Late that afternoon—it was an early dark, feldgrauer November—Herta was in the kitchen baking bread and I was alone in the library when the old man startled me by suddenly muttering, moaning, and twitching his limbs.
The first signs of life he’d shown since the attack. I’d always assumed he wasn’t going to make it, so when he started to groan and sputter I thought it was his death rattle. He certainly looked like someone in extremis. I hoped he was. I wanted him to die. We had to get to Rotterdam. Our ship was sailing in a few days. Before we left I wanted to bury the old man in the cemetery with his son.
His blue eyes snapped open, and he lay there blinking and moaning. Herta came in just then, saw him, and shouted for Karin, who came running downstairs.
Half an hour later they had the old man sitting up, swallowing broth Herta made and Karin spooned into him.
“There you are, Daddy, take a little bit at a time. We’re going to get you better.”
Her father was clinging to a very dim level of consciousness, barely able to open his lips, and I’d never seen her behave with such tenderness. I think she had all kinds of wild feelings kept in reserve through her childhood and now, with her mother dead and her father dying, those feelings were running around like children released from school.
A few minutes later Hermann, Freiherr von Weinbrenner, was vomiting and shitting with such devastating violence it seemed as if he were literally pouring his guts out.
We changed the sheets. He screeched when we tried to lift him. I used my necktie as a tourniquet to bind his arm, and Karin took a breath and plunged the needle, delivering the first injection, fifteen milliliters. His skin, gray as tallow. The whites of his eyes were stained with yellow.
The shot stunned him within a few minutes, but three hours later he was awake again, or at least conscious, and in pain—writhing and twisting. The pain was like a snake in his body, restlessly coiling and uncoiling. Karin had for some reason started a Mozart serenade on the turntable. Herta and I struggled to hold his arm while Karin stabbed at it, trying to hit a vein. She was weeping without making a sound, dripping tears while “Eine kleine Nachtsmusik” pranced deliriously through the room. At last she struck a vein and pushed the dose in far too quickly. Within a few seconds her father’s eyes rolled back in his head.
“Oh my Christ, Billy, I’ve killed him.”
We listened, I was hoping she had—but he kept breathing, hoarsely. He sounded like a bus grunting up the slope of Muswell Hill under wartime sky, carrying my mother and me.
We arranged rugs and blankets for our bed on the library floor. In the middle of the night her father swam back into consciousness. His moaning and thrashing awakened us, and I held him down while she delivered another shot in his arm.
KLINGER SCHOOL
Arten von Licht Buch [Kinds of Light Book], Karin v Weinbrenner. Unpaginated. In English and occ. German. Lange Family Archive, 11 C-12-1988. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.
Spread before you a map of prairie-land, and I shall point out the tract of territory known as the “Llano Estacado” or Staked Plain. It must be a map of modern time, based on the latest explorations; else you will have some difficulty comprehending the limits assigned to this singular, and yet almost unexplored district of country.
—Mayne Reid, The Lone Ranch, 1871
Von Papen and his circle invited the Danubian Oddball to become chancellor in January 1933. My father insisted the Germans would not tolerate the scoundrel for long. Such a shocking appointment could not stand. That fellow was a dupe, a simpleton. The reactionary politicians were using him to eliminate socialists and liberals they feared. But the generals would never submit to such a monkey whose insane program must lead to disastrous war.
That fellow would be gone after a couple of weeks. A month at most.
Buck’s analysis sounded sensible enough; it just didn’t bear any relationship to what was happening.
Immediately after Hitler’s appointment Günter Krebs started sporting his party membership pin on his lapel. This was against the code at IG Farben, but no one admonished him. Then one Friday he reported for work kitted out in a black SS uniform. Dr. Ziegler cast dark looks in his direction, but Günter ignored our chief and patiently explained the meanings of his various insignia and informed anyone who’d listen that his rank as SS Untersturmführer more or less corresponded to second-lieutenant rank in the army.
“You look like an undertaker in fancy dress!” my pal Ernst Mack told him.
“And you don’t show real pride as a German!” Gunter replied. “You fellows, with your cosmopolitan spirit, are seriously ill! But things will change.”
The following Monday he wore an ordinary business suit, but a precedent had been established, and from then on he appeared in his SS regalia at least one day each week.
And the “Horst Wessel Lied” had become the national anthem. At a joint meeting with the export sales staff, sheets printed with lyrics had been handed round, and everyone, including Kracauer, the last Jewish member of our department, had to stand up and sing:
For the last time, the call to arms is sounded!
For the fight, we all stand prepared!
Soon Hitler’s banners will fly over all streets.
The time of bondage will last but a little while now!
One afternoon Dr. Ziegler stopped by my desk to congratulate me for a précis of economic news I’d prepared from the American financial press.
“The work was well done, Lange, though I don’t know if they are in a mood to read it upstairs.”
“I can’t help that.”
“How well do you think the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ will translate?” His tone was sardonic.
“Not very well.”
“I wouldn’t think so. No one quite understands us Germans. I’m not sure I do myself. I’ve just authorized Kracauer’s transfer to the Montevideo sales office. At least he won’t have to sing ‘Horst Wessel’ anymore.”
A few weeks later—February 27, 1933—the Reichstag burned. The morning after, newspapers and the radio were insisting the fire had been set by Bolsheviks plotting a putsch. Even my father’s favorite read, the liberal and respected Vossische Zeitung, warned the situation presented a clear danger to the state and nation. A roundup of suspects was ordered. All of a sudden SA men were acting as auxiliary police. On my way to work I saw their brownshirt squads reeling through the streets in commandeered lorries.
That morning was sleeting and gray. At eleven o’clock all of us in the Translation Department were summoned to a meeting in one of the sleek conference rooms on the sixth floor. The sixth was where signatory executives had their aeries. We took seats around a magnificent African mahogany conference table. From the expansive windows there were wide views of the city and the black river. Waitresses went around pouring coffee into porcelain cups bearing the IG logo in gold.
We were aggressive young fellows. We thought a lot of ourselves. Each of us spoke two languages at least, and we referred to workers in other branches of IG Farben as “the drones.” We were a noisy bunch, but that morning we waited in silence. Most of us had never set foot on the sixth floor before. We didn’t know who’d be addressing us—it wasn’t even clear who’d called the meeting. Our chief, Dr. Ziegler, hadn’t shown up. Where the hell was he?
As minutes crept by and no one senior appeared, the tension expanded, the room pressurized. Could all this have something to do with what was going on outside, the truckloads of SA toughs rolling about the city; the smoldering ruin of the Reichstag in Berlin? And where was our much-admired chief?
Counting heads, I realized the only one from our department missing, apart from Dr. Ziegler, was Günter Krebs.
During the last few weeks Dr. Ziegler had been spending a lot of his time either visiting the plant at Hoechst or shut up in his office, his door guarded by his gorgeous Jewish secretary, Fräulein Reffe. Since getting to see the chief was so difficult, certain fellows i
n the department had started bringing their questions and work problems to—Günter Krebs. We were like a ship with the first mate beginning to take over command from the captain without anything being said about it. Weird. We were used to a clear hierarchy, so this kink in the chain of command was troubling. Ducky Krebs wasn’t competent to be a first mate; with his skills level, he was barely a deckhand. His authority derived solely from his black uniform. The atmosphere at IG had changed the moment Hitler had been appointed chancellor. One suddenly overheard Heil Hitler greetings being barked around the lobby in the morning. NSDAP pins sprouted on the lapels of senior executives, well-dressed men with Prokurist status whom I only saw when they were crossing the lobby in the morning and stepping into the paternoster elevators that lifted them noiselessly, elegantly to their sixth floor.
“The army of the black?” Kracauer had sneered, when Günter first showed up in SS regalia. “What’s wrong with the old feldgrau? That’s no uniform you’re wearing, Ducky, it’s a costume, and you don’t even know the difference.”
I missed Kracauer’s derisive tongue. Kracauer had kept Ducky in his place. He wouldn’t let Günter get away so easily with newfound authority based upon silver Death’s Head collar buttons.
The door of the conference room opened soundlessly, and two men entered. I recognized Dr. Schiller, Prokurist, the signatory executive in charge of Western Hemisphere export sales, supposedly a brilliant chemist. Schiller was a perfect IG Farben man, tall and slender, with a beautifully cut gray suit and a big head. In fact he looked like a well-dressed university professor. He was wearing a gold wristwatch on a brown leather strap, the thinnest watch I’d ever seen, no thicker than a five-mark coin.
The second man I didn’t recognize. He was younger than Dr. Schiller, fatter, and wore a rumpled suit of reddish tweed. He looked harried and clutched a sheaf of files under his arm.
The pressure in the room increased. I could hear crows yapping outside. Without sitting down Dr. Schiller placed both hands on the conference table and looked around at us.
“I’m sorry to keep you away from your important work. There are a few matters that need clearing up. Is everyone here? Krebs isn’t? Well, Untersturmführer Krebs has important business to attend.
“First things first. Dr. Ziegler is no longer of the Translation Department. He is no longer with the IG. This is a closed matter, and I am not at liberty to discuss it further. As of now, you serve under a new chief—Dr. Winnacker.” Schiller glanced at the fat man, who gave a little bow. “Dr. Winnacker is an esteemed scientist and a linguist and a good German, though he’s spent far too much time in South America, from my point of view. Anyway, now he is a headquarters man and your chief. It’s your responsibility to inform him of your current projects and in all ways to help him take up the reins of his work. Understood? Yes? Good.
“Second—and this statement is being read out in our offices and plants around the country, indeed around the world this morning.”
He read from a piece of paper in his hand.
“ ‘Given the very difficult situation our führer faces as he confronts the Bolshevik element, the board of directors of the IG Farbenindustrie affirms to its staff and to the German Volk that Adolf Hitler, the National Socialist Party, and the German nation are essentially one, that the recent and refreshing change in leadership has our absolute support, as do all measures our führer takes to maintain the integrity and dignity of the German people.’ ”
Dr. Schiller looked around the room. I couldn’t tell if he believed what he was saying. He was an executive trained to put force into his words whether or not he believed them, an executive for whom belief wasn’t essential. He found himself pushed out of IG three years later, and his pension severely cut, after some indiscreet words at a reception at the American embassy.
There was nothing for the rest of us to do but nod stupidly. The meeting was adjourned and we crept back to our department. Dr. Winnacker settled into Dr. Ziegler’s room, and that was that. Fräulien Reffe looked unhappy, but she wasn’t going to discuss what had happened.
On my way home I paused outside at the BMW showroom and peered in at their latest motorcycle, the R11.
Passion in metal, that’s what I was thinking. A thousand parts all working together. A piece of speed. A promise. Distance. Transcendence. That wicked, low-slung machine had over me something of the power that Lady Maire’s altarpieces, Palmesels, and chalices must have had over the faithful.
A salesman, a fellow about my own age, came out while I was staring at the bike.
“A beautiful machine, isn’t it?” the salesman remarked. “But let me ask. I’ve seen you here often enough. Are you shopping or dreaming?”
“Are BMW spare parts available in America? Out in the western parts? Texas? New Mexico?”
On that sleeting Frankfurt evening I just needed to hear myself say those bright sunny words. Texas. New. Mexico.
“No idea!” the salesman replied, with a cheerful smile. “Can’t say! But let me make some inquiries. I’m sure I can find out!”
I was at work the next morning when Herta, the chauffeur’s wife, approached my father in the stables at Walden. She was distraught. Her husband Solomon had gone out the evening before to drink beer at the Reichsbanner clubhouse in Niederrad and hadn’t returned. She was afraid he’d been taken into custody by SA auxiliaries.
Solomon was a loudmouth and a brawler and very proud of his membership in the Reichsbanner. Herta was too frightened to go to the clubhouse. Everyone had seen the Sturmtruppen uproarious and drunk, rushing back and forth across the river in stolen trucks. Everyone had listened to the radio announcer insisting that “nests of Communists” were being “wiped out” in retaliation for setting the Reichstag on fire.
Herta pleaded with my father to do something. Solomon was a Jew who worked for the Jewish traitor baron and that was enough to make him a target if he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A Reichsbanner drinking club the night after the Reichstag fire was certainly that.
The baron and Lady Maire were visiting her family in England. The baroness was riding to hounds on her brother’s estate in Northamptonshire.
Herta wept while my parents discussed what should be done. Buck made up his mind to visit Solomon’s club, which was a storefront in Niederrad, and make inquiries. It was possible Solomon had been arrested. “Arrested” was at that point the worst outcome my parents permitted themselves to imagine. For them, “arrested” was bad enough. After Buck’s arrest in 1914 they had lost control of their own lives for four and a half years. His arrest had cost them a fundamental sense of security, a sense of owning their lives.
Maybe up until the Reichstag fire it had not been unreasonable to assume that life in Germany would gradually find its way back to normal—but my reasonable parents still didn’t realize that things were actually moving in the opposite direction.
Buck planned to check at the club, then, if necessary, go to the local police station and offer a statement testifying to Solomon’s character, employment, and war record. If the chauffeur was charged with an offense—and not just sleeping off the aftereffects of a brawl—my father would call in the baron’s lawyer, Kaufman, and hand matters over to him.
While all this was going on I was at my desk in the Translation Department, where the mood was unsettled. Not only had Dr. Ziegler disappeared, but Günter Krebs hadn’t shown up for work since before the Reichstag fire. There was a rumor going around that Ducky had demanded a week’s leave to deal with “party responsibilities” and that this preposterous request had been granted by our new chief, Dr. Winnacker.
Was it now acceptable at IG Farbenindustrie to be openly Nazi? The question took courage to ask. Perhaps that was why Dr. Winnacker seemed to be dodging it and hiding in his office.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the river Main, my father, Buck, set off on foot for the center of Niederrad. That dingy neighborhood lay between Walden and Frankfurt city proper and h
ad the atmosphere of a down-at-heel Hessian village. It hadn’t shown much improvement since 1919. People kept chickens and pigs and milk cows. There were as many horse carts as cars on the road.
Buck headed straight for the clubhouse of the Reichsbanner on Schwanheimerstraße where he found a wreck: windows smashed, door battered down. There had been some sort of bonfire lit inside. It had been put out by then, but when he walked through, the walls were blackened and the air greasy from smoke. Everything was smashed and broken.
No passerby would say anything about what had happened. People averted their eyes and walked past the place quickly. Finally a clerk at the newsagents’ across the street told my father the club had been raided by SA auxiliary police, which meant stormtroopers with white armbands and Mauser rifles. They’d arrested the Reichsbanner men, loaded them in the back of a truck, and driven off.
My father asked the newsagent if he had any idea where prisoners were being held. The man just pressed his lips together and ignored Buck until he turned and left the shop.
He was perplexed, annoyed, and, understandably, frightened. He wanted to go back to Walden, work with his beloved yearlings, forget the stench of burned rooms. He always had disliked Solomon Dietz. But Herta had a right to know what had happened to her man.
Buck decided to go to the Schutzpolizei. If Solomon was under arrest, the local police station was most likely where he would be held, wasn’t it?
At the police station the Oberwachtmeister insisted his cells held no prisoners. If auxiliaries arrested the Reichsbanner, then it was auxiliaries who were most likely detaining them. He himself knew nothing whatsoever about the matter.
“Detaining them where?”
“You would be wise, Herr Lange, to let the matter drop. The fellow will undoubtedly turn up, sooner or later.”
Carry Me Page 27