Two Gentlemen on the Beach

by Köhlmeier, Michael; Martin, Ruth;

  Ms Jamchy was not the first to remark on the fact that this book was the scene of a battle before the battle. As early as 1959, the Danish psychoanalyst Eskild Ottensen wrote that here we have “one of the most remarkable anachronisms in modern literature”, an unusual anachronism that didn’t turn back time, but turned it forwards. Churchill’s Marlborough biography reminded him of Palaeolithic cave paintings, depicting animals that were yet to be hunted. Ottensen believed he had discovered an unsettling vein of magical thinking running through all the statesman’s works – literary and pictorial. He saw evidence that Churchill had no feeling for symbols. He recounts the anecdote from Winston’s swearing-in as President of the Board of Trade by Edward VII in 1908, when in all seriousness he reassured those present that he wasn’t intending to do the king harm; the latter had appeared not only in an ermine robe and a crown, but carrying a sceptre, and evidently the new minister saw it not as a symbol, but as the cudgel from which the royal utensil doubtless originated. Ottensen speaks of this as a defect, though he emphasises that Churchill certainly didn’t lack the capacity for abstract thought; that would be tantamount to describing him as stupid, which of course he was not. He called this defect “Churchill Syndrome”. Nor does it surprise him, he writes, that the young Winston was a truant. In the early years of education, children are taught and must practise symbolic thinking above all: digits, numbers, letters. It was no wonder that Churchill was thrown off balance by the vocative and its requirement that he address a table. In the story of the First Duke of Marlborough and his fight against Louis XIV, Churchill symbolically pre-empted his own fight against Hitler. Writing the book was already part of this battle, although logically, when he was writing it, he couldn’t have predicted whether the fight would actually take place. That was Eskild Ottensen’s theory.

  In my father’s opinion, very few of the people who speculated on Churchill as a writer had actually read the Marlborough. He, too, saw the work as a novel: one of the most significant novels of the century, a thing like War and Peace, like Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma. William Knott concurred: Sir Winston, he wrote in one of his letters, had liked it when people referred to his book as a novel – though admittedly, he added, somebody first had to explain to him how much broader the term “novel” had become in the twentieth century. Churchill’s literary tastes had been “modest”, said Knott, confined to C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels and Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man, and of course he loved Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, whom he considered the most important American novelist. But at the same time he had poured scorn on contemporary novel-writers, who clearly had no new ideas and were still writing like Forester, Reade, Scott and Cooper. When Knott suggested to him that this accusation was entirely wrong with regard to modern literature, and mentioned names like James Joyce, Marcel Proust or William Faulkner, his boss would dismiss it with a wave of his hand – how good could these people be if he had never heard of them? Knott closed this chapter by saying that of all the Nobel Literature laureates, Churchill had certainly been the one with the least literary education.

  Of course one should believe that Winston Churchill identified strongly with the hero of his “novel”, John Churchill. One should believe that, firstly, he was fighting to clear his name; secondly, that he was a shadow from posterity fighting at his ancestor’s side against the French despot; and thirdly, that this fight was a symbolic battle before the battle against another adversary, who had already started to cause trouble when Churchill was writing, cobbling together a bunch of desperados – the fanatical, the bloodline-obsessed and the just plain stupid – into a party called the NSDAP, which was to form the core of the outfit he would use to try and get the better of Germany and then the world. Before, during and after the awarding of the Nobel Prize in 1953, when people kept on and on telling Churchill that the Marlborough was a unique example of political prophesy, he never showed the weakness of trying to play the comparison down – yes, he found it incredible too, he said, but that was just how he saw it: he was the Duke, and the Duke was him.

  My father collected everything to do with the protagonist of his research, which meant he also read various biographies of Louis XIV. He searched through the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon and the Cardinal of Retz, read the letters of Liselotte von der Pfalz, immersed himself in Harrison Salter’s weighty monograph on the period and, not least, studied The Sun King by Nancy Mitford, Clementine Churchill’s cousin, where he saw all kinds of things written between the lines. He finally formed a picture of the King of France that shocked him deeply. But this shock didn’t relate to the absolutist monarch himself; it concerned a fact that nobody had yet picked up on – certainly not Churchill himself.

  Naturally, Churchill wanted to identify with the hero of his novel, the First Duke of Marlborough. He wanted to be like him.

  But he wasn’t like the Duke.

  John Churchill is quite a different character. One can, one must

  see him as the antithesis of the author. Though in this context, it doesn’t matter who John Churchill really was. The important thing is how his descendant and biographer Winston Churchill painted him. Who Louis XIV really was matters just as little. But the person on whom the novelist Winston Churchill based the despot is a truly astounding choice.

  Louis XIV may be a distant reflection of A.H., but first and foremost he is a perfect self-portrait of his author W.C.!

  This was my father’s conclusion. He wrote an essay on the subject for the Blättern für Geschichte und Politik, issue 2, 1979.

  Did Churchill ever recognise that he had portrayed himself in the Sun King? My father didn’t believe so. In Marc Landier’s brilliant study Through the Looking-Glass: Churchill’s Doppelganger, the Belgian-British historian and philosopher put forward the theory that Churchill was the first (and for a long time the only) person to see through Hitler, because he was similar to him in many ways – which made my father crow triumphantly, in his “English” manner, by raising an eyebrow, underlining the paragraph with a pencil, taking off his glasses and slowly sliding the journal across the kitchen table towards me.

  “Landier should have quoted you,” I said. “Or at least mentioned you.”

  My father curled his lips into a smile and gave a barely perceptible shake of his head.

  26

  All Wednesday afternoon I spent flying round with Hitler from one meeting to another. First of all we lunched at the aerodrome just outside Berlin. Hitler is a teetotaller, a non-smoker and a vegetarian. On this occasion he ate his favourite scrambled eggs and salads. His lieutenants and I fortify ourselves with a more substantial meal.

  So said an article in the London Sunday Graphic on 31 July 1932, the day of the German parliamentary elections. The reporter was Randolph Churchill, who was just twenty-one years old.

  Randolph was one of half a dozen foreign journalists who accompanied Hitler on his election campaign tour. Did Hitler know whose son this young man was? Goebbels knew. It’s possible he kept it from his Führer. The propagandist might well have regarded accrediting the young man as a cunning trick, which would pay off at some point. But he also thought he knew that Hitler didn’t agree with playing off the cushion and shied away from intrigue. Though at the same time – and this is the refrain in his diaries – Goebbels believed it was “almost a law of nature” that the Führer’s charisma would win all hearts and minds; he could therefore be confident that Randolph would write an article sympathetic to the movement. A report in an English newspaper that contained even cautious praise, and was signed by a Churchill, no matter which one, was still worth more than ten enthusiastic articles by a Mills, a Jones or a Brown.

  Randolph was a man of many talents, with a dazzling exterior.

  “He looks like a Greek god,” gushed Ann-Mari von Bismarck, wife of the German ambassador, though she added – and this is seldom quoted – “and behaves like a satyr.” He was brilliant, arrogant, cynical, a know-it-all who actually di
d know it all most of the time, and who certainly knew how to have the last laugh. He had a talent for creating an audience and turning that audience into his accomplices when he wanted to humiliate a third party. He was a winner, successful with women and busy making an international career for himself as an author and journalist. He admired his father, and although he smoked cigarettes, he imitated him in everything else.

  In truth, he was completely clueless about the great man. He knew nothing about depression – nothing in general, and nothing about the illness in his family. If somebody had enlightened him, he would have dismissed it: his father was too strong, too powerful, too influential, too brilliant to let himself be ruled by an insubstantial thing like the soul. In a letter to his son, Churchill uses the following revealing words: “If, as I’m sure you meant to, and forgot, you had asked me how things were at home, I would have replied: life is flowing peacefully downstream.”

  Randolph had a vested interest in his father making a political comeback. Unlike his sister Sarah, he liked to let the sun of the Churchills shine on him. He had come up with a potential non-parliamentary role for his father that would give the family name more weight – more than all the enervating detail-work in the House of Commons and his many committees and sub-committees put together. He didn’t think the future of Europe was generally decided in its parliaments. He thought the future of the world would be decided by a few great men. His father was one of these great men. Adolf Hitler was another.

  In Munich, he had made friends with Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s foreign policy advisor, the man who had introduced the Führer to high society and, as he boasted, taught him some proper manners. Hanfstaengl, a giant of a man with the flat face of a boxer – paradoxically, he was known as “Putzi” (baby) – had grown up in New York, where his family ran an art gallery. He had studied at Harvard, spoke several languages, had a passable singing voice and played the piano. He had an American wife, a National Socialist to her marrow, who, as people who were close to Hanfstaengl whispered, had a “mystical” connection to the Führer. Randolph was immune to any kind of ideology; Nazism left him cold. But he was interested in the man who until recently had been dipping bread in cabbage soup in a men’s hostel in Vienna, and whose proletarian head was now wreathed with Germany’s hopes and visions for the future. Through the Hanfstaengls he made contact with Goebbels, and through Goebbels he made contact with Hitler.

  Hanfstaengl had spent some time in London, and was aware of Churchill. His opinion: though the man was approaching sixty, and looked his age, looked like an old has-been, he was the only politician in Europe with enough guts, character, ambition and vigour to plan the old continent anew with Hitler: a Europe in which Germany and England weren’t enemies; where they had a mutual respect, the Germans respecting England as a leading naval force, the English respecting Germany as the only real power on the continent. Together, they would be a bulwark against Bolshevism. Hitler admired, almost venerated the British Empire, and had always wanted to come to some arrangement with England, as Hanfstaengl had always advised him. So far, Churchill hadn’t said anything negative about the Führer and National Socialism – in fact, he had even made some positive comments – and he had spoken out against Poincaré in 1922, in favour of a policy of communication with Germany. Hanfstaengl was delighted with Randolph’s idea. The international community would be relieved to learn that – as Randolph phrased it in a circular to selected journalists – “finally we have real experts with the chutzpah to address this hopeless-looking situation and do some straight talking with each other.” Another word would have to be found for “chutzpah” in the German press release – Hanfstaengl insisted on it.

  Before the start of the Churchill family’s trip through Holland and Germany, Randolph had telephoned his father, who said he was prepared to meet Hitler for a “private dinner”. Hanfstaengl, meanwhile, had spoken to Hitler, and obtained his agreement as well. They settled on Munich as the location for the meeting. And so Hanfstaengl reserved the splendid private dining room at the Hotel Continental on Max-Joseph-Straße, and ordered a supper for eleven people.

  27

  Ernst and Helene Hanfstaengl arrived at eight o’clock, an hour late – without Hitler. They apologised for Hitler’s lateness, and their own (they had been waiting for him themselves): the election campaign was in full swing, and the Führer was conducting a campaign like no politician had ever done before. He was flying from one city to the next, sometimes appearing at three events in one day, in front of ten thousand people, in Dortmund in the afternoon, Cologne in the early evening, and Berlin later the same night, speaking for one to two hours in each place. He never spoke on the same topic twice in a row, but his “ineffable” enthusiasm never wavered.

  They waited.

  At nine, when Hitler still wasn’t there, Clementine suggested starting dinner.

  Helene Hanfstaengl seemed amused by the Führer’s rudeness – in the same way some doting mothers, convinced their sons are unique, will view their bad behaviour as evidence of this uniqueness. She told them how she and her dear friends Helene Bechstein and Elsa Bruckmann, the former the wife of the piano manufacturer, the latter born Princess Cantacuzène, had tried to teach him how to behave properly. “It’s like telling a hurricane to blow gently.” A full silver-service dinner, attending a concert, a fitting with the tailor, how to address various ranks of the nobility, the correct use of commas, various conversational styles for use with diplomats, academics, conductors, captains of industry.

  “The man is an idea,” she said, moving her head slowly from one side to the other, as if – Sarah recalled later – she was trying to indicate the breadth of this idea, and looking down at the table as she did so. She said again: “The man is an idea.”

  There was a grand piano in the room: “a Bechstein, naturally.” Hanfstaengl played a potpourri of the music Hitler loved – Johann Strauss, Liszt, Brahms – and some old Scottish dances. He turned the announcement of each piece into a little sketch. He mimicked Goebbels, Göring, Kaiser Wilhelm II – he didn’t do Mussolini because Herr Hitler was better at that, he said, though he did send up the former US president Woodrow Wilson by, in his words, performing all actions an inch to one side of where he meant to. Surely his best impression would be Frankenstein’s monster, Randolph called out. He was treating the giant like a hired entertainer. But the object of his ridicule laughed along with him, telling the party that Herr Hitler always said the same thing. And his wife, who was laughing too, said that the monster was the good guy in the novel; the villain was Doctor Frankenstein, which of course was why he was called Frankenstein. At which Professor Lindemann asked if she meant to imply that Mary Shelley chose the name Frankenstein for the evil scientist because she believed it was a Jewish name. And Frau Hanfstaengl replied, without looking at the Prof, without looking at anyone, that she knew all the Jewish names, really, all of them, including the ones that sounded particularly German, and she could smell Jewish skin even through perfumed tweed.

  “And I can smell death,” Winston butted in. It was the first thing he had said all evening. “It stinks like brewed yellow shit.” He was deeply shocked at himself – he couldn’t believe he had just said such a thing, and on top of that so loudly, so belligerently – and his wife and children were shocked, too.

  But Frau Hanfstaengl nodded, and as the colour drained from Winston’s face, he was the only one she looked at.

  “I’m just the same, Mr Churchill,” she said gently. “I can smell it, and I sense its presence.” She told the story of how, on 10 November 1923, after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, she had prevented Hitler from taking his own life by twisting the gun from his hand with a jiu-jitsu grip and burying it in a barrel of flour.

  A silence fell over the room.

  To break it, Herr Hanfstaengl suggested that Sarah recite a German poem, since she had told him that this was her new passion, and he would improvise to it on the piano.

  That evening, Sara
h recited “Die Bürgschaft” by Friedrich Schiller, Churchill remembered – it had to be this poem, this most German of all German poems, in which a brutal tyrant learns the value of friendship – and the giant with the ingratiating demeanor and the concave face of an imbecile tinkled away to it, much too loudly, much too clumsily, without any feeling for the delicate quality of her voice.

  After her father’s death, William Knott spoke to Sarah Churchill about that evening, keen to hear the detail of the incident. She remembered it, though she thought it had been a different poem – not “Die Bürgschaft”, certainly not “Die Bürgschaft”. Although, she said, it was typical of her father to dramatize reality in hindsight: the saviour of the world waiting for the destroyer of the world, a monster at the piano, the gentle virgin reciting a poem, and the whole scene playing out in Germany – it could only have been “Die Bürgschaft”.

  28

  In one of his letters, William Knott told my father that two years after Churchill’s death, he had been invited to Chartwell by Mary, now Mrs Soames, to help her and the historian Martin Gilbert go through her father’s correspondence. By this point, said Knott, the family had known for some time of the role he had played in Churchill’s life during the war. Lady Churchill had truly valued his services, if what he had done as “secretary to her husband’s soul” could be described as a service; she had even suggested paying him a life annuity, an offer he had declined. His task, as William Knott told Lady Churchill in reply, had been to serve a man; but if one considered the times in which this service was rendered, and to which man, it had also been a service to mankind, and one should not accept payment for such a thing. In any case – so Knott wrote to my father – when it came to ordering Churchill’s correspondence for publication, the family decided to seek his advice. Mrs Soames offered him the role of joint editor. This he also declined; he appreciated the honour and was keen to help, but he still had no desire to appear in the public gaze.