by Adam Sisman
The University registrar sat David down and marvelled at his lack of qualifications. When David’s schoolboy German failed him, they continued the conversation in English. David told the registrar that he wished to study German language and literature; the registrar suggested that he might find it easier to take an introductory course in philosophy instead, but David was adamant. With a droll smile the registrar wished the young man luck and shook his hand.1
By the end of that day David was the proud possessor of a student card, and had found himself a place to live, unfortunately in a French-speaking household.
A few weeks later Ronnie arrived in Bern. Together they went to the Kantonalbank and deposited a few hundred francs in David’s account, with a promise of more to follow. Under the illusion that Swiss bank managers could be manipulated as easily as their English counterparts, Ronnie treated Herr Joss to a long lunch before departing for St Moritz.
The first few weeks at the University were difficult for David. He attended seminars at which he did not dare open his mouth, and lectures on literature that he could not have understood even if they had been in English. Both his professors were German-born: one was Fritz Strich, whose important book Goethe und die Weltliteratur had been published only two years earlier. Strich portrayed Goethe as an advocate of ‘world literature’, to counter the Nazis’ appropriation of German cultural figures for narrow nationalist purposes. David’s other professor was Jonas Fränkel, who was mainly interested in Keller and Spitteler,* two Swiss German writers unfamiliar to David. Furtively he noted down their names and later looked them up in the library. As a Jew, Fränkel had been resented by Swiss Nazis, who had successfully intrigued to have him ousted as editor of Keller’s complete works (the canton of Zurich went so far as to deny him access to Keller’s archives), and had made his work on Spitteler as difficult as possible.2 Though the Swiss far right had been less prominent since the end of the war, neo-Nazi groups continued to agitate against ‘over-foreignisation’.
After one of these seminars, at which David was obviously struggling, Professor Strich took him aside. ‘Young man,’ he asked, ‘what are you doing here?’
‘I’m an Englishman,’ David replied, ‘studying German culture.’
‘You are welcome,’ the Professor said gravely.*
Under Strich’s tutelage, David embraced German literature and letters with the zeal of a convert. Suddenly, instead of Keats he had Hölderlin; instead of Byron, Heine; and for his narcissistic hours of introspection and impossible love, The Sorrows of Young Werther. He took to writing self-conscious poetry about lost horizons, and painting lurid skyscapes that seemed to him, at the time, every bit as good as the equivalent works by Nolde. Losing himself in the cobbled winter streets of Bern, many of them covered by vaulted arcades, he recited Hermann Hesse: ‘strange to wander in the fog, everyone is alone, no tree knows the other, each is alone’.†
Not that he was alone all the time: he soon made friends, among them Kaspar von Almen, a fellow student at the University, with whom he engaged in intense conversations on poetry and the soul, and on the cultural differences between the English and the Swiss. Von Almen was a wealthy young man; his family owned hotels at Kleine Scheidegg in the Bernese Oberland and at Trümmelbach in the valley above Lauterbrunnen, below the Jungfrau. (Trümmelbach was a romantic situation: it was here that Byron had stayed in 1816 and been inspired to write his poem Manfred.) Perceiving that David was lonely and short of money, von Almen invited him to come skiing during the Christmas vacation.
In the Bern pension where von Almen lived during term-time was a young woman called Erica, who would eventually become his wife. When he invited her to accompany him to the cinema, her hopes were raised. Unknown to her, however, von Almen had lent his heart, albeit temporarily, to an English girl. Outside the cinema she found another young man waiting for them. ‘I wait for somebody else, but here I present to you my friend David,’ von Almen explained. She was disappointed at first, but when she examined David more closely, she began to change her mind. ‘Not too bad,’ she decided.
In Bern David made timid excursions into the field of love. He developed a romantic obsession with a girl named Ursula, daughter of a don at the University, who allowed him to walk with her along the river, always accompanied by a chaperone.
With tears in his eyes, Herr Joss informed David that there was no more money in his bank account. A cheque received from Herr Cornwell had not been honoured. David left the French-speaking household and found himself the cheapest possible place to live, a tiny attic room, one of several that opened on to a corridor under the eaves of a house on the Längstrasse. The others were occupied by poor people, mostly unemployed. The only source of water was a cold tap and a basin that served the whole corridor. The house stood next to the Tobler factory, so that the whole house smelt of chocolate. His landlady, a Frau Schreuers, who lived with her son Lothar on the third floor, fed David breakfasts of salami and mint tea to keep up his strength. Meanwhile David found part-time work as a waiter in the railway-station buffet, and, he says, mucked out cages and washed elephants for the Circus Knie. Cycling to work he was stopped by the police, who threatened him with repatriation to England for the crime of riding an unlicensed bicycle.*
On Saturday afternoons David would put on his best suit and buy a ticket to the thé dansant at the Bellevue Palace. On Sundays he would stroll with the Schreuers along the Aare, or in the Gurten, a high park overlooking the city, reached by a funicular railway.
It did not take David long to appreciate that Swiss German was not High German: going to Bern to study German literature, he would later say, was like going to New Orleans to learn classical French. He spent some of his last francs on language tuition provided by a Frau Karsten from Hamburg. Some Swiss students were kind enough to speak High German to him, but most wanted to practise their English, so he sought out German students instead. Only three years after the end of the war, they could tell of extraordinary experiences in the recent past, and hardship difficult for a young Englishman to imagine. One of these was the crippled Alexander Heussler, from Kemnitz on the Baltic coast, in the Russian zone. He was older than David, and already in possession of a doctorate. Another was Horst Nözholt, who like Heussler was a few years David’s senior, old enough to have served in the army. He too came from the east, and would return there after completing his studies. Both would go into the blend from which emerged the figure of Axel in A Perfect Spy. ‘Neither fits the final portrait,’ David has subsequently written, ‘because in the end you have to give people bits of yourself so that you can understand them.’3 By contrast, Roland Reinäcker, who was introduced to David by Kaspar von Almen, was from Essen in the British zone, and his mother was Swiss. He was suspicious of Nözholt, whom he suspected of spying.
In A Perfect Spy Magnus Pym reflects that the German muse had no particular draw for him, then or later, ‘for all his loud enthusiasm’:
The point was she supplied Pym with the means, for the first time, to regard himself intellectually as a gentleman … When he went down to the warehouse in Ostring where Herr Ollinger had obtained illegal night work for him at the hands of a fellow philanthropist, he neither walked nor took the tram but rode with Mozart in his coach to Prague. When he washed his elephants at night he endured the humiliations of Lenz’s Soldaten. When he sat in the third-class buffet bestowing soulful looks on Elizabeth he imagined himself as Young Werther, planning his wardrobe before committing suicide. And when he considered his hopes and failures together, he was able to compare his Werdegang* with Wilhelm Meister’s years of apprenticeship, and planned even then a great autobiographical novel that would show the world what a noble sensitive fellow he was compared to Rick.
This interpretation is laden with self-mockery. David’s intellectual engagement with the German muse was profound. References to German literature abound in his work, even if few English-speaking readers notice them.4
Perhaps identifying with Young Wert
her, David underwent a crisis while in Bern, as he would confess two years afterwards in a letter to a girlfriend, written at four o’clock one morning. ‘I shall tell you of things I shall never tell anyone else,’ he told her, ‘and have certainly never yet told anyone.’ He detailed his feelings of alienation. ‘Everywhere I went, people seemed to be trampling on all that I loved,’ he wrote. ‘It seemed to me that God had played a huge joke on me, and the thing I held most important was the mirror of all the evil of mankind. I learned to mistrust love completely …’ David’s meaning is obscure, but it is obvious from the context that he is unburdening himself of something important.
I made a decision, rightly or wrongly I shall never know, to cut myself always from all the towering problems that seemed to be everywhere, and create a world of my own entirely. Already at school in England I had written ‘escapist’ poems for my own pleasure, and it was the memory of these that kindled the idea. On pretence of going on a ski-ing expedition I took a small room away from Bern and lived in it for several weeks – nearly three, I think – just writing and thinking, living in my own world – creating my own characters – or rather, principal character. Most of what I wrote was sheer nonsense, raving mad.
He told how he had created an imaginary girlfriend called ‘Judy’, to whom he addressed love poems – possibly a version of the girl in Thorpeness. But then Kaspar von Almen had invited him skiing, and physical activity had turned him outward again.5
On the slopes he was accosted by a dauntingly thin, gimlet-eyed Englishwoman. This was the formidable Ros Hepworth, secretary of the Downhill Only Club,* home of British skiing at Wengen since 1925. She was scouting for recruits to the Club’s new racing team, intended to develop British skiers capable of competing at international events. In commanding cadences that he would later hear employed by Britain’s first female Prime Minister, she insisted that he join. It was his patriotic duty, she instructed him. When he showed reluctance, she told him not to be ridiculous. ‘It will do you good and you’ll be serving your country.’6
David was summoned by Frau Schreuers to the telephone to take a call from Ronnie: ‘Son, I’ve got a job for you.’ He was to go to St Moritz, where the account for last winter’s visit was still outstanding. David’s task was a familiar one: to explain that the obstacles to passing on the money had proved more challenging than anticipated, but the matter was now in hand and would soon be dealt with. ‘And while you’re there,’ Ronnie added, ‘have yourself a steak on your old man.’
David made his way to St Moritz, and stammered out his lines to Herr Badrutt, a big, tender man, red-faced and anxious, who seemed just as embarrassed by the interview as his young visitor.* The manager was too courteous to do more than thank the young emissary for his good offices and tell him the time of the next train back to Bern, innocent of the fact that David lacked the money for the fare and intended to hitchhike.7
So David tells the story, though he was unaware of evidence that Ronnie did try to pay the hotel bill, albeit illegally. In 1954 he would be convicted of an offence dating from this period, of borrowing Swiss francs from an unauthorised dealer – perhaps his contact at the Swiss Embassy in London. Maybe the Badrutts, despairing of ever being paid, had alerted the authorities to the proposed method of payment.
David’s wanderings took him to the English church in Kirchenfeld, more from a desire to hear English voices again than out of any need to commune with his maker. There, on Christmas Day, he made the acquaintance of a county lady in tweeds and sensible shoes who introduced herself as ‘Wendy Gillbanks’, and her handsome, chummy, amusing friend ‘Sandy’, both of the Consular Section of the British Embassy. They invited him back for a glass of sherry and a spot of lunch the next day, and gently probed him on his attitudes and beliefs. When the subject of service to one’s country came up in the conversation, David was keen to prove himself a patriot, conscious that his father had contributed not very much to the struggle against Hitler. When presented with a legal document pledging him to secrecy – perhaps a version of the Official Secrets Act – at the British Embassy, he had no hesitation in signing.
In 1948 it was not hard to make the case that Britain faced a threat from the East. As Nazi Germany collapsed, the Red Army had occupied Eastern and much of Central Europe. One by one, democratic governments in the countries occupied by Soviet forces were being replaced by Communist regimes owing their allegiance to Moscow. Earlier in the year a Communist coup had overthrown the Czech government of President Beneš, an event with particular resonance in Britain, because of the lingering shame felt at the betrayal of the Czechs at Munich. Even in countries not occupied by the Red Army, fragile democracies were threatened by Communist takeover. It seemed conceivable that all Europe might fall into Stalin’s dominion, that the Red Army might soon be encamped on the Channel coast. In June 1948 the Russians had begun blockading the Western zones of Berlin, the only territory behind the Iron Curtain outside their control. In response the Western Allies were flying in supplies to keep the Berliners from starving.
So when Sandy asked David to attend meetings of left-wing student groups, and report the names of any other British citizens he spotted there, or of any Czechs or Hungarians who might happen to be present, he was happy to do so, even if they did take place late at night and even if he did find some of the debate hard to comprehend. And when they asked him to pop down to Geneva for a day, and sit on a park bench with a volume of Goethe’s poems open on his lap, until a passing stranger asked whether he had seen his lost dog, he was happy to do that too.
Before David’s year in Bern came to an end, he attended a lecture given by Thomas Mann at the baroque concert hall of the Casino, to commemorate the bicentenary of Goethe’s birth. It was an appropriate subject for Mann, now in his seventies, who had been awarded the Goethe Prize that year. After the First World War he had written an important essay on the role of the artist in society, based on a comparative study of Goethe and Tolstoy. And in 1939 he had brought out Lotte in Weimar, a novel about Goethe, in which the poet is reunited in old age with the woman whom he had loved forty years earlier, the woman who had inspired him to write The Sorrows of Young Werther. Mann’s fictional Goethe had reflected on the immoderate character of the German people, in particular their susceptibility to ‘any mad scoundrel who appeals to their lowest instincts, who confirms them in their vices and teaches them to conceive nationalism as isolation and brutality’. No one reading Lotte in Weimar in the post-war years could fail to make the connection with the mad scoundrel who had so recently led the German people into the abyss. Indeed, this passage from Mann’s novel had been quoted in his summing-up by the chief British prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, Hartley Shawcross, in the mistaken belief that these were the authentic words of Goethe himself.
To David’s indignation, Mann’s lecture had been picketed by neo-Nazis, who complained that the novelist had become Anglicised during his exile in America.
Full of enthusiasm for what he had heard, David made his way to the distinguished speaker’s dressing room. His first impression of the man who opened the door was that he looked like the film actor Clifton Webb. The Great Man asked David what he wanted. ‘I want to shake your hand,’ David replied. ‘Here it is,’ said Thomas Mann, offering his hand.
After a year in Bern David had learned to speak fluent German. But Frau Karsten told him, in her severe way, that in order to know the real Germany, he must go there, ‘even in these bitter times’. So, at the end of the 1949 summer term, David crossed into Germany, or rather into the Federal Republic (West Germany), which had only just come into being, following the de facto partition of Germany between the zones occupied by the Western Allies and the Russians. The Berlin blockade had failed, but West Berlin remained an island surrounded by a sea of Communist-controlled territory. With Roland Reinäcker as his guide, David travelled to Essen, where Reinäcker’s parents lived, and toured the industrial Ruhr district, pulverised by Allied bombers during the war a
nd still largely in ruins. In Lower Saxony, he walked the empty alleys of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where the foul stench of dying humanity still lingered, and struggled to reconcile what he was witnessing with the high cultural abstractions he had been studying over the past year. David obtained a pass to visit West Berlin, where he gazed across the frontier into the Eastern sector of the city, capital of the new German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany).
In Berlin, David suffered a painful swelling in his testicles. A British doctor diagnosed mumps and advised bed-rest, but refused to admit him to the main British military hospital on the grounds that David was a civilian, with a visa to West Germany stamped ‘Visitor No Facilities’; instead he was put to bed in what had been an air-raid shelter, a former U-bahn station, listening to the often horrifying stories of his German fellow patients. When he had recovered enough to travel, he returned to England to recuperate further at Tunmers, lying in bed while Jean read to him.
Roland Reinäcker came to visit him and stayed a fortnight. To him, Chalfont St Peter seemed very civilised, by comparison with the wreckage of the Ruhr. Every morning at seven o’clock a maid brought him a cup of tea, and then he and David would go riding before breakfast.
Reinäcker, who was very much a ladies’ man, found David’s stepmother very attractive and sympathetic. She and Ronnie took the two young men to the Café Royal, where Marlene Dietrich was making a comeback. Reinäcker’s godfather, a Swiss plastic surgeon living in London, who had been invited to join them, was momentarily disconcerted when Ronnie offered to obtain for him a cut-price Bentley. On another day Ronnie despatched his son and his guest to the Nottingham races, to put money on Prince Rupert. Following his instructions they placed a large each-way bet; the horse came in second, ensuring that they had some winnings to take back to Ronnie. Reinäcker remembers David proudly declaring that ‘We are not punters, we are owners’ when asked to pay the entrance fee. This announcement may have undermined the essentially covert nature of the operation.