by A. N. Wilson
The fact that we were going to the opera together, itself an unheard-of adventure, was perhaps enough to make me think of the railway journey as ‘special’. Anyway, we spoke as we had never done, on that occasion. I do not know how it came about that you asked about my father. I had never told you about him and as the train rattled on I told you things that had never come up in conversation before.
I do not know why the three of us – you, me, Helga – living together for fifteen years, never spoke. After the war I never much spoke to my wife, nor she to me, nor she to you, nor you to me. You could say that you had grown up, first in an orphanage in Nazi times, then with us in the war, then in a police state and that this did not encourage chatter. You could say that the silence which gelled around my wife and me like ice froze out openness. But maybe we just aren’t an especially expressive family? I certainly had no idea what was going on inside my father, my mother, my brother throughout my teenage years, which was what made their behaviour, after the Nazi seizure of power, so completely extraordinary to me. I had thought (rightly) that they were quiet, even stuffy people, whose interests did not extend much beyond their books, their family, their music and a small circle of acquaintances. For years and years I had allowed all four of them – Mutti, Vati and my brothers, Heinrich and Ernst – to become caricatures inside my head. And because, arrogantly, I had followed some of the same paths intellectually, and then branched off in directions I considered more interesting, I assumed that they had merely reached the buffers. The idea that there was actually something going on behind the shutters of their quiet houses had not crossed my arrogant mind.
I derided my brother Heinrich’s ‘doubts’ and I even more derided his overcoming them to become ordained as an evangelical (Lutheran) pastor. As for my father’s Hegel-and-water position (as I conceived it), what could have been more ridiculous? I had once tried to explain to him why I had lost any faith in a personal God. And if there was no God, what was the point of pretending that there was any value in religion, or quasi-religious poses? Oh, yes, the fine eighteenth-century church where my father presided each Sunday, with its heraldic devices dotting the galleries, its painted ceilings, its pale-grey painted pews and its high windows, made a beautiful little concert hall for the endless rendition of Bach chorales.
But, but, but … There was a man called Charles Darwin who demonstrated that we do not need to invent a ‘Creator’ to explain why there are natural forms on this earth. And without this unnecessary hypothesis, we need not tie up our minds in endless knots of absurdity, trying to puzzle out how the creator of a universe so full of pain, injustice, pointless suffering, could be a ‘loving God’. It was all so much eyewash; why waste time on it? And the patient way in which my father had tried to say there was a ‘universe of value’ and certain ‘principles’ enshrined in the Christian tradition which ‘either as individuals or as a society we threw away at our peril’ – well, this was just flannel.
My poor mother! At the time I patronizingly assumed that she found even my father’s (and brother’s) views rather ‘advanced’; that she was still stuck at the stage of believing Noah’s Ark to be historical, which at least had a kind of coherence to it. I assumed she would be shocked by their ‘position’ – I could not dignify it by calling it a philosophy, in spite of, no, because of, the invocation of Hegel, which always threatened in discussions with my father – and that my outright admission of unbelief must be a sword through her heart.
‘It isn’t very difficult,’ I remember my father saying. ‘It is tested again and again in life. Do you in fact believe in a world of value outside yourself? Do you think you could reinvent morality? Would it be all right to … perform an act of gratuitous violence on a child, for example? Of course you don’t. That’s the starting point.’
We left it there – somewhere in the early 1920s. I could not be bothered with it. I abandoned first theology, then philosophy (for which I never really had any aptitude), then I threw in my lot with the Wagners. It never occurred to me, as he led his really quite idle and gentle life – reading Harnack or the Greeks of a morning, visiting a few lonely or sick parishioners of an afternoon, practising music in the evening – that my father was a man of passion. He held to what I considered his wishy-washy views – that there was some kind of decency ‘out there’ which it would be an outrage to infringe – with as much fervour as Lieselotte or even Winnie would attend a Parteitag in Nuremberg.
That was the shock. I had not been to a service at my father’s church for years, so when Gauleiter Schemm, the leader of the Party in Bayreuth, arrived in person to interview my father, some time in the early days of the regime, I was quite unaware that, week in and week out, he had been denouncing National Socialism from his pulpit. There was also, apparently, a notice pinned up at the back of the church, next to announcements of the following week’s music and the rota of volunteers to clean the church or arrange flowers. It read simply, in my father’s neat calligraphy: JEWS ARE WELCOME IN THIS CHURCH. It was a parody, of course, of the signs by then going up in many restaurants, cafés and bars: JEWS NOT WELCOME, one stage milder than the JEWS PROHIBITED notices that appeared elsewhere in places such as swimming baths. (I remember going to our local baths shortly after such notices appeared there. I met a very nice pair, mid forties, he the head of the Maths Department at the school where my brother taught, she a housewife and mother. They had gone for a little swim together in the afternoon and as we passed the JEWS PROHIBITED notice she said, this perfectly nice and decent woman, with a little smile, half-guilty, half-conspiratorial, ‘How nice it’s just us, eh?’)
Gauleiter Schemm was apparently closeted for about half an hour with my father in his study. My parents made very little comment upon the man’s visit. The first I heard about it was when I noticed that my mother had prepared a rather tasteless macaroni cheese for supper, and I enquired after Elsa. It wasn’t her evening off.
‘Elsa has left us,’ said my mother.
‘What? Just like that? Without warning?’
‘Your father dismissed her this afternoon.’
It turned out that Elsa had, all along, been an enthusiast for Wolf and his cause, and many of my father’s tarter comments about National Socialism, over the weeks and months, had found their way back to Gauleiter Schemm’s headquarters. Some members of my father’s flock had deserted him and gone to churches in the town more sympathetic to the extreme nationalist viewpoint.
Since you had a completely secular upbringing, at home and at school, you are probably barely aware of the fact that after the National Socialists took power, the Lutheran Church was asked to swear allegiance to the new Leader. Up to that point in history the Protestant Church had been rather loosely organized in Germany, but now there was to be a Reich Bishop, Ludwig Müller, presiding over a Reich Church owing its allegiance to the Leader. Since in those days most God-fearing German Protestants saw the deepest threat to their Church as coming from Communism, hundreds of thousands of Germans enthusiastically expressed their allegiance to this Church. But not Dad. There he was, in his old frock-coat on a Sunday morning, looking as if very little had changed in Germany since Hegel had penned the last confusing sentences of The Phenomenology of the Mind, or Schumann had played his last ‘Träumerei’; and yet, when the choice was placed before him he allied himself with the ‘rebels’ in his Church, the so-called Confessing Christians, such as a young friend of my brother’s in Berlin, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another Harnack pupil, who took it as axiomatic that National Socialism was a toxic, wholly incompatible with Christianity.
There were some more visits – not from Gauleiter Schemm this time, but from some of his heavies. My father was eventually asked not to speak on political subjects from the pulpit. I am sure he disobeyed this. They had endless trouble with the authorities as the 1930s advanced and his congregation dwindled to very few. Interestingly, those who were brave enough to stay and hear him envisage what early Christian Platonists such as Cleme
nt of Alexandria would have thought of the Nuremberg Laws were largely old ladies. Still – I had my own preoccupations during all these years as you have noticed – I was not really registering what went on at home, and my father’s activities, such as they were, struck me as no more embarrassing than anything else he had ever done.
Then came Crystal Night, 9 November 1938. Some kid had gone into the German Embassy in Warsaw and shot a diplomat of ours, supposedly in protest at his parents, Jewish, being deported back to Poland from Germany. It was used by Goebbels as the occasion to whip up a pogrom across the whole of Germany. Tens of thousands of Jews were arrested. Shops were smashed or set on fire. In almost every German town the brown-shirted thugs made their way through the streets with their cans of petrol, making for the nearest synagogue.
I knew nothing about what had been happening during the previous few days. I forget what crisis at the Festival Theatre had been occupying me, but it certainly had nothing to do with politics. It was more likely a crisis with the plumber, or Tietjen, the artistic director, with whom I by then got on extremely badly, was probably bullying me to write to some orchestral agency about the cut they were taking from the musicians’ fees. Something like that. And I had my other life – my private life, with you – because I was married by then and you were with us. You were aged six.
I finished work about six and came home, which was now the flat I shared with you and Helga. We ate our meal – she was a good, simple cook, as you would agree – and for some reason I went out for a walk in the streets.
I remember wandering at will, smoking cigarettes. Probably Helga and I had just had one of our pointless rows and I was stomping off to get it out of my system. At the corner of Friedrichstrasse I encountered a coarse brown-shirted couple of boys who yelled at me, asking what I was doing. Since it was only about eight or nine in the evening, it did not seem unreasonable to be out walking in one’s own home town, so I gave a non-committal reply and walked on.
‘’Ere – you was asked a question!’
‘I didn’t feel much inclined to answer it.’
‘It’s better to stay in – unless you want to help give the yids a licking.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘This time we’re really going to let them have it.’
There never were, historically, many Jews in Bayreuth until the famous anti-Semite Wagner, for whose music they showed such a penchant, came to live there. In 1759 old Margrave Friedrich had bought the old Redoutenhaus from a banker called Moses Seckel and built a synagogue, a fine little building, for the thirty-four families who might wish to worship there. By the time Wagner had established his Festival Theatre, several hundred more Jews came to the town, and it was those associated with the theatre who accounted for the huge majority of Jews in Bayreuth. Nearly all who were left in Bayreuth at the beginning of the war, by the way, were deported, either to Auschwitz or to Riga, where they were murdered. But that’s to look ahead, to days which none of us foretold or understood. Even my parents and brother, who protested against the maltreatment and persecution of Jews, had no conception of the scale of what lay ahead.
But this was November 1938, and the lout in the street was yelling that the yids had had it this time, they’d really had their comeuppance. I don’t think he was suggesting that we all went out and committed murder together.
‘Yeah,’ said his companion, who had particularly bad breath, I remember, you could smell it halfway across the street, ‘we’re off on a little cleaning-up expedition.’ This was one of those strange transformations in our language which began after the change of government in 1933 and which was actually, well, terribly un-German I always thought.
It certainly was not my idea to take part in an evening of Jew-baiting. The further down the road I had been led, at first condoning and once even actually voting for the Nazis, I had always, like any decent person, felt this side of things was sick. We turned a blind eye, while we hoped the firm tactics on offer in foreign policy and economics would deliver our shopping list – ripping up the Versailles Treaty, giving us back the occupied territories on the Ruhr, allowing a standing army and getting the economy back on course. That was what we wanted – not broken windows and burnt synagogues and frightened old ladies.
Further down the street I saw that the yobs had some pals and on the next corner there was something approaching a crowd. I absented myself from them all and cut down a side street into the Market Square. There, life seemed to be going on much as normal. People were drinking in cafés and bars. Some people, perfectly innocently, were walking up and down looking at the shop windows. But this was only a superficial reality. As I watched, I saw that more Brownshirts were moving – from the restaurants and bars, to the streets themselves, advising people to move on. What in hell’s name was going on?
I do not know what possessed me next. You probably think, from what Helga used to yell, that I was at the very least a fellow-traveller with the Nazis and that I might even approve of the Brownshirt roughnecks on our streets. But I most decidedly did not. I was sober, but I made hasty steps towards the police station, which led down the side of Bismarckstrasse into Humboldtstrasse.
The desk sergeant was friendly and polite. We knew one another by sight. Everyone did in Bayreuth in those days.
‘They are planning some kind of affray,’ I told him. ‘They told me so themselves. You can’t let them go around smashing the houses of innocent people.’
‘We’ll look into it, sir,’ said the desk sergeant with maddening slowness.
‘But they are out on the streets now! There was quite a gang of them and they seemed to be saying…’
‘Yours is the only complaint we’ve had, sir.’
‘But surely you’ll come with me and see what I mean?’
‘When there is an incident, sir, you can be sure that we will investigate it.’
‘You mean you will sit there and wait for a crime to happen, rather than come out and prevent one happening?’
‘That is the usual order of events, sir.’
So – I went out again into the night. And all at once I thought of the old synagogue, which I had never even entered myself. They surely would not be so brutal, so utterly without mercy, so ignorant of the history of our town that they would be prepared to attack this beautiful little eighteenth-century building? Then I remembered the two Brownshirts I’d met at close hand only minutes before – Spotty and Badbreath – and it occurred to me that eighteenth-century architecture was not necessarily something to which either had ever given much thought. Nor did either of them seem to be especially overflowing with the milk of human kindness.
So I broke into a run, the short journey to the little synagogue on the corner of Ludwigstrasse. And there an absolutely extraordinary sight greeted me. There was indeed quite a crowd of Brownshirts, shouting their usual anti-Semitic filth. But they were not alone. All around the front of the synagogue was a human chain, holding hands. I could see my dentist, poor old boring Erik Hügel, how bloody brave of him. But the majority of those who formed the human chain were not Jews. It was five years, then, since the National Socialists had become our government, abolished trade unions and all opposition parties, sent political activists and dissidents to prison or concentration camp. There were very few political activists at large in the whole country and Bayreuth was not the sort of town, at the best (or worst) of times, in which you would look for political activists anyway.
That was what made this demonstration so extraordinary. It was composed not of Trotskyites or latter-day Rosa Luxemburgs. It was the ordinary townspeople of Bayreuth. Not a lot of them, it is true, but about a hundred, who had formed a human chain round the synagogue. And at the centre of the chain, standing by the synagogue door with a vast placard, I saw, to my total astonishment, both my mother and my father. My father was wearing the black gown, white Geneva preaching bands and chimney-pot hat of the Lutheran pastor. My mother, as if dressed for a winter walk in the Hofgarten, wa
s wearing hat, gloves and tweed suit trimmed at the collar with a modest fur. The poster behind them, with a text from St Paul, asked the question, ARE THEY HEBREWS? SO AM I!
The little group, in the quavery voices of the old, were singing church hymns. Some very much only for aficionados, which was why, presumably, they so often reverted to the old favourite, Luther’s ‘Ein’ feste Burg’:
Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wäre …
‘And though the world were full of devils and wanted to gobble us up, we should still not be fearful, we should not give up. The Prince of this World, however angry he may seem, can do nothing to us, because he is already judged…’
Some of the people in that chain were in their eighties. My father was, what? Sixty-eight. I stood there for a while watching, unable completely to believe what I was seeing. I knew that if I had total integrity I should have simply gone to join my parents and that, if I had done so, it would have melted the ice that had existed between us ever since my childhood. I told myself the reason I did not do so was that I did not want to make trouble for you or for Helga, who had already been to a concentration camp for her political views. In reality, I was still worried about what the Wagners would think. Of course, I now realize with retrospect that this sort of robust defence of other people’s freedoms and decencies was precisely the sort of thing of which Winnie would have approved, that she was completely illogical, adoring Wolf but actually hating many, if not most, manifestations of Nazism when she encountered them, whether in its attempts to take over her Festival, or in its insistence that her children join the various appalling youth cults. But I did not know that then and I was a coward. I went home, and I did not even tell Helga what I had seen, for fear she would say that I had been taking risks, getting her into trouble.