by Phillip Rock
He lay on his bed in pajamas, stared at the ceiling, and fought back tears, his throat aching with the effort to keep from sobbing. Then he sat up with a start. Damn! Mr. Rilke wouldn’t lie on his bed and bawl. No real journalist would. He switched on the bedside lamp, found his notebook and pencil in the top drawer of the bedstand, and began to write in Pitman …
Berlin, Friday night, September 12, ’30
The usual crowds along the Kurfürstendamm and in all the streets leading off from it. Rudy Kessler and I made our way to the Romanische where we had beer and wurst. A waiter gave us cold stares and tried to hurry us out because he could sense he wouldn’t get so much as a pfennig tip from us. He was right, of course, but we would have sat there all night if there had been nothing better to do with our time. There isn’t a waiter alive who can intimidate Rudy Kessler.
I read All Quiet on the Western Front at school. I think Mr. Remarque’s book is better than Barbusse’s Le Feu, despite the fact that Barbusse had fought in the trenches and Remarque had not. It’s odd how some of the best books about war and man’s courage in the face of death were written by men who had never heard a shot fired in anger. Stephen Crane … Count Tolstoy … although I believe Tolstoy served briefly with the Russian army when quite young, but on the frontier, protecting villages from Tartar bandits—hardly the type of provincial service to serve as inspiration for Borodino! Rudy lent me his copy of Remarque in German … Im Westen Nichts Neues … and I felt it was even more powerful than the English translation. Simon Kahr, INA’s motion-picture and theater critic, had seen the American picture while in London. He told all of us in the office that it is the most stunning war flick ever made, better by far than The Big Parade.
There was such a large crowd in the Nollendorfplatz, jamming the pavement in front of the theater and spilling out into the street, that police had been called to keep the traffic moving. A good deal of shouting, pushing, and shoving was taking place under the marquee and it seemed obvious that Rudy had been right, that we wouldn’t have the remotest chance of buying tickets. Rudy suggested we go around the corner to the UFA house which was showing The White Hell of Pitz Palu with Luis Trenker and Leni Riefenstahl, but I’m not fond of mountaineering flicks.
“Something is up,” Rudy said. “Too many cops.”
As we walked closer we could see a solid line of policemen in front of the theater; tall, imposing men in buckled greatcoats and leather-and-brass helmets. Lights from the marquee gleamed off their shiny boots, belts, and holsters. They stood as a wall between two groups of people—men and women going into the theater and a much larger group, men only, milling around in the street, waving their arms and shouting. All of the latter were wearing white shirts.
“Storm troopers,” Rudy said. “Brownshirt bastards.”
It has become the costume of the Nazi SA since the government forbade the wearing of uniforms in Berlin until after the elections. On the second button of every white shirt dangled a brown rubber band so everyone would know who they were.
A White Shirt stepped out of a doorway and stood weaving in front of us. He was a short, thick-set man with a grizzled face and breath like a brewery.
“Where are you two going?” he shouted.
“See a flick,” Rudy said casually.
The man jerked a thumb at the marquee. “Not that one.”
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
The man spat at our feet. “A rotten pack of lies. A Jew in Hollywood made that shit—one of our own Jew boys, too—from Laupheim—my town—may the son-of-a-bitch roast in hell!”
We brushed past him and he made no move to stop us. He stood swaying in the shadows, cursing Carl Laemmle, spitting obscenities about the international Jewish bankers who had stabbed the German army in the back.
A policeman gave us a cold stare when we said we had tickets to the showing. Rudy told me that most of the Berlin police are sympathetic to the Nazis. They do their job because Germans obey orders, but they find it mortifying that their commissioner of police is a Jew and that the Nazis taunt them as “Isador’s Army.” We had no tickets, of course, but figured—rightly—that in all the confusion we could slip by the doorman. As it turned out, there was no one at the door and the box-office window was shuttered.
Groups of people in the lobby—some angry and defiant, others clustered in tight, nervous groups. The theater seats well over a thousand people, but we could see no more than a few hundred. Along one wall there was a long banner—NO MORE WAR INTERNATIONAL—BERLIN CHAPTER. Beneath it was a table piled high with Erich Maria Remarque’s book in both English and German, and Mr. Rilke’s book, An End to Castles, in English only. I bought a paperbound copy for Rudy for a mark fifty and told him I would have Mr. Rilke autograph it for him, that it might serve as an incentive to learn English.
A tall, white-haired man wearing a dinner jacket thanked everyone for coming and spoke angrily of the intimidation they had faced “… from a mob of ignorance and unreasoning hate.” He then asked us all to take our seats and the motion picture would begin. Frightened ushers closed the front doors on a final howl of invective from the streets.
It was the book, alive on the screen. I knew them all—squat, ugly, powerful Katczinsky; thin, lugubrious Tjaden; and boyish Paul. I mouthed the dialogue in the darkness as though I, too, stood weary and hungry in front of the field kitchen demanding that the rations be served—the double rations—for we are the Second Company even if half the men the cook has prepared to feed lie in the dressing stations or dead in no man’s land. And I could feel the terror as the shells howled down from the night sky as we strung barbed wire. And the agony of the wounded was my pain. My palms were damp as I clutched the armrests on the seat. I glanced at Rudy, and his face was pale in the flickering light from the projector and his eyes were fixed on the terrible images of war. And the young soldier Paul, who is no one and everyone, reached a gentle hand through the wire to cup the delicate butterfly … and the hand closed so softly in death.
The Nazi mob was gone when we left the theater, but a few knots of police could be seen standing about on the far side of the square or in the center of the traffic circle. Taxis lined the curb and our fellow moviegoers hurried to them. Rudy and I walked slowly toward the Kurfürstendamm subway station, our collars turned up against the wind. We did not speak, both of us lost in our own thoughts.
“Enjoy the show, Jew boys?”
We had not heard the footsteps behind us. We stopped and four men in shabby raincoats faced us in a semicircle. One was not much older than we, the other three had the hard, craggy look of ex-soldiers. We could see their dirty white shirts beneath their coats, the rubber bands looped on the buttons.
“I’m not a Jew,” Rudy said.
“You think like a Jew,” one of the men said with a quiet intensity.
We tried to move on but they crowded in on us, forcing our backs to the metal grille of a shuttered store window. One of them stuck his face close to mine.
“I read that damn book, sonny. Not a word of truth in it. We never broke … we never cried for our mothers. Give us guns and we’d go back tomorrow and finish the job. Do you think I wept when I stuck a goddamn Frenchie in the guts? Shit, boy, pure shit.”
“Get away from us,” Rudy said.
“You whine like a Hebe.” The youngest of the group licked his lips and glanced nervously up and down the street. “You’re nothing but a red-headed turd, that’s what you are.”
“Call me that when your friends aren’t around! I’d kick your fat ass all the way to Potsdam!”
The three older men chuckled softly. “Go for a walk, Hans,” one of them said. “Wait for us around the corner.”
The man who had his face close to mine smiled. “Kids today. All talk and no balls. You look a good sort. Act like a real German and don’t fall for that pacifist turn-the-other-cheek crap.”
I didn’t want to tell him I was English. Maybe he bore a grudge against the tommies. I could
only stare into his eyes. It was like looking into dark water.
“Kids like you don’t know what to believe. The Bolshie Jews tell you what to believe. No one to set you straight. If you were my son and went to see shit like that—” He moved his hand back a few inches and slapped me on the side of the face. It was like being struck with a hard leather strap. My head snapped back against the grille. Rudy shouted something and one of the other men drove a fist into his belly. I must have turned toward him—to help him—I can’t remember—and the man slapped me again, putting his strength behind it this time. Lights exploded in my eyes and the next thing I can recall is being on my hands and knees on the pavement. The men had gone. Rudy was kneeling by the curb, bent forward, vomiting in the gutter.
He put the notebook aside and turned off the light. There was still pain in his jaw but he felt better having written about it. He sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the night sounds of the city, the rumble of traffic along Neue Friedrich Strasse and the bridges of the Spree. He thought of automobiles filled with contented people on their way home from theaters or restaurants, the men in dinner jackets and the women in furs, whizzing past the dark shadows of narrow streets where men in shoddy clothing prowled like wolves.
LIGHTS BURNED IN the early morning hours in the offices of all the wire services and newspapers throughout Berlin. By four in the morning of September 15 the election results, except for a few provincial districts, had been received. The figures were stunning.
“Nearly six and a half million votes so far for the Nazi party,” Dix said in a toneless voice. “Quite a gain from eight hundred thousand they received two years ago.”
Martin peered over his shoulder at the clattering teletype machine. “How many seats?”
“Over a hundred, I’d say.”
“A hundred and seven for certain,” one of the editors remarked. “That makes them the second largest party in the Reichstag.”
The three men stared numbly at the machine, the names of cities, candidates, parties—the tally of votes—appearing in typed blocks on the white paper.
“Hofhauser lost in Stuttgart to the Nazi candidate by two thousand votes,” Dix said. “Poor Emil.”
Martin shook his head. “Poor everyone.”
“And your kinsman won in Munich … Werner von Rilke … but no surprise there. The Nazi paymaster.”
Martin turned away from the machine and poured a cup of coffee from an alcohol-heated urn. The coffee was bitter and scalded his tongue. To think of Werner was to think, in a symbolic way, of Germany itself. Werner had marched off to war in 1914 as a twenty-three-year-old infantry officer loyal to kaiser and fatherland. He had been horribly wounded in the abdomen by a grenade and had been brought back to a Germany plunging into revolution and anarchy. The defeat, the continuing allied blockade, the humiliation of Versailles, the French occupation of the Rhineland, the despoiling of his country—even by his own relative—had embittered him. Paul Rilke had bought for six million dollars family holdings worth twenty times that amount. But the dollar had been king as the mark tumbled into the rat hole of inflation. Werner had spent his share in seeking political solutions to the overwhelming problems of the Reich. Among the myriad splinter parties he had backed in 1922 had been Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers. It had obviously turned out to be a sound investment.
Dix joined him at the coffee urn. “Will you be making a broadcast today?”
“I hope at midnight … six P.M. New York time. I asked for fifteen minutes on the shortwave, but I may only get five.”
“And what will you tell America?”
Martin shrugged and slurped at his steaming coffee. “What can I say? Facts and figures, I suppose. It’s too early to speculate on what this is going to mean to Germany.”
“Not too early,” said Dix quietly. “Too late.”
ALBERT FINISHED PACKING his suitcase and Rudy insisted on carrying it downstairs for him. Frau Bernstorff, who managed the boardinghouse, met them in the main hall and kissed Albert on the cheek. She was a plump, jolly woman who fretted over her “young men” and pampered her favorites.
“Be sure to come back next year,” she said in English. “Mein jung Englander.” And kissed him again.
He liked Frau Bernstorff. She was a woman who had known far better days. Her husband Klaus—who puttered about and did the bookkeeping—had been a hotel owner who went bankrupt during the inflation years.
“I’ll try, Frau Bernstorff,” he said, knowing in his heart that he would never want to come back to Berlin. He noticed that a photograph of Adolf Hitler had been hung next to the one of President Hindenburg on the wall behind the concierge’s desk. The old field marshal and the corporal side by side. He mentioned the photograph to Rudy as they went out to the street to wait for the taxi.
“Oh, that,” said Rudy airily. “Bertha Kiss-Kiss has great faith in him. The savior of Germany, she says. But she hates the Brownshirts. Scum, she calls them … feels certain they’ll be eliminated once Hitler gains the support of the army.”
“Do you believe that?”
Rudy shrugged. “Makes sense. Why hold on to those gangsters if he doesn’t have to?” The taxi pulled up at the curb and he opened the rear door. “Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof,” he told the driver, then turned to Albert and clasped him by the arms. “Goodbye, my friend, and good luck. I’ll think of you slaving away at school while I’m drinking my beer at the Romanische! As we English fellows say … cheerio and pip-pip, old cock!”
BACK TO SCHOOL. The thought was depressing. There would be something of a fuss made about his returning two weeks late, but he could justify his absence by having “been abroad.” Travel, he would claim, was most enlightening. He had also brought a leather-bound volume of Heine’s poems for his housemaster.
The soft, pallid face staring out from the frame on the wall. The little mustache and lank hair. The sightless eyes. Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, president of the Republic, hanging beside him. The fleshy jowls and the white hair … the vacant, senile stare.
And Adolf Hitler telling the country in his bad German what they wished to hear. His speech in Leipzig, pledging his allegiance to the army and promising the German people that he would come to power through the ballot box, swearing that he would fight against the Treaty of Versailles even if he had to do that through illegal means. What had he meant? What sort of illegal means? And vowing in his harsh, near hysterical voice that once he came to power—no doubt there; the stating of an inevitable fact—he would form a National Socialist Court of Justice and heads would roll. Whose heads? All the shadowy enemies of the Reich, Albert supposed as he gazed through the window of the taxi. The enemies alluded to in all of the Nazi speeches; the Jews and the liberals; the “degenerate” artists, writers, and poets; the international bankers—the so-called scum and parasites who had stabbed Germany in the back during the war.
People crossing the Friedrichstrasse into Unter den Linden. People shopping … going to and from work … seated in the cafés … standing in front of the restaurants. A city like any other going about its mundane affairs in the pale October sunshine. Rough boards covering the broken display windows at Israel’s department store. JUDE painted across a wall. Brownshirt pranks, Rudy had said. But the gangsters would go when Hitler achieved his aim of becoming president, or at least chancellor, through the process of ballot box, law and order.
And he had seen them take their seats in the Reichstag, standing high in the press gallery with Mr. Rilke and Wolf von Dix. One hundred and seven new delegates to the parliament of the land, respectable gentlemen all in their dark blue business suits. And then, unaccountably, they had all risen to their feet and walked out, leaving the remaining members talking among themselves in confused speculation. They returned a short time later, the blue suits gone, one hundred and seven men now dressed in the brown uniform of the Storm Troops, the swastika brassard on their arms, red and black—the colors of blood and iron. And the roll
being called and one hundred and seven voices shouting in their turn … Present! Heil Hitler!
He thought suddenly of Abingdon Pryory, that summer evening after dinner … Lord Stanmore rising to give a toast. Dear friends and gentle hearts. The words ran through his head like a litany as the taxi crawled through the traffic toward the railway station. Dear friends … gentle hearts … words so meaningless in this time—in this place.
TELETYPES
TORCHLIGHT AND SWEATING faces. Hysterical eyes. Bonfires in the public squares. Berlin and Munich. Nuremberg and Weimar. Students clogging the Haupstrasse in Heidelberg, beer-filled and arm-laden—burning the books. Shadows writhing on the ancient buildings, the stones of Heine, Goethe, and Schiller.
Black cars in the silent streets. The locked doors and the closed shutters. The midnight raids. The disappearance of the man next door … the quiet woman down the hall. A beginning—a New Order—and a thousand endings in dim-lit cellars or the hastily nailed and wired compounds at Oranienburg and Dachau.
“Whatever happened to Wolf von Dix? … Emil Zeitzler? … The elderly couple who owned the restaurant next to the Schiffbauerdam? …”
Do not ask such things. There is nothing to be done, even if one knows, or cares.
Protests. Debates in Geneva. Committees formed and abandoned. A wringing of hands. Mute rage. Shrugged gestures of impotence. Fear.