The early mornings were the most exciting times. On winter days Grandfather and I would get up in the dark and dress and go out and see the gables and the red roofs of the city coming up sharp against the first light. Our breath was visible as it puffed out in little clouds, the morning giving us its energy as we walked through the narrow, winding streets of the Old City. Usually we took the narrow little Herrnstrasse which led directly to the back of the Minster, but I liked it when Grandfather chose the curving Salzstrasse with clean mountain water gushing through deep stone gutters between the sidewalks and the cobbles of the street itself. It was a little longer but it was more beautiful. We heard the angelus from the slim spire of our cathedral of red sandstone, the scars of old cannonballs on its walls, and I remember Grandfather remarking that people had been listening to those bells for nearly seven hundred years. When we left the apartment we always had to cross the bridge over the little Dreisam River which comes down from the Black Forest beside the Schillerstrasse where we lived. Most mornings there were mist patches over the water and the current flowing over the terraced bottom was just fast enough to keep it from freezing, though there were pockets of shell ice along the shores. The city was cold, clean, silent, and orderly, the war was barely a hundred kilometers away, and I was a child.
Just across the river was the massively angular medieval Schwabentor, which had been a city gate in the old days. It made me think of armored knights riding out to the wars of my storybooks, but on several dark mornings we saw modern soldiers marching through it with the solid, rumbling tramp of infantry under full pack, tired men in worn, patched field gray and flat forage caps, their Mausers slung by straps over their shoulders with the barrels sticking up like a hedge of broomsticks, their heavy coal-scuttle steel helmets secured to their packs. In the stillness of early morning we heard the tramp, tramp, tramp of two thousand boots hitting the cobbles in the plodding, businesslike march of the German army, and we knew why they were here and where they were going. The southern front near our city was the quietest in the West and any troops sent there had been collected from the tag ends of divisions which had been chewed to pieces on the big fronts farther north. They marched with the blank eyes of men who had learned long ago to live without hope and each soldier stared at the jogging pack of the man just ahead of him.
“So we’ve come to this,” my grandfather said the first time we saw the soldiers. “Things are so bad they’re moving them at night so the people won’t see what they look like.”
It was only then that I began to be afraid, and the fear grew rapidly. It was only then that I knew in the way a child does that most of the things they had been telling us in school were lies, that the French were not cowards and the English were not bad soldiers and that perhaps we were as much responsible for the war as they were. When we entered the cathedral in the last winter of the war it was often so cold my grandfather had to warm his hands over the votive candles before going up to the organ loft to play. The people who came to early Mass seemed different from the ones who came at night. It was not the music they craved but the Mass itself and I saw them huddled like bundles in their shabby clothes praying for the souls of the dead and the lives of the living.
The war, Der Krieg – I used to think it was everywhere. It was in the desperate hardness of everyone’s work and in the eyes of the people who knew we were losing yet hoped for a miracle, for now the government was telling us that if we lost the war we could expect no mercy. The war was in the flat of our neighbor, Studienrat Zimmermann, the night his only son Alphonz, home on a five-days leave, invited us over so that he could play piano-violin duets with my mother. His three younger sisters looked at him adoringly and after he had finished playing he pushed back his forelock, looked at his rough hands, and smiled in a strange way and said, “This I will remember when …” and did not finish the sentence. Sure enough a month later, just after we had been told by the newspapers that our men had broken the British Army in the north and were advancing on Paris and that we would win the war by the summer, the word came that Alphonz had fallen at last.
THREE
This is what troubles me now I am no longer young, now I am living in another country on the western side of the ocean and I see that this new country has suddenly become nervous with discontent and does not know why. It troubles me that fear is different from discontent and that there is something in discontented people that makes them crave fear just as it makes people crave sex or the bottle. Fear – a distant fear and not the terror of bombardment or torture – a distant fear is very exciting. In those days in the war it heightened my sense of everything. It made the city and the cathedral, the music and the spring flowers when finally spring came, seem more poignantly lovely than they have ever seemed since. We were always saying how much we longed for peace, but the suffering and the hunger had to go beyond bearing before people began to talk of giving up. And when that happened the whole country turned hideous.
I remember the horrid look on the face of another schoolboy when he told me my father was sure to die and that it would serve him right for the coward that he was. We got into a fight immediately and the boy was stronger than me and made my nose and mouth bleed pretty badly. All these boys whose fathers and big brothers were in the army were now cursing the navy because their parents told them the sailors skulked in harbor while the soldiers fought and died. What this boy meant was something I had been dreading anyway, that when the war was hopelessly lost the navy would be ordered to save its honor by sailing out to certain death against overwhelming odds, for the English who had been too strong for them from the beginning of the war were now reinforced by the Americans. By this time the politicians and the newspapers were talking about fighting to the last drop of blood. By this time also I was old enough to have a pretty clear idea of what happens to a warship when the shells explode inside it. I became insomniac with visions of my father lying wounded on a steel deck frying to death when the deck turned white-hot from the fires. But that last drop of blood – I used to wonder how they measured it out, how they were sure there was any left in the body, did they squeeze it out like the last gob in a toothpaste tube or what did they do?
“Quatsch!” said my grandfather when I asked him to explain. “Quatsch – like everything else they tell you.”
Mother was seldom home after breakfast, if you could call the tiny roll and the cup of ersatz coffee a breakfast. She went to the hospital where she nursed wounded soldiers and often it was midnight before she returned. She looked terribly tired and thin like everyone else, and being slim anyway, she had too little flesh to hide the crow’s-feet about her eyes and the constant fear for her husband gave her chronic headaches. There was so little to eat that this was called the winter of turnips, and as our bellies shrank, the British blockade was blamed for it. Actually, as I later discovered, the real cause was not the blockade at all, but our generals’ insatiable appetite for human lives. They were so hungry for men that they conscripted the majority of our farm workers. Of course, when the war was over, the continuance of the blockade was very effective in creating the mood for the next war. Anyway, towards the war’s end, as has happened in so many other wars, we were hungry all the time. Often I could not sleep because of hunger and when I did sleep I sometimes dreamed of wolves in the snow. But in the last winter of the war, again because of hunger, occurred one of the happiest and proudest days of my life.
Lying awake one night I suddenly thought, “Why am I lying here when there are hares in the forest?” I dressed quietly, collected a few necessaries, and slipped out of the apartment and down the stairs into the silent city. The only sound was the whisper of the Dreisam under the bridge. I had read in a boys’ magazine how to set snares and was sure I was going to be successful. The ground was frozen, there was a film of snow on it, and I knew the hares would be gray. It was a short, steep walk out of our part of town into the Black Forest and when I reached higher ground I followed the footpath into the trees. When I
came out from the trees I looked down on the city lying below open to the sky and a last quarter-moon. The slim spire of the Minster rose out of its heart steadfast and beloved.
I went back into the trees again and after a short walk came to a small clearing where there was an abandoned cottage built of thick logs morticed with plaster and held together by S-shaped iron clamps. I had seen it before and knew it had belonged to a solitary forester who had gone to the war. I tried the door but saw it was double-locked with a huge padlock and a heavy lock with a bolt. Then I went back among the trees and set two snares about a hundred meters inside the tree growth. I waited near by and listened for nearly an hour. The frost was searching for my bones when I heard a squeak, almost a scream like a tiny infant’s cry. I shivered and waited until I heard another scream. “I’ve caught the hare and the hare’s wife,” I thought, and came out from my hiding place and killed them with blows of a stick on the backs of their heads. When I removed them from the snares I saw a film of blood at their throats and now it was dawn. The moon was pallid and low in the sky and the air had the pallor and promise of a windless dawn. I walked home proudly with the furry animals. They were heavy and hung limply and I was tired and achingly hungry when in full daylight I reached home and climbed the flight of stairs to our apartment on the second floor.
By this time Grandfather had returned from the Minster and he growled at me, “Where have you been, Bubi? Your poor Mother is frantic. She went to the hospital but she is frantic. What have you been doing?”
Then he saw my two hares and I swear that the lips of that disciplined old man actually slavered. If old people are healthy, hunger can be even worse for them than for the young.
“Ach, Conrad! Zwei Hasen! Zwei Hasen! Du liebe Zeit, was hast du getan?”
After I had swallowed a cup of ersatz coffee and a crust of bread, he told me to run to the hospital and tell my mother I was safe.
It was a Saturday and Mother would not have to get up early next morning. When I came home from the hospital, I found that Grandfather had already skinned and cleaned the hares and laid them out ready for Mother to season and cook them. He held up the skins.
“These will make two pairs of good mittens. One for your mother and one for you. I’ll make them myself.”
When Mother came home she seasoned the hares and put them into the oven to bake. She boiled a whole swede turnip and I tell you that never afterwards did I feel so proud as when Grandfather chuckled and said, “Conrad has given us a feast. But a feast he has given us.” After dinner, which we ate slowly, relishingly, Grandfather turning to me from time to time and saying, “Ach, Conrad, was für ein Knabe bist du!” Mother smiled with tears in her eyes and said, “How proud your father will be when I write to him about this.” For many minutes we sat feeling the good food working inside us and then Grandfather went to the cupboard and carefully measured out into two thimble cups the last of his old cognac. Smiling broadly he said, “Nunc est bibendum.” He and Mother sat close to the amber-colored porcelain stove – I had spent the afternoon walking the railway line with a sack and had picked up enough coal to partially heat our living room for two days – they sat there turning their glasses and warming them with their fingers and palms, sniffing the cognac and touching it with the tips of their tongues.
Grandfather must have become drunk with the food for he broke into a Latin student drinking song. Mother went to the piano, caught up the tune, and joined him, and because I knew the words I joined in, too. Then Grandfather took a beer mug from the mantelpiece, one of those German porcelain Krüge decorated with grotesque medieval figures, and he waved the empty mug in time to the music. When the music stopped he gave us one of his rare, wonderful smiles and announced that he felt ten years younger. Indeed, he could even say that he felt fifteen years younger. Then his smile became almost crafty, his beard spreading because of it, and he looked at Mother and said, “Trudi, when I was a young man I did not comport myself like a Herr Professor. I can tell you that when I was a young man in Strassburg I knew some girls, but never once did I see a girl like you.” Mother smiled back at him and said, “I hope that isn’t true.” He pretended to be shocked and said, “Do you say that I ever tell a lie?” And she said, “What will I play for you now – Mozart?” Grandfather, no longer drunk with food, said decisively, “No, the Titan!”
Mother sat down at the piano and her face became composed and contemplative as she selected what to play. Then she began Beethoven’s last sonata, brooding, all its creator’s violence absorbed into his final gentleness, holding within its sounds so much of our condition that words can never express. We sat still, bathed in the music, and when she finished, Grandfather rose and kissed her cheek. Then he said something that to me was meaningless, though many years later, remembering it, I understood what he meant.
“Beethoven may have been born in Bonn, but his family was Flamand.”
Those were the last and only hares I caught. When a country is starving, it doesn’t take long for the edible wild animals to disappear even in a forest as large as the Schwarzwald.
Grandfather was the first of the many men I have known, myself included, who saw the disintegration of their world. He had grown up in a time in which most university lectures in Europe east of the Rhine were given in Latin and when scholars thought of themselves as an international brotherhood. He was nauseated by the Germany that grew up after the Franco-Prussian War. “Germany!” he used to say in anger. “When I was young it wasn’t this. It was the home of the German people. It was the land of poets and musicians and thinkers.”
He made me think of an indignant old bear when he went down on his knees to pry open the briquets of pressed coal dust we used in our porcelain stove. There was never enough of them to take the chill out of our rooms in January and February and soon there were none at all. Even the briquets had been harnessed to propaganda. When we pried them open we saw pressed into their insides the words GOTT STRAFE ENGLAND. Of all the things that disgusted Grandfather, this made him the most disgusted of all.
In the war’s last year I acquired from Grandfather a sense of time unusual for a boy, a sense young people today have not at all, so far as I can see. I myself lost it entirely when I became a university student, and this also was natural and perhaps healthy. The young can do nothing if they have to carry the past on their shoulders. Now that I am old it has returned to me. It’s simply a feeling that the present moment is unreal because it is a product of the past and a transition into the future. It was not that Grandfather lived in the past, though naturally he did a little. Rather it was that he saw the present with such experienced eyes that he often seemed to be living in the future, which would become real only after he was dead. At the time this frightened me. Now it only makes me feel lonely for him.
“They will tell you about the Laws of History when you go to the university. Don’t believe them. This war wasn’t caused by laws, it was caused by fools and spoiled brats.”
Grandfather was no romantic as my father was, even as I myself have been, and this was natural in a classical scholar. One night while we were waiting for Mother to return from the hospital, the windows blacked out in case of an air raid from the French, the old man in his worn black suit shabby about the knees and elbows hanging loose on a body that once had been robust, he spoke to me as though he were speaking to himself.
“Queen Victoria,” I heard him say. “Old Queen Victoria, she should have lived forever.”
I had no idea what he meant and for a long time he did not explain. He picked up an empty meerschaum, stuck it between his teeth, and hunched forward breathing air fiercely through the stem. It had been months since he had had any tobacco to fill it.
“Twice I heard Victor Hugo speak,” he said finally. “Twice also I heard Humboldt. He worked in Paris for twenty-one years before Germany became a religion, then he lectured at Göttingen and I was there to hear him. Brahms and Wagner I have heard conduct their own music. Saint-Saëns also. An
d now what do we have? Strauss!”
He made an abrupt turn of his whole body and looked at me with the expression of a scholar studying a new manuscript. What he saw there I don’t know. After a while he looked away and seemed lost in his own thoughts and it must have been ten minutes before he spoke again.
“Money won’t be worth the paper they’ll print it on. The fools know it already. When the old emperors began putting lead into the denarius and the drachma they sealed the fate of the Empire. Foreigners are going to come in here from all over Europe and buy property for a song. Our people have believed everything they were told and it’s no wonder we have fools for our rulers. It’s going to be years. Years it’s going to be before anyone will even dare to understand what all this means. How many states are going to disappear? States have their seasons like the leaves of a forest. They come and they wither but the people remain. When you’re as old as I am, living in a world so different I can’t even imagine what it will be like, let me tell you that men are not going to be different from what they are now. Queen Victoria should have stayed alive another twenty years at least. With that woman alive, he’d never have dared do it.”
Voices in Time Page 21