the 1914
war. If ever there had to be a choice between his duty to his ship and his duty to his wife and family, it was understood that the ship came before the wife, just as the nation came before the ship. If the ship were ordered to commit suicide for what a superior officer considered the greater good of the Fatherland, he and his brother officers would obey without even thinking. As it turned out, just such an order was given to his ship during the First War.
My mother, as I have told you, came from a Catholic family in the city of Freiburg in the southwest corner of Germany where most of the people look different from the blond, fair-skinned Nordics of the Baltic region. My father met her in the Prado in Madrid where she was looking at the pictures with her parents. The moment he saw her he fell in love with her but he was very correct about it. Hearing them speaking German together, guessing that her bearded father was a professor, he approached them, clicked his heels though he was not wearing uniform, bowed, and begged permission to introduce himself. Two days later he asked her to marry him. Two years later she did marry him.
My father was a good man in those years and so were most of the young men of the old fighting races of Europe who so diligently and high-mindedly slaughtered each other when I was a child. To my students of today he would seem preposterous and probably horrible; to him they would have seemed worthless and contemptible. He was a product of what somebody has called “the age of the hero” and my students are the products of what somebody else has called “the age of the anti-hero.” And I, who witnessed his tragedy, and pray God I may not also have to witness the tragedy of these his opposites, I whose life was spent in a limbo between him and them, I mourn for him in an impersonal way beyond grief, for it is a mourning for a species that with absolute courage did what they thought was their duty and thereby became the most destructive generation the world hais ever known.
Now this man was on his honeymoon. This man whose disciplined face would still look lean, taut, and ruddy at sixty (and in a frightening way would also look innocent and bewildered) was releasing into a young girl all the pent-up tenderness and suppressed poetry of an over-organized but essentially adolescent character. I’m sure it never crossed his mind to wonder what his wife would look like when she was middle-aged, or how either of them would feel when they knew in advance what the other would say about everything. I’m sure that it never occurred to him that it might be possible that they would ever disappoint one another. If in fact they did – and indeed they did – he would never admit it even to himself.
It so happened that my mother did conceive a child the night before my father read the Conrad novel and watched the new battleship firing her 280-millimeter guns. When he knew for sure that a child was on its way his happiness was the greatest he had ever experienced because his own family had never been prolific of boys and he was sure that his wife had conceived a son. Nor was his happiness diminished by his certainty that in a few years his country would be at war and that his own chances of survival were likely to be small, for everyone knew that the young German navy was smaller than the British. But this knowledge he locked away in a separate compartment of his brain, and so it was possible for him, in the mood of the moment, to believe that this sentence of Joseph Conrad was a divine revelation.
I like the name Conrad well enough and I love the books of the great man after whom I was called, but about that particular sentence I can see nothing remarkable. If there were not millions of women to whom life speaks imperatively in terms of love the human race would have finished itself off long ago. The dedicated efficiency of those millions of boy-men like my father in serving the dreams of messiahs, megalomaniacs, and ordinary cheap politicians would have guaranteed it. Incidentally, the country he admired most was the very one he was training himself to destroy, England. He was also a strict Lutheran and continued to be one after he married Mother in a private chapel in the Freiburg Catholic cathedral.
When I was working in that American university, I knew a young psychologist who was researching a mass of evidence to fortify one of those brainstorms psychologists often have. He was a great one for the Oedipus complex and he had a theory that the social and political results of our two big wa
rs could best be understood by a computation of how many children had spent the first years of their lives living with their mothers and knowing their fathers only as pictures on a wall. He had worked out a rough estimate of how many millions of men, now of student age, fell into this category and from this he deduced a growing hostility to male authority leading into the present permissive society. He asked me what I thought of his idea and what else could I say but that I myself was one of his specimens, along with millions of other Germans who were children in the First War. I had to tell him that so far as the Germany I knew was concerned, the exact opposite had happened to what he had taken for his conclusion, for most of my generation had worshipped Hitler and died for him. But his example of the picture on the wall remained with me. For when my memory began, this was all my father was to me.
He stared gravely out of the frame with a gloved hand clasping a telescope, and if it weren’t for the telescope and the naval cap he could have been mistaken for a high-class undertaker in the dark, long-coated naval uniform of the day. Like most German naval officers of the time he wore a small moustache and a short, spiked beard beginning at the bottom of his lower lip and terminating just under the point of his chin. Beside him was a larger photograph of his ship surging through the sea with a mighty bow wave and a vast pollution of coal smoke belching out of her two squat funnels. Her name would mean nothing to anyone now, but after the Battle of the Skagerrak (the English call it Jutland) she was the most famous ship in Germany. In the early stages of the battle her guns destroyed two huge British ships. Later, when the battle turned against the Germans, she and the other ships in her squadron, all terribly battered and one of them unable to fire a single gun, were ordered to charge and even ram the entire British fleet – four wounded battle cruisers against twenty-four untouched battleships. The four ships were to do this to give the main German fleet time to escape from the trap the British had caught them in. With their usual love of the macabre, our newspapers called this “The Death Ride of the Battle Cruisers.” Which it wasn’t, for somehow those four burning, half-destroyed ships wallowed home in the night to their harbor.
In Germany this battle was celebrated as a great victory, though actually it was a great defeat. Everyone was talking about it and strange men visited our apartment to congratulate my mother. There was one old man I have never forgotten, I loathed him so much. He was tall and thick. Out of a bull’s hump neck there upthrust a narrow, pear-shaped head shaved completely bald. He wore a handlebar moustache like the Kaiser’s, his face was seamed with duelling scars, and for years he had been boring everyone he knew by telling them about the great day in 1871 when he rode into Paris at the head of his regiment of Uhlans. He kept jabbing a stubby, cigar-stained finger at the photograph of my father’s ship. “Such casualties!” he kept saying as though the idea was beautiful. “Such casualties! Two hundred and fifty-seven dead on her decks and so many more wounded and she fought the whole British fleet and came home.” Stiff as a poker he bowed and kissed my mother’s hand. But Mother was white, drawn, and still, and I watched the fingers of her left hand tapping the arm of her chair. For all the time this horrible old man was boasting about the casualties, she still did not know whether her husband was one of them and neither did I.
Several days later the news came that my father was alive but had been severely wounded and had been decorated by the Kaiser himself with the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. It was not until several years later that I learned that his guns had been responsible for the blowing up of two famous British ships and (to use the delightful word of today) the vaporizing of nearly three thousand human beings.
In those days we lived in an apartment in the old city of Freiburgim-Breisgau on the verge of the Black Forest – my mother, my grandfather, and myself. During the first two years of the war I only once saw my father because he was on the other side of Germany with the navy. Occasionally we all went out to the railway station to see my mother off on a short visit to the north to spend a few days with my father, and when she came back from the third visit I overheard her telling my grandfather that my father was depressed and irritable because the authorities would not let the navy go out to fight. I, of course, was a tremendous patriot and filled my drawing books with crude pictures of German soldiers bayoneting French soldiers and German ships sinking English ships, but after the famous sea fight I lost my taste for this sort of nonsense.
When my father was released from hospital he came home and stayed with us for a month – not long enough for him to become completely real to me but certainly long enough to become unforgettable. His back had been gouged by a shell fragment and it was to remain painful for the rest of his life; some spinal disks were injured and in those days nobody understood how to treat them. I’m sure he wished to be kind, but to me he seemed remote, brooding, and ominous. He never learned to be wise, but within the limits of his profession he was exceedingly intelligent and he must have known that after the failure of his ships to drive the English off the seas it was impossible for Germany to win the war. He never spoke a word to us about the great sea fight. When his leave was up and his ship had been repaired – it took nearly four months before she was fit to fight again – he left us and went north, his eyes having seen what few men see.
It was around this time that Grandfather took me in hand. He was my mother’s father and he told me many things, including something of my own origins.
Like many people in my region of Germany I had Frankish genes along with a variety of others inherited from the huge anonymity of time and the ebb and flow of various peoples and the tramplings of forgotten armies throughout the ages. In Mother’s family there was a legend that a male ancestor in the eighteenth century had been a Jewish chamberlain to one of the old archdukes. There were many stories about these Jewish chamberlains, for even before Hitler there was a tendency among Germans to believe that Jews have some kind of occult power. Years later one of my gymnasium teachers informed me that there was Jewish blood in the royal family of England and that it came from the chamberlain of some half-witted archduke or elector who had hired the Jew to run his province for him. That particular teacher became a Nazi long after I had left him, and when Hitler came to power, he elaborated on the story by explaining to his pupils that King George V was actually the grandson of Benjamin Disraeli, which meant that King George VI was at least one-quarter Jewish and that it was no wonder that he and President Roosevelt got on so well because everyone knew that Roosevelt was a Jew born.
There was much music in Mother’s family. Her great-grandfather had been a child prodigy who had once been presented to Beethoven, but when he grew up the best he could do was to become Kapellmeister in a provincial city. Mother herself was a fine pianist, almost but not quite good enough for the concert stage. She had the same glossy black hair that you have, Stephanie, but her body was frailer, small in the bones, which is unusual with German women. This must have been an inheritance from her great-grandmother, the wife of the Kapellmeister, who had come from a line of Italian musicians. (I suppose that was why the story got around that we had Jewish blood.) She had the soft, deep eyes of many Italian women, which may explain why images of dark, still water so often come to me when I am tired or troubled, for the first time I saw her eyes they were smiling in wonder at her first baby, who was me.
She was very different from the general run of German women in those days. Most of them had been trained to think of themselves as Roman matrons and the war made some of them much fiercer than the men to whom they were supposed to be subservient. The lady living on the floor above us was a majestic hater, but Mother was not like that. She loathed war and her love for my father must have been remarkable if it made her marry a professional officer. But she also loved the moving waters of rivers and seas and perhaps she thought the navy different from the army. As in fact it was.
But my grandfather – he was the man about the house in my childhood and a wonderful old man he was to me. He used
to talk with me as though I were an adult and he was very outspoken about the war, though he was probably more reticent outside the house than in it. He understood very well what it would lead to. He used to remind me that he was just as much a Frenchman as a German because he had been born in Strassburg and had lived there for twenty years before the Prussians took the city from France and made it a part of Germany. He had been a professor of Philology in our university for more than thirty years, but he was retired the year the war broke out and he had to live with us because his pension had shrunk to less than a quarter of its value in purchasing power. He was a proud man who looked older than his actual age, for it was the fashion when he was young for men in their twenties to try to look like men in their forties. He became a widower five years before I was born. He had always been thrifty and he told me that the Latin phrase for “debt” was “another man’s money.” He used to earn a few extra marks by playing the organ in our cathedral and in the last winters of the war, which were exceptionally cold, he would let me walk out with him in the early morning when he went to the Minster. I used to sit on the edge of the organ bench while he played.
Sometimes as a special treat Grandfather took me with him at night when he went to the cathedral to practise. The only illumination came from the flickering votive candles and the light on the organ console. When it became known in the city that Grandfather played there almost every night, numbers of people came to listen. They were troubled people who never spoke, they were just there, and I used to see the music. I mean I saw it literally, especially if it were the music of Bach or Handel, saw it mounting like the risen dead in and out of the Gothic shadows. The most visible music of all was an organ version of Bach’s Eightieth Cantata, the one you like so much, which was based on the old Lutheran war-hymn “Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott.” When Grandfather played it he pulled out all the stops and the whole cathedral shook with it and first I thought the music was a picture of Germany surrounded and fighting for her life, then I saw the music grow into the boughs and mountains of the Black Forest, then into the cathedral arches, then up and out toward the hands of the Supreme Ally of all living creatures who have the will and courage to go on living no matter what their lives are doing to them. “Nicht Bach,” said my grandfather, “sondern das Meer.” And I marvelled that the composer whose music is the most oceanic of them all should have a name which means “brook.”
Voices in Time Page 20