by Adam Thorpe
Dresden.
He must not think of Dresden. There – he felt worse, now. A sort of disbelief that winded him. He undid his top button.
‘Are you alright, Herr Hoffer?’
‘Very well, thank you, Frau Schenkel. Just the air.’
When he’d heard the news about his favourite city, he had immediately wanted their air boys to pulverise Oxford. He had spent a week in Oxford in 1928, examining its treasures (particularly the Ashmolean’s Claude Lorraine). He had punted on the Isis under the willows and taken tea in Iffley. Completely smitten, he’d been. He had visited Bath, too, and marvelled. When, earlier in the war, he had heard about the air raid on Bath and the destruction of the Assembly Rooms, he had cried. On hearing the news about Dresden, he had wanted Bath to be smashed again and Oxford, his beloved Oxford, to be completely flattened.
Then he felt like killing himself, but the migraine had taken over.
Sabine was a little impatient with him, but he could not move from the darkness of the bedroom for three days, not even to end his life.
He must not think of Dresden.
Being down in the vaults during an air raid horribly resembled a migraine attack, anyway. He had suffered a bad one early in the war, during a heatwave, after a phone call from the SS-Standartenführer in Berlin, accusing him of defeatism. This was because he had suggested, in a letter to the SS-Sturmbannführer, the return of Mademoiselle de Guilleroy au Bain to the safety of the museum’s shelter.
Sabine had not been altogether sympathetic. In fact, she had suggested yet again that he do as everyone who was anyone in Lohenfelde had long done and join the ‘Friends of the Reichsführer-SS’.
‘It doesn’t cost a thing,’ she had pointed out. ‘One mark a year. All further contributions are voluntary.’
‘No,’ he had replied. ‘No no no no.’
‘In fact,’ his dearest love went on, completely naked, combing her long fair locks in front of the mirror, ‘the best thing you could do for me and the children is to join the organisation itself.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Become a Schutzstaffel officer.’
‘I’d rather become a pig.’
‘Oh thank you, Heinrich, for being so thoughtful about your family.’
Her bare buttocks squirmed on the embroidered stool.
‘I don’t want silly aluminium badges stuck all over my chest,’ he said, feebly.
‘It’s ever so classy and fashionable,’ she insisted.
‘I hate class and despise fashion,’ he said.
It was turning into an argument. She finished combing her hair and slipped into bed beside him.
‘The uniform is very sexy,’ she said. ‘Especially the black belt and black jackboots.’
‘I would look ridiculous.’
She stroked his midriff as he lay there in his damp nightshirt, her breasts taut and glistening. He touched them, and they were surprisingly cool.
‘I was thinking of wearing them myself,’ she said, ‘and nothing else, Heinrich my cherry.’
She was most amused by the abrupt and surprising reaction of her favourite little man to this information! How straight the little chap stood to attention, in his shiny red helmet – as if Herr Minister Himmler himself was inspecting! The little chap surely deserved a kiss! There, there and there!
‘Herr Hoffer, would you like me to open the door?’
‘No thank you, Frau Schenkel, I’m quite alright. Really.’
He shifted on his cushion and sighed. The best way to escape fear was to think of sex, it was well known. He tried to make his face look priestly and profound, and kept his eyes closed. The dust was getting up his nose, stinging it slightly. Lime dust, perhaps. Just the beginning.
Actually, the mere sight of an SS uniform curdled his stomach. The purge of the modern works back in ’36 was all done by SS henchmen, ordered about by the horrible Ziegler and the madman Willrich, with Herr Hoffer – having been asked by Herr Streicher to do so – wretchedly accompanying them through the galleries. Fortunately, the Degenerate Confiscation Committee did not have an independent inventory, and did not notice the missing works (those already secreted into the vaults). It was all done in such a hurry, and there were hundreds of collections to disembowel all over the Reich.
‘The worst day of my life,’ he had said to Sabine, afterwards. ‘I should have done something.’
‘And get yourself arrested, Heinrich? Don’t be foolish. They are only paintings, my pumpkin.’
The trouble was, the museum was supported by local businesses or company branches whose managers and chairmen were certainly members of the ‘Friends of the Reichsführer-SS’: the Deutsche Bank, IG Farben, Robert Bosch, Kreipe Thermometer, Siemens-Schuckert, Lohenfelde Druckerei – the list was very long. Their contributions, as part of their civic responsibilities, were vital to the museum: the superb van Gogh, for instance, would not have been acquired in 1923 without their help, even at its bargain price (Vincent was not yet quite a legend in 1923).
‘The SS is all things to all men,’ Herr Streicher had said, scowling. ‘Like Christianity.’
Then the Degenerate Committee had swept through and torn a great hole in the modernist collection and the elegant, black uniform became suddenly hateful to Herr Hoffer.
In fact, that terrible day back in ’36 left him with a great desire for revenge. One day he would combust, he reckoned, if his fury and his guilt had no outlet in action. As action was impossible, he would fantasise. His favourite invention was the ‘Degenerates Exhibition’: groups of bedraggled men and women, tied up in bundles, with SS Degenerate written clumsily on placards hung about their necks. This exhibition would be continually extended by order of the Director! He was sure the Americans would allow this. Perhaps not the British. How had Treitschke described an Englishman? He’d learnt it at school: ‘The hypocrite who, with a Bible in one hand and an opium pipe in the other, scatters over the universe the benefits of civilisation.’
But who would come to mock and jeer, apart from the Jews? The tens of thousands who mocked and jeered at the modern paintings just a few years before?
It frightened him, thinking this.
And what about the hundreds of thousands of decent citizens who were just SS office employees or honorary members? There would be no room for them in the museum, with placards round their necks. He would have to use the third floor and the attics, and still it would be crowded compared to the handful of visitors. And then the Americans would go home, leaving him stranded.
But it was only a fantasy, to stop him bursting.
Werner had lit a cigarette and handed the packet to Hilde Winkel. Like Frau Schenkel and Herr Wolmer, he had hoarded cigarettes in a drawer for two years. Herr Hoffer took one, too. The vaults filled with the delicious scent of quite decent tobacco.
Frau Schenkel said, out of the blue, that she had locked up all her valuables and objects of sentimental value in a cupboard in her apartment, and that the key was in her pocket. She said this with a cool, official air, as if she was entrusting them with something.
They all nodded, enjoying their cigarettes too much to speak. Herr Hoffer did not smoke very often – Sabine did not approve – but he was savouring every mouthful, drawing it deeper into his lungs than ever before. It allowed one to think.
Of course Werner did not despise him. How ridiculous one’s thoughts got in these situations! Better to dream of Sabine, naked.
A sudden stab – of jealousy – made him all but cough.
Bendel.
Bendel had only smoked Turkish cigarettes, herbal concoctions. He actually thought, like the Führer, that ordinary tobacco was bad for you!
Bendel certainly looked good in black, according to Sabine.
‘Maybe. But the wrapping is not the goods.’
‘It helps,’ had been her reply.
Ah, Herr Hoffer wanted to cry. He squeezed his eyes tight and stopped himself moaning. He must not think of Bendel. Or Dresden. Or
sex. Or plump pork chops. Or the Degenerate Committee. Picking wild flowers in a meadow with his mother, the scents of the forest all around. That’s more like it. Bendel could go to Hell. He, Herr Hoffer, would stay with Heaven. Searching for wild flowers near Bad Wildungen, the sun warm on the meadow-grass and the hills brimming with firs, butterflies, his mother laughing in her bright dress . . .
The trouble with Bendel was that he took you in with his charm.
Herr Acting Director Streicher, who kept his ear very close to the ground, was the only one not taken in by SS-Sturmführer Klaus Bendel.
Mind you, Herr Streicher was already a nervous man when Bendel first popped up. When was that – ’35? The screws were already tightening. Dismissal (or worse) was normal, in the art world. Dismissal never came for Herr Acting Director Streicher. But the expectation of it screwed his nerves up like violin gut.
‘It’s the Bismarck method,’ he would joke: ‘keep all Europe in a state of nervous apprehension by hinting at war. They hope to wear me down.’
‘You mean the Führer method.’
‘Oh, he’s just inheriting the mantle.’
It might have been easier for Herr Streicher if he had been dismissed – as his predecessor was. But Herr Director Kirschenbaum was a Jew. And he had, through his contacts with other wealthy Jews, falsely increased the value of certain mediocre artists to the benefit of his personal collection. Or so it was claimed in the local gazette (reprinted in the prestigious Deutsche Kulturwacht). That was enough to get old Kirschenbaum off his seat. Don’t believe a word of it!
Scholars and curators fell like ninepins – Justi, Schardt, the lot – but Herr Acting Director Streicher kept upright, despite his support for ‘long-haired swindlers’ and ‘lunatic sensationalists’.
‘Perhaps,’ he said one winter’s day, lighting the office fire with a copy of the Nazi paper Der Völkische Beobachter, ‘it is because they have never officially appointed me as Kirschenbaum’s successor, Heinrich. I fit into no category. I am invisible.’
Herr Hoffer thought that very unlikely.
Sitting in the vaults and relishing his cigarette, he remembered his first proper encounter with Bendel. Herr Streicher had encouraged it. It must have been early ’36, just before the purge of the modernist collection. There was snow. Herr Streicher had called Herr Hoffer into the office and started off almost in a whisper, since it was well known that Frau Schenkel in the room next door had very good ears and was married to a train driver – a man of no great importance except that he was a Party member of long date, had attended its training institute at Sonthofen, and subsequently organised ‘Saxon’ forest camps for boys where he taught them how to grind corn and throw spears and build huts out of branches and bracken.
The Acting Director requested that the Assistant Director should make the SS officer’s acquaintance.
‘His name is Klaus Bendel. A lieutenant, but only a pen-pusher. He has signed the visitors’ book twenty times in a month,’ said Herr Streicher, under his breath.
‘Twenty times. Goodness me. I didn’t think it was that many.’
‘Ever talked to him?’
‘No. Not more than a polite greeting.’
‘Very wise. I want you to talk to him. Unusual taste for an SS man. Spends a great deal of time in front of the van Gogh.’
‘Hardly surprising. The jewel of our collection.’
Herr Streicher frowned. For him, it was the small Poussin figure-study.
‘The jewel of our nineteenth-century crown, then,’ Herr Hoffer qualified. ‘As the Kandinsky is of our modern collection.’
Herr Hoffer had purchased the Kandinsky at auction the previous year. Its owner, a wealthy Jew, had emigrated to America in a hurry and his entire collection went piecemeal for an absurdly low price. It was the museum’s first Kandinsky, entitled Blue Circles II (although there were no discernible circles in the painting, only wild sweeps of violet that never joined up).
Herr Streicher, missing the point, said that Bendel showed no interest in the Kandinsky. He stroked his bushy white eyebrows with a yellowed forefinger. ‘The Dark Dwarf, for one, likes van Gogh. I have this on the highest authority.’
‘I see. But Herr Minister Goebbels has nothing much to do with the SS, Herr Streicher.’
‘This fondness for the Dutch genius is not a peculiarity the Dark Dwarf would be eager to make public, Heinrich,’ the Acting Director went on. ‘Like a sexual maladjustment.’ He puffed a few times on his pipe. ‘The Führer disapproves of insanity in artists. Although personally I have seen plenty of yellow skies. Fewer blue meadows. Though cornflowers, like poppies, can turn a field blue. His drawings are more convincing than his paintings, I’ve always thought.’
‘The Führer’s?’
‘Van Gogh’s, Herr Hoffer. I would not presume to judge the Führer’s work. It is presumably above judgement. Watercolours of Vienna monuments. Snowy peaks. Pretty little Alpine valleys –’
‘There are two words for colour in Dutch,’ Herr Hoffer interrupted, adjusting the subject before Herr Streicher said anything silly. ‘Verf and kleur. Verf is the material and kleur the effect. Vincent kept mentioning verf in his letters.’
‘So?’
‘Vincent started from the colours on his palette, the verf. Not from nature. Yet the effect is to bring one closer to nature.’
‘Do you have to call him Vincent? It sounds as though you were a friend of his.’
‘Rembrandt? That’s a first name.’
The Acting Director sighed, as if his assistant was being quarrelsome. The pipe in his mouth made a bubbling sound.
‘Van Gogh may be an extraordinary genius,’ Herr Streicher conceded, ‘but he hasn’t the talent to go with it. However, this painting of his is an important and extremely valuable item in our collection.’
Herr Hoffer, instead of taking up the cudgels, pointed out that van Gogh had never been the subject of official abuse, perhaps because he was nineteenth-century. There was no reason for alarm, surely.
Herr Streicher shifted behind his desk, not listening. He then leant forward and fixed Herr Hoffer with his ice-blue eyes. His white hair looked very wild.
‘Whether or not the fellow’s acting from the purest personal impulse, Heinrich, I would like you to make his acquaintance. You can always spray yourself, afterwards. I once met the Director of Television and shook his hand. I scrubbed it with bleach, afterwards. It came up in a rash.’
The ‘Director of Television’ was Goering. Herr Streicher liked to call him by his least important title. Herr Hoffer wished the Acting Director would keep his voice down.
Up until then, they had left SS-Sturmführer Bendel alone. It was best to leave members of the SS alone, especially young ones.
A week or so later, with the snow still on the ground but dirty and wet, Herr Hoffer was passing the SS administrative office on his bicycle and recognised Bendel. He was in uniform (without a coat, though it was cold) and chatting up one of the girl auxiliaries. The Waffen-SS was not yet installed at Lohenfelde in 1936, for there was no call back then to defend the city with arms; but there had long been an SS administrative office in leafy Joseph-Goebbels-Strasse. It was a few doors up from the regional Gestapo office, where plainclothes detectives serving with the Kriminalpolizei would also come and go. The SS office’s black-capped female auxiliaries in their pretty grey gloves would flounce past the spotty-faced sentries in a most provocative manner.
Turning his head to view the man better, Herr Hoffer wobbled on his bicycle and struck the kerbstone, which was old and high in that lime-shaded street. He fell off, but not badly. Ignominiously, as he later put it.
SS-Sturmführer Bendel ran up and helped him to his feet. Herr Hoffer, brushing the snow off his coat, thanked him, and they walked together up the long street. Klaus Bendel was charm itself, and congratulated Herr Hoffer on the excellence of the museum’s picture collection, adding that he was sure the medieval pieces in wood were excellent too, but they were n
ot his field. His field was broad, however; he had studied Art History under Herr Professor Pinder at the University of Berlin followed by Applied Arts at the Vienna Academy (not to be mentioned, dear sir, in front of the Führer, who had failed the entrance examination twice), had spent a semester in Harvard as an exchange student and several months in the Louvre researching for his thesis on Form as an Aesthetic Principle in Georges de la Tour.
What an interesting fellow, thought Herr Hoffer.
‘Too busy to paint, these days,’ said Bendel.
He explained his job as they walked (Herr Hoffer wheeling his bicycle along the mushy pavement). He was the official coordinator between the local SS subdistrict and the art and architectural section of Reichsführer-SS Himmler’s personal staff. The subdistrict included a large area around Lohenfelde, but was of course a great deal smaller than the total SS district whose headquarters were, naturally, also in Lohenfelde and which was in the hands of his superior, SS-Sturmbannführer Wedel, who had a gold tooth. The physical proximity of Bendel to Wedel – their offices were on the same floor – meant that the gold tooth often sought the Lieutenant’s advice in artistic or cultural matters and thus irritated the other members of staff who held similar positions in the other subdistricts under SS-Sturmbannführer Wedel’s aegis.
It was, conceded Bendel, a bloody pain in the wick.
Herr Hoffer was no longer nervous. In fact, he was rather enjoying (by proxy) the nervous glances of people passing the other way. Bendel was in uniform. Something about the SS uniform, with its blood-red armband and shiny black boots and belt and gloves, and the strange note of brown in the shirt behind the black tie, and the disparate highlights of silver, made you think of the wearer as a particularly expensive type of ornament, not as something living at all. A lacquered Japanese table, perhaps.
Making conversation in a sudden pause, he asked after the significance of the number stitched on the officer’s cuff-title and on one of his collar-patches: XIII.
‘The number of the subdistrict,’ said Bendel. ‘We are Lohenfelde Abschnitt Dreizehn.’ He lifted his arm almost to Herr Hoffer’s nose and displayed his cuff, the number raised in white thread. A smell of sweet Turkish cigarettes hung about the cloth, as if the young man still spent his evenings in student rooms. ‘I am not superstitious,’ Bendel added, bursting into laughter.