And whatwould Buckliger himself think of Stolle's speech? That might be the most interesting question of them all.
Esther Stutzman looked up from the billing to see a woman and a little boy come into Dr. Dambach's waiting room. "Good morning,Frau Klein," she said. "Good morning, Eduard. How are you today?"
"I'mall right," said Eduard, who was just in for a checkup.
Maria Klein let out a long sigh. "I'm not so well,Frau Stutzman," she said. In public, they didn't let on how well they knew each other away from the pediatrician's office. But she didn't look good; makeup couldn't hide the dark circles under her eyes, and their whites were tracked with red. "Richard and I have decided to take Paul to a Reichs Mercy Center."
"I'm so sorry," Esther whispered.
"He'll be better," Eduard said. "He'll be happy after that. He's not happy now."
His mother winced and turned away for a moment. It wasn't that Eduard was wrong, for he wasn't. From everything Esther had unwillingly learned, Tay-Sachs disease was a slow descent into hell, made all the worse because the children who suffered from it were too little to understand what was happening to them. But that made it no easier for parents to let go of children who had it. How could you not love a child, even if-or maybe especially because-something was wrong with it?
"He was such a sweet baby," Maria whispered. "He still is, as much as he can be. But he-" She turned away again, and fished a tissue out of her purse. "I don't want Eduard to see me like this," she said, dabbing at her eyes.
"I see you, Mommy." To Eduard, none of this meant much. He was the lucky one. "And Paul will be all better. You and Daddy said so."
"Yes, sweetheart. He'll be just fine," Maria said. "Why don't you go sit down and look at a picture book till it's time to see the doctor?"
Eduard went. The book he picked up was Trust No Fox in the Green Meadow and No Jew on His Oath. It had been in the waiting room since before Esther started working for Dr. Dambach. The pediatrician took the book for granted. Why shouldn't he? It had been a children's favorite and a Party favorite for seventy-five years. Eduard opened it. He smiled as he swallowed a dose of cheerful, colorful poison.
Maria Klein saw what her son was looking at. The most she could do was exchange a rueful glance with Esther. If she'd come in for an afternoon appointment today, when Irma Ritter sat behind the counter, she couldn't even have done that.
So much Eduard will have to unlearn when he gets older,Esther thought sadly. Gottlieb and Anna were still battling that. So was Alicia Gimpel. Esther knew she was still battling it herself, and would be till the end of her days. When everyone around her thought she and all the people like her deserved to be dead, how could she help wondering whether what the Nazis taught wasn't right after all? Those were the black thoughts, the up-at-three-in-the-morning-and-can't-sleep thoughts. She knew they were nonsense. She knew, but they kept coming back anyway.
Maria sat down by Eduard. He held the book up to her. "Look, Mommy! It's funny!"
She made herself look. She had to know what was in there. When she was Eduard's age, she'd probably thought it was funny, too. With a visible effort, she nodded. "Yes, dear," she said. "It is."
A woman came out of one of the examination rooms carrying a wailing toddler who'd just had a tetanus shot. "She may be cranky and feverish for a day or two, and the injection site will be sore," Dr. Dambach told her. "A pain-relieving syrup will help. If the discomfort seems severe, bring her back in, and I'll look at her." How many times had he made that speech?
"Thank you, Doctor," the woman said. The toddler didn't seem grateful.
"Frau Klein, you can take your boy back in there now," Esther called. Poor Maria got no relief, for Eduard carried Streicher's book into the examining room with him. When he laughed at the anti-Semitic book, that had to be one more lash for her, especially since her other son was dying of a disease commonest among Jews.
Dr. Dambach had patients waiting in the other examining rooms. It was a while before he could get to Maria and Eduard. Once he went in there, he spent a good long while with the Kleins. Esther knew he was thorough. If he hadn't been, he wouldn't have noticed discrepancies in their genealogy. Usually, though, that thoroughness worked for him and for his patients.
When he came out with Maria and her son, he had one hand on the boy's shoulder and the other on hers. "This one here is in the best of health,Frau Klein," he said. "He'll drive you crazy for years to come."
"Crazy!" Eduard said enthusiastically. He crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue.
The pediatrician ignored him, which wasn't easy. Dambach went on talking to Maria Klein: "And I think you are doing the right thing in the other case. The procedure is very fast. It is absolutely painless. And it does relieve needless suffering."
"Paul's, yes," she answered. "What about mine, and my husband's?"
"Things are not always as simple as we wish they would be," Dr. Dambach said with a sigh. "You have the suffering of doing this, yes, but you escape the suffering of watching his inevitable downhill course over the coming months, perhaps even over a couple of years. Which counts for more?"
"I don't know," Maria whispered. "Do you?"
The pediatrician shrugged. He was basically an honest man. Now that the Kleins had been released, he showed no antagonism toward them. He'd done what he thought he had to do in reporting the discrepancy in their pedigree to the authorities. If the authorities turned out not to care, he didn't seem to, either.
Maria went on, "And it's also hard knowing that there's a fifty-fifty chance Eduard carries this horrible-thing inside him."
"Don't let that worry you," Dr. Dambach said. "In most populations, this gene is very rare. Even if he does carry it, the odds that he will marry another carrier are also very slim. There is hardly any chance he would father another baby with this disease."
Maria Klein didn't answer. Like all surviving Jews, she was practiced in the art of deception, so she didn't even look towards Esther. Esther didn't look her way, either, but kept on with the billing as she and Eduard walked out. But she knew, and Maria knew, in fifteen or twenty years Eduard would probably marry a girl who was a Jew. And in how many of those girls did the Tay-Sachs gene lurk?
The Kleins left the waiting room. Esther called in the next patients. But she had trouble keeping her mind on her work. If Jews kept marrying Jews, would disease finish what the Nazis hadn't quite been able to? But if Jews didn't marry Jews, wouldn't the faith perish because they couldn't tell their partners what they were?
Was there a way out? For the life of her, Esther couldn't see one.
Susanna Weiss had been taking her students through Chaucer's Troylus and Criseyde. When she asked for questions, one of them asked, "This is the basis for Shakespeare's play, isn't it?"
"It's probably the most important source, yes, but it's far from the only one," she answered. Again, the question reminded her how Shakespeare was a more vital presence in modern Germany than in England. His Troilus and Cressida was rarely produced or even read in English.
A few more questions about the material followed. Students started drifting out the door. Others-not so many-came up to the lectern to ask questions of less general interest, to pump her on what the next essay topic would be, or to complain about the grades they'd got on the last one.
And then one of the students asked, "What did you think of Stolle's speech, Professor Weiss?"
"It was interesting," Susanna answered. "We haven't heard anything like it in a while." That was the truth. When had anyone ever publicly criticized the Fuhrer, even for not pushing his own agenda far enough and fast enough? Had anyone ever done such a thing in all the days of the Third Reich? She didn't think so.
"But what did youthink of it?" he persisted. "Isn't it wonderful to hear somebody come out and speak his mind like that?"
She didn't say anything for a moment.Who are you? she wondered. All she knew about this enthusiastic undergrad was that his name was Karl Stuckart and he wa
s getting a medium B in the course. What did he do when he wasn't in her class? Did he report to the SS? Lothar Prutzmann, who headed the blackshirts, undoubtedly had an opinion about Stolle's speech: a low opinion. And if Stuckart didn't report to the SS, did some of the other smiling students here?The smiler with a knife — a fine Chaucerian phrase.
One of those students, an auburn-haired girl named Mathilde Burchert, said, "I certainly think it's about time we get moving with reform. We've been in the doldrums forever, and the Gauleiter 's right. The Fuhrer 's not going fast enough."
Several other students smiled and nodded. Susanna smiled, too, but she didn't nod. She didn't know much about Mathilde Burchert, either. Was she serious? Was she naive? Was she a provocateur, either working with Stuckart or independently? Were the young men and women who showed they agreed with her fools? Or did they sense a breeze Susanna couldn't, or wouldn't, feel?
She hated mistrusting everyone around her. She hated it, but she couldn't let it go. Were she worried about only her own safety, she thought she would have. But choices she would make for herself she wouldn't for other Jews she might endanger if she turned out to be wrong.
"Whatdo you think, Professor?" another student asked her.
"I think the Fuhrer will go at his own pace regardless of whether anyone tries to jog his elbow," she answered. Hard to go wrong-hard to land in trouble-for backing the Fuhrer. It made her seem safely moderate: not a hard-liner who hated the very idea of change, but not a wild-eyed, bomb-throwing radical, either.
And what's a moderate? Someone who gets shot at from the rightandthe left. She wished she hadn't had that thought.
Karl didn't want to leave things alone. "I wasn't so much talking about what would happen. I was talking about what should happen."
No matter how Susanna seemed, her instincts were of the wild-eyed, bomb-throwing sort, and to a degree that made Rolf Stolle hopelessly stodgy. Like Buckliger, Stolle wanted to reform the Reich. Susanna wanted to see it fall to pieces, to ruin, to disaster unparalleled. She wished its foes would have smashed it in the Second World War, or the Third. Maybe then she could have lived openly as what she was.
I'll never do that now. Hiding is too ingrained in me. Even if I knew they wouldn't kill me, I couldn't reveal myself that way. Easier to walk up the middle of the Kurfurstendamm naked.
"I'd like to vote in an election where I had a real choice," Mathilde said. "I don't know who I'd vote for, but there sure are plenty of people I'd vote against."
Again, several of the youngsters up by the lectern showed they agreed with her. Only a couple of them frowned. But who was more likely to be a spy for the Security Police, someone who pretended to agree or someone who openly didn't?
Susanna sighed. That question had no answer. Anyone could spy for the Security Police, anyone at all.
Mathilde looked right at her. "How about you, Professor Weiss? Don't you think we'd be better off with real elections than with the ones where everybody just votesja all the time? When Horst says all the Reichstag candidates got elected with 99.78 percent of the vote, don't you wonder how he keeps a straight face? It's such a farce! You must feel the same way, too. You're a sharp person. Anyone can tell from the way you lecture. Tell us!"
"Tell us!" the other students echoed.Tell us you're with it. Tell us you're not a fuddy-duddy. Tell us we don't have to turn into fuddy-duddies when we're your age. Please tell us.
Am I a sharp person?Susanna wondered.Am I really? Am I sharp enough to keep my mouth shut when I really want to shout, to scream? "I don't know anything about politics," she said. "As long as the politicians leave me alone, I'll leave them alone, too."
"But theydon't leave us alone," Mathilde said fiercely. "If you say the wrong thing today, you're liable to get a noodle tomorrow." Camp slang permeated German these days. Often, people didn't even know where it came from. When you were talking about a bullet in the back of the neck, though, there wasn't much doubt.
"Well…" Susanna's conditioned caution warred with the fury and outrage she'd bottled up for so long. She surprised herself. What came out was a compromise, and she wasn't usually good at splitting the difference. All or nothing was more her style. But now she said, "I wasn't sorry when the Fuhrer reminded the Volk about what the first edition of Mein Kampf says. In fact, I was in London for a conference last year when the British Union of Fascists reminded us all."
"You were in London for the BUF convention?" Was that awe or horror in Karl Stuckart's voice? Some of each, probably. Maybe he was wondering ifshe had SS connections.
"No, no, no." Susanna shook her head. "I was in London for the Medieval English Association conference. The BUF was meeting across the street." That she'd found some of the Fascist bruisers more interesting than her fellow professors was a secret she intended to keep.
"It's a shame the British had to remind us of what we should have remembered for ourselves-no, what we never should have forgotten," Mathilde Burchert said. Most of the other students nodded. They didn't seem to fear informers or provocateurs. Maybe they were too young to know better, although in the Greater German Reich you were never too young to learn such lessons. Or did they smell freedom on the wind?
Heinrich Gimpel pulled a copy of the Volkischer Beobachter out of the vending machine in the Stahnsdorf train station. A moment later, Willi Dorsch paid fifteen pfennigs for his own copy. On the front page was a color photo of Heinz Buckliger receiving an award in Oslo from the Nasjonal Samling, the Norwegian Fascist party. the Fuhrer was a big blond man. The Nasjonal Samling officials in the photo were even bigger and even blonder, with long faces and granite cheekbones.
Willi saw the same thing at the same time. "Damned Scandinavians are the only ones who can racially embarrass us," he said. "Bastards look more Nordic than we do."
Was Willi kidding? Was he kidding on the square? Or did he really mean it? Heinrich had trouble telling. Willi loved to joke, but race, in the Reich, was as serious a business as Marxism had been in Russia before it fell. Even the Fuhrer hadn't said anything more than that the Nazi founding fathers might not have understood race the right way. Heinrich gave back a grunt and a nod-a minimal answer.
They went up to the platform together, and got there just in time to catch the train to Berlin. Willi grabbed the window seat, then proceeded to unfold his paper and ignore the scenery rolling by. He'd seen it often enough, anyhow. So had Heinrich, who sat down beside him and also buried his nose in the Beobachter. Willi seemed to ignore his troubles with Erika, too, except that every once in a while he would come out with a remark that also left Heinrich wondering how to take it.
The two of them stiffened within thirty seconds of each other. They both pointed to the same article on page three. The headline above it said ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. The byline was Konrad Jahnke, not a name Heinrich had seen before. He soon found out why: the author declared himself to be a doctor from
Breslau, not a reporter at all.
I am sick and tired,he wrote,of inaccuracies that blacken the history of the Reichand the heroic deeds of our ancestors. Why men who were not there to see them now presume to cast judgment is beyond me. We should be grateful for what our ancestors accomplished. Without their heroism, Jewish Communists in Russia and Jewish capitalists in England and the United States would have swallowed up the whole world between them.
"Well, well," Willi said. "Looks like the other shoe just dropped, doesn't it?"
"You might say that," Heinrich replied. "Yes, you just might say that. Someone didn't like Stolle's speech, did he?"
"Not very much," Willi said. They both spoke of the article elliptically and in understatements. That was the best way to play down how frightening it was.
Heinrich read on with a detached, horrified fascination: the sort of fascination he would have given to a really nasty traffic accident on the other side of the road.The whole business of repression has been blown out of proportion in some younger men's heads, Dr. Jahnke declared.It overshadows any objective a
nalysis of the past. Hitler may have made mistakes, but no one else could have readied the Reichfor the great struggle against Bolshevism. Anyone who thinks he can deny this suffers from ideological confusion and has lost his political bearings.
Jahnke wasn't afraid to name the Gauleiter of Berlin, saying,Rolf Stolle, in his arrogance, departs substantially from the accepted principles of National Socialism. And, he went on,other leaders try to make us believe that the country's past was nothing but mistakes and crimes, keeping silent about the greatest achievements of the past and the present. He didn't name Heinz Buckliger, but he came close.
There is an internal process in this country and abroad,the doctor from Breslau thundered,that seeks to falsify the truths of National Socialism. Too many ignore the world-historical mission of the Volkand its role in the National Socialist movement. I, for one, can never forsake my ideals under any pretext.
When Heinrich finished the piece, he let out a small, tuneless whistle. Beside him, Willi nodded heavily, as if he'd just done a good job of summing things up. "Who?" Heinrich said. "Who would have the nerve to publish such a thing?"
"Why, you see for yourself," Willi answered. "He's a doctor from Breslau. That gives him the right to say anything he pleases."
"Quatsch,"Heinrich said, and then several things a great deal more pungent than that. "Do you notice how carefully this was timed? Think it's an accident that it shows up in the Beobachter when Buckliger's out of the country?"
"Just a coincidence," Willi said airily. "What else could it possibly be? They got this letter, and an assistant editor liked it, and so…" He couldn't go on, not with a straight face. He started to snort, and then to giggle. Any junior man who published an inflammatory-to say nothing of reactionary-piece like this without getting it cleared from on high would shortly thereafter wish he'd never been born.
"If you want to talk sense now, let's try it again." Heinrich unconsciously lowered his voice, as people did when they spoke of dangerous things. "Who?"
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