He asked her what people in England thought of Hitler and she said they didn’t take him seriously. He asked what she herself thought of him and she said she had thought very little about him. Hanna and her father were exceptionally close, so close that her mother may have resented it. When she absorbed the expression on his face she felt frightened.
“What I’m seeing, Hanna, is something only one other person I know is seeing. What I’m seeing is something unthinkably terrible. This man is soon going to become this country’s dictator.”
She looked at him incredulously. He nodded and went on. “There’s a limit to what the human mind can stand. Too many calamities have happened too fast. The war was lost. The Treaty was terrible. The middle classes lost all their savings in the inflation. Still the people held together, and two years ago most of them were working. Then pouf – inside a few months everything fell apart and now there are at least seven million Germans out of work.”
“But it’s the same everywhere else. Look at England. Even America.”
“That doesn’t make it the same. England is an old nation, but Germany has never been sure of herself as a nation. She’s falling back onto what she always was – a collection of tribes. America? If an American is out of work he may feel guilty. He certainly will feel angry. But a German out of work feels sick in his mind.”
A silence fell between them and finally the doctor said, “If I were to tell you that the neurotic symptoms of a large number of my patients are becoming alarmingly similar to Hitler’s, would that seem important to you?”
She looked at the sadness in his face and nodded, “Yes, it would. If you said it.”
“You see, this republic of ours never grew out of the people. It was imposed on them by victors who have totally discredited themselves. Now it’s falling apart.” He paused, looked away, and said very quietly, “Germany is on the verge of a mass psychosis and Hitler is going to be its catalyst.”
She still could not really believe him. She said what most people were saying, “But this little man, he’s been nobody all his life.”
“That’s just it, Hanna. Most people in Germany have been made to feel like nobodies. The young believe that nobody wants them. But Hitler wants them and he will find them. He’s probably found enough of them already.”
How can I describe this man Hitler to André and his friends? A squat figure, an unsavory face, a ridiculous moustache, short legs, a backside shaped like a basket, a raucous, uncouth voice – I read somewhere that he had only a single testicle.
Hanna asked what her soldier-uncle thought of Hitler and her father smiled wearily.
“Your Uncle Helmuth is a civilized man. Unfortunately, civilized men will be the last to recognize what I’ve been seeing. He tells me the Officers’ Corps is now the best since Gneisenau and I’d take his professional opinion that it is. No wonder I’ve not been sleeping well. There’s only one man I know among the officers who sees what I’m seeing. You’ve met him. He’s often been at our house. You’ve played chamber music with him.”
“Admiral Canaris? Does he agree with what you’re telling me?”
“But Wilhelm is alone.” He pointed his pipe at her. “I ask you never to mention – not to anyone – never mention anything I may ever tell you in private about Wilhelm Canaris. Yes, indeed he’s alone. The rest of our officers are the most professionally professional men in the whole of Europe. They have no idea how isolated and arrogant they are. All but a few of them despise Hitler, but he sees through them like plate glass. When he gets power – and I say when, not if – the first thing he will demand is a huge army. Can you imagine any professional soldier objecting to that? It would not be unpleasant to your Uncle Helmuth if he were promoted to lieutenant-general and commanded a corps. They’ll all be promoted. All the sergeants will become lieutenants, all the lieutenants will become majors, and so on.”
She sat silent for nearly a minute; they both sat silent.
Then Hanna said, “I suppose Uncle Helmuth thinks the army will be able to use him and then control him.”
“He hasn’t told me that.”
“But he thinks it?”
“Probably. But I tell you, the army won’t have a chance with him. Those generals follow the rule-book, but Hitler talks directly to the volcano underneath the rules. Nothing in their experience has prepared them for a man like this. When has anyone in this country known how to strike straight through the rules to what lies underneath them? It’s as clear as daylight to me what has happened to this man. When he gets power he will make it happen to the whole country.”
“But what has happened to him? To me he’s just a crazy little man who talks nonsense. What has happened to him?”
“I wonder if even you will believe me. A total inversion of his original character – that’s what has happened to him. I’ve seen it in a few patients – generally they were criminals. None of them had abilities but this man has incredible abilities. Let me put it to you like this.
“Using our ghastly professional jargon, let’s start with the preposterous German authoritarian superego that demands more of people than any individual can fulfill. You know it yourself. The soldier who is supposed to be incapable of fear because he’s a German. The philosopher who is never satisfied to understand a few things perfectly but must set out to understand everything in creation. The planner who is expected – and who expects himself – to foresee every possible difficulty before it occurs. One could go on and on.” He paused. “In Hitler, this impossibly tyrannic superego has combined with a particularly ferocious and cruel id to crush out his original ego as though it had been caught between a hammer and an anvil. Adolf Hitler the little corporal? Adolf Hitler the dreamer and failed artist? This man has literally ceased to exist and an entirely different man has been born.”
Hanna listened in silence and when her father stopped talking neither of them spoke for nearly a minute.
Finally she said, “So he’s insane – is that what you’re telling me?”
“Psychotic certainly, but so far his psychosis is under control. It’s working for him. It’s what gives him his incredible self-confidence. He has a perfect eye for everyone’s weakness – especially for the weaknesses of the powerful.”
The doctor went on to say that he took another war for granted and that it would not be pleasant to have to pray that his country would lose it.
“For when he comes to power he will be absolute, and he will act with such speed that nobody will believe it. But Hanna, there’s something else and it’s why I beg you to return to England and stay there.”
Then he began talking about Hitler’s obsession with the Jews and he asked her to remember that in Hitler’s eyes the long service of their family would mean nothing whatever.
“I’m one-half Jewish and you’re one-quarter Jewish, but in Hitler’s country we will all be Jews whether we’ve practised the religion or not.”
He talked to her for nearly an hour more. Finally she asked him if he himself intended to emigrate and practise in another country.
“Your mother wants me to leave, but not even she believes what I believe. As she has no Jewish blood – as Hitler would put it – she’d be safe enough. At least for a while. At my age I feel it would be professionally dishonorable for a psychiatrist to walk away at the moment when a psychotic is about to become his country’s ruler. But you’re too young, Hanna. You could do nothing here. Your whole life is before you and you have a duty to that.”
When Hanna returned to England her father’s warning seemed unreal. The English had far too many troubles of their own to worry about Adolf Hitler. Only five weeks after Hanna had left her father, Hitler not only gained power, but gained it legally. There must have been some people in England who were concerned, but Hanna never met any. Just as her father had predicted, he acted with lightning speed. He drove the communists underground and soon he would destroy them. He began to get the unemployed off the streets and back to work. Knowing that
no other nation would agree, he even proposed universal disarmament. As for his attitude to Jews, most foreigners and even many Germans refused to take it seriously.
Now I come to Conrad. He had certainly known about Hitler and the Nazis but had thought of them as a bunch of ignorant crackpots. Like nearly everyone else, he refused to believe they were serious about the Jews. When Hanna tried to warn him, he reminded her that Jews were in control of many of the key positions in universities, hospitals, and the law. This had caused inevitable resentment, he said. It had caused resentment in Austria for years. But – as my generation would have put it – what was new in that?
Hanna gave up arguing with him and suggested that he write to his father. He did so, asking him specifically if Hitler really meant what he was saying against the Jews. He got an instant reply warning him never to ask such questions again, never to utter any kind of criticism against a leader who was Germany’s savior.
A letter like this would have told the mature Conrad all he needed to know, but Conrad was not mature then. As Dr. Erlich had said to Hanna, trained men of reason are the last to recognize the bared teeth of the human ape when it appears before them. Half a century later, when I was young, it was the same story all over again.
Matters came to a head between Conrad and Hanna in the summer of that same year. He had finally published the results of his long researches and within his narrow speciality they had been well received. The famous Russian scholar wrote him a letter of praise. He also wrote to the Director of the Grosser Kurfürst Institut in Berlin, and in August of that year Conrad received a letter informing him that a post on its staff was his for the asking.
Now for the first time in his life Conrad could look forward to financial security and even to a modest fame. Having finished his work with the papyri, he was ready to enter the world of Renaissance art. Full of joy and deeply in love, seeing his Grand Design developing just as he had planned it, he asked Hanna to dine with him in celebration. This time it would not be Soho and a carafon of Chianti, it would be the Savoy and champagne.
It was not until dinner was over that the roof fell in on his head. He was sitting relaxed sipping Turkish coffee, looking at Hanna and feeling like a sailor who had finally come to harbor after a long and dangerous voyage. Then he realized that Hanna had been silent during the whole evening and that her eyes across the table were remote and on her face was an expression of withdrawal he had never seen before. His euphoria began to evaporate. He reached across the table and closed his hand over hers, but there was no responding pressure.
“Hanna darling, what’s the matter?”
She looked back at him and said, “I’m so proud of you. I’m so happy for you.”
Then she looked away and he felt a chill.
“There seems to be something I don’t understand,” he said.
“Yes,” she said in a small voice. He saw her make a compulsive movement, take a handkerchief out of her bag, and wipe her eyes.
“Is it something I’ve done? Is it something I’ve said?”
She shook her head violently, “No!”
“Then what is it? Has something happened at home? Are your parents all right?”
She turned to him in a surge of grief. “I should have insisted on making you understand long ago. I tried in so many ways but you never heard me. Don’t think I blame you. Don’t think that, please don’t. I was so happy and happiness is going to become so rare. I’ve had such happiness with you I’ll remember it for what’s left of my life.”
He stared at her in total incomprehension. “For what’s left of your life! What is it you’re trying to tell me?”
“What I’ve been trying to tell you for so long and you couldn’t listen. I didn’t say wouldn’t. I said couldn’t. Oh my God, but I understand you. Yes, I do. Nearly everyone in Europe is like you, but to accept what I accept – they can’t.”
He was hurt, bewildered. “I seem to have lost you.”
“It’s me who has lost you.” She was panting with emotion. “Haven’t I told you, dear – haven’t I told you I can never go back to Germany the way things are now? Haven’t I asked you to try to find a post in America?” She bowed her head, put her face in her hands, and said, “No, all that I said isn’t true. I only wished you to do it for your own sake. I wouldn’t have gone to America with you, either.”
“Hanna!” He was shocked. He thought something had happened to her mind and he had always assumed that she was more mature than himself. “Hanna, you’ve either told me too much or you’ve told me too little.”
“Can’t you for once let me be a woman? Can’t you?”
Later in his diary Conrad wrote that his intuitions knew exactly what she was trying to tell him but that he could not accept it. For if he did accept it, what would become of the ambitions of more than ten years, ambitions much deeper than a mere post in a famous institute? He was barely able to realize that the true reason for his relentless work had been a drive to release himself from his father without making his father despise him.
Hanna said, “You’d set your heart on it. It was to be your liberation. Now you’ve got it.”
He exploded into the usual rationalizations of nearly everyone at the time, including the most hard-boiled statesmen in the world. He stopped talking when he saw the expression on her face.
“What does your Uncle Helmuth think?” he said.
“I don’t know what he thinks now. A year ago he thought exactly as you told me your father thinks.”
“Aren’t both of them in a better position to know than you or I?” She smiled desperately. “Of all the heroines of antiquity, the one I’ve most pitied was Cassandra. I’m not calling myself a Cassandra. I’m calling my father one. Uncle Helmuth? I’d take his opinion on music and rose-growing and even on soldiering if he ever mentioned that – which he never has to me.”
He sat silently and she watched his face.
Quietly she said, “What about the Jews, Conrad?”
He winced. There was nothing to answer to that question now. She pushed back her chair and rose.
“Let’s go outside into the air while it’s still light,” she said. Holding hands they strolled down to the Thames Embankment in the twilight of a summer evening, sensing the majesty of the grand old city that most people still thought of as the capital of the world.
“I’ll be sorry to leave London,” he said.
“I’ll be even sorrier to see you go. I’ll be very sad to see you go.” His nerves tightened again. “I’m shaken. I thought I understood you.”
She pressed his hand. “And so you have! Understood me as I never dared hope I’d be understood by any man. Body and soul when we’ve loved you’ve understood me.”
They leaned in silence against the parapet, their arms about each other’s waists, he feeling her hip’s curve through the light dress she was wearing, she knowing that the beauty he had discovered in her own body had become sacred to this man. They watched the lights on the moving water and their gaze followed a late excursion boat passing downriver toward Greenwich.
“The tide is going out,” she said.
“Do you mean that symbolically?”
“I was just looking at it. It’s drawing out fast.”
He remembered his grandfather’s words about the gods leaving Troy and again was aware of the pressure of her hand on his own.
“Please don’t be offended, Conrad. You’re a scholar and I’m only a musician, but when I was in the university I used to hear professors and students talking about history just as I’ve heard you talk about it. For me, it’s made by men, and I’m afraid professors seldom meet the kind of men who make it. I’ve met a few. My father and my uncles have met many. But none of them has met a man like the one who’s making history in Germany now. I suppose you know his police have you in their files?”
“Why should they bother about me?”
“Oh, Conrad, where have you been living?”
He stared bleakly at
the river and the lights coming on in the city. Recalling the evening a few months later, he was to write that he knew that what she was telling him was the truth, but he knew it only in the way that a man knows that one day he is going to die.
Hanna was talking again. She was telling him some of what her father had told her, that Hitler’s psychosis was still under control and that it would remain so just as long as he was successful, as long as he received the echo from the people that he was the genius he felt himself to be.
Conrad almost exploded. “Him a genius! You tell me your father believes that?”
She gave up. She knew how it had been with him and so many others for a long time, that the word “genius” was sacred and applied only to men like Goethe and Beethoven.
They found an empty bench and watched the lights grow brighter as the last glimmer of twilight vanished into a moonless night. They sat there and listened to London, to the sonorous rumble of London as I myself would listen to it nearly two generations later with Valerie and in that very place. With Valerie who now was dead, along with much of London itself. What a marvellous name for a city was London! Rolling, deep-toned, fuller in sound than Roma and almost as heavy with experience.
Conrad began talking. “Do you remember that man from Munich we met last year, the one who’d been in New York? How he said that he resented New York because it made him feel like nothing, but that when London gave him the same feeling he couldn’t resent it?”
He drew her closer, turned her head to his own, kissed her, and felt the warmth of her breast.
“No darling, in spite of what your father says and with all respect to him, Hitler won’t be able to get away with it. I know our generals are political children and our admirals aren’t even that, but even if they can’t control him, there are others who can and will. The French have been stupid and malicious about Germany, but they’ll certainly know how to look after themselves. And finally there’s England. There’s London. It’s still the capital of the world.”
“Have you ever lived in France?” she asked quietly.
Voices in Time Page 25