“What about ‘bodies’?”
I had no idea how to put it into acceptable words. “Variations?”
Here he laughed—only slightly, and with forgiveness, but his mirth was plain. “Between the genders?”
The librarian closed the book he’d been reading and removed his reading glasses. “You don’t mean reproductive systems, do you?”
“No,” I assured him. “Not that.”
He waited.
“Perhaps diseases,” I ventured. “Rare ones. But not the kind you catch.”
He would have waited all day, but I had no more clues to impart, so he loaded my desk with some impressive medical tomes. I’d never encountered such thin onionskin paper or such small, dense type. Much of it in Latin. No photographs and only a few illustrations of concepts too general to be useful: circulatory systems and skeletal charts.
One might find my curiosity strange, now that my father’s erratic actions had solved one problem for me (replacing it with another, that summer of infection, the subsequent year of healing), but yes, I was still curious. Even more so. Though he had attempted to remove the small proof of my difference, leaving me scarred in the process, I was even more driven now to discover how deep and permanently within the human body flaws are marked. I wanted to know what remained after he had removed the surface flaw from my flesh.
I was nearly ready to leave that day, my fingertips dirty from the endless turning of pages, each tired breath moving my ribs, evoking the little twinge from my bandaged side. The librarian showed up: the soft, white hands again, under the light of my own study carrel. No wonder Gerhard would seem familiar to me when I would meet him some five years later: he had the same soft, white hands.
The librarian saw my finished stack of books. “Did you find your variations?”
“No, sir.”
“Perhaps we have begun from the wrong end of things. Perhaps we are being too technical. You know, when I was your age and interested in the human form, in its most ideal and masterful depictions, I began not with modern science but with the Greeks and Romans …”
He had lost me entirely. But he was speaking from his own memories, with evident pleasure. “And best of all—yes, why didn’t I think of it sooner?—they provide us with something more than text; they provide us with images. After all the reading you’ve done, you might find some pictures to be a tonic. Wait here, young man.”
He returned with yet larger books, opening them to show me illustrations of the great Greek and Roman statues. “There you are. I’ll stop back in half an hour, and then I must collect these and set you on your way.”
He disappeared tactfully back into the shadows, leaving me to puzzle over these naked forms. I’d seen the occasional classical illustration, of course, but I’d never had the privacy to make a thorough, close-up inspection. Rather than glancing quickly—at a small penis centered over a scrotal sack, or at the lines and curves where the secrets of womanhood remained hidden—I could stare now until my eyes had had their fill, then follow the graceful lines of chest and pelvis, thigh and calf, bicep and forearm, belly and breast.
In these pictures I found no clue to my own strange variation, but I found something else: a fascination that would grow during the many library visits to follow. The classical artists had captured perfection—athletic, aesthetic, even moral perfection—and perhaps if I understood perfection I would understand its opposite. I would know which flaws were only minor details, which were deep and ineradicable. I was completely unfamiliar with genetics at this time—my school was about fifty years behind in its teaching of science—but I am not sure genetics would have provided the answers anyway, not in a form that spoke to my own athletic background, my own respect and regret for the minor aspirations I had set aside. Yes, I recognized that wonderful dark line running along the back of a tensed hamstring. Yes, I recognized the commanding realism of The Spear-Bearer by Polyclitus, an ancient Greek statue of a muscular man walking with a spear over his shoulder, one leg just beginning to lift from the ground. Yes, I recognized the calm, focused faces of the athletes—who, much more than gods or unlikely heroes, offered real insight into the human condition.
“You haven’t visited the Glyptothek?” the librarian said to me one day, after my weekly library visits had become routine. “Your parents have never taken you there?”
My father? “Never.”
“Oh, my boy,” he said, deeply apologetic for having failed to mention that we had our own excellent museum of classical art in Munich. “You must go. You know, of course, where the Königsplatz is?”
Nearby, at 45 Brienner Strasse, the Nazis had already built their party headquarters, the Brown House. In years to come, the party would choose this location for some of their enormous rallies. But once I came to associate the Königsplatz with art, with the Greek and Roman masterpieces and the magnificent Glyptothek itself, nothing would ever convince me that the heart of Munich could be anywhere else. Even if this part of the city became the heart of something else, too. Even if one couldn’t walk thirty meters without being expected to offer a verdammte salute.
Meanwhile, Germany was facing the currency crisis, bank failures. Here I was, entranced by old bronze and stone, oblivious and increasingly unemployable. Perhaps if I had attended a more rigorous secondary school, I might have gone on to a university such as the one in Erlangen, where that same year a student committee made a request to the Ministry of Culture for the creation of a chair of race science. Some subjects were deemed worthy of national support, even with a failing economy. But I didn’t dare dream that, in a few more years, art history would be deemed worthy of public support as well. It doesn’t always hurt to have a failed artist as Führer, many art lovers might have reasoned in those early years—before life became more complicated, before reason itself was left behind.
When I graduated from secondary school in 1932, the jobs I managed to find were low-paid and sporadic, though I was happy to get them. On weekends, I worked as a sports club trainer because nationalistic sports clubs were booming in Munich. Even in my unexceptional condition, and even though I had a reputation for being reserved and for keeping my distance from the boys in general and from the changing room in particular, I could still earn a few marks conducting warm-up exercises and running drills.
During the week, I worked as an assistant to a small-time art dealer and auctioneer named Franz Betelmann. This second job was much more important to me. I kept records for Franz and helped him evaluate and catalog the ancient statues, many of them with a Trojan theme, inspired by German archaeology being conducted then in Asia Minor. They were just copies, of course, and were being sold as such—nothing particularly valuable, only objets d’art to grace some city dweller’s chilly entrance hall. But Franz wanted to elevate himself. He wanted to appear better educated than he was (as did I; as would anyone who had attended a Realschule instead of a Gymnasium) and he was eager to absorb what I had already assimilated.
He expressed no embarrassment that someone my age would be lecturing to him on the significance of the contrapposto pose in classical sculpture. He’d smack his leg, delighted, the pince-nez he wore for effect falling from his face: “So there’s a name for that! I always thought those Romans looked tired, leaning on one leg.”
I worked for Betelmann on and off for three years, for diminishing pay, as his own accounts became more irreconcilable. I enjoyed learning and sharing my increasing knowledge of art with my employer, and even with the customers. I sketched on the side, not with any artistic ambition, but only to develop my own eye and memory and appreciation of famous objects. My father wanted me to work for the German Labor Service—yet another unpaid job, and this one promising only toil, but one he thought might lead to some paid job when the economy improved. I put it off as long as I could, but in the summer of 1935, the six-month labor stints were made compulsory. So at the age of twenty-one, I joined thousands of other secondary school graduates. We were each given a bicycle a
nd a spade, and a brown uniform symbolizing the earthiness of our pursuits, and on the uniform—this struck me as funny, somehow—was a cap patch featuring a spade and a special belt buckle featuring, ah yes, the spade again.
They were serious about this spade business. So serious that they made us carry the spades, drill with the spades, keep them shiny and clean, and present them for inspection when requested. I think we all knew what this was preparing us for—not just future employment as construction workers or assistant engineers. No matter what the Treaty of Versailles said, no matter what limits had been placed on our standing army, thousands of us were being whipped into shape, taught to follow orders and get along, to carry heavy wood-handled implements over our shoulders as we bicycled or marched. And all while singing the typical group-unity drivel:
Our shovels are the weapons of peace,
Our camps are castles in the countryside.
Yesterday divided by class and standing,
Yesterday the one avoided the other,
Today we dig together in the sand.
There was a military briskness to the entire program, from our rousing at 4 A.M. to our dormitory life and bland meals, and our long, callus-producing hours spent in sun, wind, and rain. My regiment was building an autobahn: one of the early highways that would someday connect with other autobahns, connect all of Germany, perhaps even minimize our regional differences—in other words, a peaceful pursuit. But also a multi-pronged strategy. Good highways could serve a wide range of purposes. We did nearly everything by hand; there was rarely a construction machine or heavy vehicle in sight because the more human labor we required, the more people were temporarily fed, housed, and exercised. Elsewhere in the nation, regiments were draining swamps or reclaiming soil.
It wasn’t easy, but in a sense, I was glad to have served in the Reichsarbeitsdienst. For one thing, it made me theoretically eligible for university. Due to changing national priorities and ideologies, university enrollment was no longer strongly encouraged and admissions had been restricted, though of course not eliminated. I had no idea, to be honest, if I qualified in other ways—I was now older than a typical applicant and my earlier education might not suffice—but it was still a dream of mine, one encouraged by the art dealer, Betelmann, who was kind enough to praise my potential.
But there was another reason I was glad to have served. Having heard my father’s war stories, knowing how much he had changed as a result of that terrible conflict, and having spent so many of those childhood beer-hall hours listening to other men who were similarly haunted, I had truly feared military service. But the Labor Service was like the military, and—remembering that I had already healed from my injury and now looked even more like everyone else—I made it through.
So when, just after the Berlin Olympics, I was drafted into the Wehrmacht Heer, I wasn’t as upset as I might have been. It wouldn’t be so bad, I figured, and someday I’d have my own stories to tell—in university, when all this was done, or back at the art dealership where I might find a way to earn commissions selling not copies but authentic classical objects.
That accepting attitude got me through the first five weeks of training: firearms instead of spades, and finding my place among my fellow Landsers. Then, one night, I heard three men in my Gruppe talking about another man they disliked, a farm boy named Ackerman, a kid who had attracted teasing from day one for his dedication to the platoon’s rabbits. Ackerman had informed on them for taking the wire cutters he used to maintain the rabbit hutches. They’d stolen the tool to cut a gap in a barbed-wire fence, hoping to exploit the break on an upcoming evening when they planned to sneak out of camp and visit a brothel in the neighboring town.
This simply wasn’t done. When it was time for that sort of entertainment, a field brothel would come to our camp, we had been told. An order would be followed: a health check for the rifleman, issuance of a condom, and a can of disinfectant spray that had to be returned empty. These three in my Gruppe were rebellious and impatient in a way that would be unimaginable a few years later, but this was only 1936, and these were new recruits—fellow Labor Service boys who thought they already knew it all.
Even after getting caught for messing with the barbed wire, even after serving their punishment—reduced rations, extra latrine duty, prohibition from sending or receiving mail to girlfriends back home—they still planned to try to sneak out the following Friday. Invited to come along, I told them I’d think about it. I’d learned that the middle path was the safest: breaking some rules, but not many; eating some tripe, no matter how green or suspect; taking part in some schemes, but not others, and never tattling. I had at least one excuse for not going out that coming weekend: an officer in camp had seen some nature sketches I’d done and wondered if I might draw his portrait on Saturday. I’d told him I was no good at drawing real people, but you can bet that I started practicing with an electric torch under the covers every night that week.
Now the three others challenged Ackerman to cover for them, should anyone come poking around their bunks after midnight—a major task, given that our superior officer was now more alert to mischief. And if Ackerman didn’t cover? They would make him a Jew. I’d heard of ways to make a Jew a gentile—feed him pork, make him claim allegiance to Jesus—but not vice versa. How does one turn a gentile into a Jew?
“Just make sure the blade is good and sharp,” someone at the table said. “He’s bound to squirm and you’ll hurt yourself as well as him.”
“Oh—” I said out loud, hand dropping to the table with an audible thunk, unable to conceal my horror. With the other hand I clutched my own side, that tender, scarred spot, in sympathetic pain. Without that wound, I might have believed the men were only joking, showing off. But unfortunately, I knew what a person, armed with a knife and some asinine ideas, could do.
The man next to me smirked at my expression of dismay. “Oh?”
“I forgot something.”
“What?” He was still testing me, probing for any indication that I would stand in their way or report what I had just heard. “You didn’t forget who your friends are, did you?”
“No, no,” I stammered. “I only forgot that I don’t have enough charcoal or high-grade paper. I’ll have to get to an art store somehow, if I’m going to sketch Hauptmann Becker on Saturday.”
Pushing away my plate, I hurried directly to the officers’ tent and explained my enthusiasm for our upcoming portrait session. Becker was occupied Saturday, as it turned out. Sunday would be better. I needed more supplies, I told him. All the better, he said, I could use Saturday to go shopping. He not only gave me a pass to leave camp, but arranged for a ride—not just to the closest village, but all the way to Munich, my hometown, nearly ninety minutes away. I should get oil paints as well, he said. This time I had the sense not to mention that I did not paint with oils. Now I had my entire weekend booked with excuses.
Whatever my Kameraden did, it need not involve me. Whatever happened, I could not be asked to handle any knife. I left a cryptic message for Ackerman telling him to be on his guard, but honestly, once I left that note on his bunk, I pushed the matter out of my mind—not thinking I’d be punished someday for that cowardly amnesia, not thinking that this was only one such decision life would send my way and there would be many others, not realizing that moments like this were like a sculptor’s tools, revealing the shape of the true self locked within. What I did not—perhaps could not—yet understand was that character, rather than genetics or racial differences or minor biological oddities, is the real mystery of life.
At the time, I felt only lucky, and bound to get luckier with every kilometer traveled away from our camp. In Munich that Saturday, wandering the aisles of a small art supply store, fingering the brushes and caressing the tips of soft gray pencils, inhaling the clean smells of paper and paint, I heard a man call out to me. He was well dressed, in a crisp suit, wool coat, and white muffler, holding a large, brown parcel—a freshly framed artwork of s
ome kind, retrieved from the corner of the store where an old man cut mats, hammered wood, and touched up the gilt on antique frames.
“Berlin,” he called out, shifting the package from his right hand to his left in order to shake my hand. “The Olympic stadium. I saw you there. I applauded your moral act. I would have made my own departure, but I was another man’s guest—such difficult tickets to acquire! And besides, I was hoping to sell him a painting later.”
“Oh—yes?” I wanted my hand back, but he was still massaging my knuckles.
“And then, in the beer hall near the stadium, I happened to spot you. I called out, but you didn’t hear. Isn’t that strange? Three times now—a lucky number. One shouldn’t ignore signs. Are you an artist?”
“No, sir.”
“But you’re buying art supplies.”
The sketchpad and pencils were tucked beneath my left arm.
“Come to lunch next door,” he insisted. “I’m meeting a friend who is an art dealer, very well traveled—Italy, Greece, Egypt. His name is Keller.”
“I should be getting back to my Zug.”
He was a big man—mustachioed, red cheeked, well fed. He insisted on standing close to me, touching my arm with his free hand. “What’s the hurry? Let me be honest—Herr Keller keeps a Mediterranean schedule. I don’t know when he’ll turn up late or on time, so I show up on the dot and end up waiting more often than not. It gives me indigestion. But here, you can tell me some stories. We can discuss the finer things.”
Before I had even caught his name, our arms were linked and he was guiding me out of the art supply store. That is how I ended up dining with the mining magnate-turned-art aficionado Heinrich Röthel, who would go on to help organize one of the first Third Reich art “shopping lists,” which would become the starting point for the art curatorial office, Sonderprojekt, in which I would ultimately work. Much later, this list would be expanded upon by top museum professionals. Röthel was no professional himself. If anything, the scholars and major museum directors intimidated him, but he had strong opinions, he had lots of money, and he knew a lot about people and politics and slightly less about European masterpieces.
The Detour Page 11