To Greet the Sun

by Claus von Bohlen

  There was a time in the early 1970s when I had just been promoted to a prominent role in the Feldmann brewery in São Paulo. My responsibilities had increased considerably and at the same time profits had slumped. I remember all too well the feeling of stress, of being wound up inside like a clockwork toy. A peculiar side effect was my tendency to weep during any film I watched during that period, no matter how clichéd or sentimental. At the time I was told by my doctor that all emotions need to be expressed and that, if they are unable to find an outlet in the subject’s real life, then they will do so as soon as his guard is let down, by empathising with a fictional character for instance.

  My doctor wanted me to see a psychotherapist. The idea did not appeal to me – I have always seen psychotherapy as a forum for complaining. The process seems to me to encourage an unhealthy obsession with oneself, and a good deal of whining. Nevertheless, my own unpredictable tears were not a symptom I could easily ignore, and so I followed my doctor’s advice and went to see an American psychoanalyst in São Paulo by the name of Dr. Greenbaum.

  From the very moment I entered Dr. Greenbaum’s practice, I felt ill at ease. It seemed to me that Dr. Greenbaum had moved from his native New York in order to create his own sun-kissed harem: the other clients I saw arriving and leaving were the cream of Brazil’s society ladies. If Dr. Greenbaum was disappointed that a middle-aged male had slipped through the net, he was kind enough to disguise that emotion. In fact, he disguised every emotion; talking to him was like talking to a brick wall. However, in our first meeting he insisted that he would require me to ‘explore my feelings’. I replied that I had no interest in exploring them, I just wanted to return to the way I had always been. Over the course of a few sessions, Dr. Greenbaum became increasingly insistent. Then, fortunately, I had to leave on a business trip.

  One of the results of the business trip was the amelioration of my work situation. Feldmann’s international sales increased and profits consequently went up. My own symptoms diminished – I was no longer overcome by waves of emotion at inopportune moments. This confirmed what I have always believed, that the only true healer is time. Following my return from the trip, I had my secretary cancel all future sessions with Dr. Greenbaum. I imagine he was as relieved as I was, though of course he would have disguised that emotion too.

  But why were the memories of my childhood crowding in upon me so vividly as I lay in that hospital bed?

  ‘Seu Otto, would you like some more water?’ Pietro interrupted politely.

  ‘No, no thank you.’ I put the glass back down, then Pietro asked, ‘You said earlier that you saw the Blutfahne twice – the first time was at Marienburg. When was the second time?’

  ‘That was when I heard the Führer speak at Nuremberg. It was on the last day of the rally, a week after we had paraded past him in the Adolf Hitler Platz. Towards sunset we made our way to the Zeppelin Field.’

  Again I closed my eyes, and again I could see before me the overpowering enormity of the Zeppelin field. How to describe it to Pietro? How to convey the impact it makes on you as you enter the gates?

  ‘The Zeppelin field was an area the size of 12 football pitches,’ I said. ‘It was a vast rectangle. On three sides it was surrounded by tribunes for spectators; that is where our seats were. Opposite us was the monumental main grandstand. The Führer’s rostrum stood in the centre and two tribunes supporting double rows of white columns stretched away into the far corners of the field like the wings of an enormous bird. It was magnificent, like a Greek temple but many times bigger.

  ‘We found our block of seats. Being the youngest, we had to sit furthest back. The HJ boys sat at the front of our block. The block next to ours was for the girls – BDM at the front and the Jungmädel behind them. The BDM were even more excited than we were – they hadn’t marched past the Führer as we had and many of the girls were crazy about “our dear Adolf”, as they liked to call him. Christiane was there too; she was sitting in the row in front of me, just on the other side of the narrow walkway that divided our two blocks. I liked Christiane a lot. In fact, I was sweet on her.’

  Pietro smiled briefly. I don’t think he expected me to be up to date with Jugendsprache.

  ‘I wanted to attract her attention,’ I said, ‘but she was just out of reach. In any case, her attention was riveted to the vast open expanse of the Zeppelin Field in front of us. The tribunes were beginning to fill up with spectators – many of them were Hitler Youth from other parts of Germany, others were ordinary civilians. Everywhere people were joking and laughing and passing around food and beer. As the sun dipped behind the horizon, the white stone of the Führer’s rostrum was caught in the red glow. For a few moments the crowd hushed. Then the glow faded from the stonework and 200 Hitler Youths in Rhönrads came rolling through the gates.’

  ‘In what?’ asked Pietro.

  ‘In Rhönrads. They were a type of gymnastic toy, very popular with the HJ. Imagine two metal rings, each the height of a man. The rings were fixed parallel to each other and held apart by six metal bars each about the length of a forearm. Each bar had a grip attached to it on the inside, two grips for your hands and two for your feet. By placing your hands and feet on the grips you could stand between the two outer rings. By shifting your weight left or right you could make the Rhönrad roll forwards or backwards. That was the easy part. The hard part was steering. By pushing your belly or your bottom either in or out you could, in theory, turn corners.’

  ‘Have you tried it?’

  ‘I’ve played around on a Rhönrad, yes. It’s fun, though it always made me a bit dizzy. But the few rotations I managed were a far cry from the HJ Rhönrad display which I saw on the Zeppelin Field. They just kept rolling in through the gates, four abreast. When there were 200 Rhönrads inside the Zeppelin Field, they started performing the most intricate manoeuvres with unerring accuracy. It is hard enough to turn a corner in a Rhönrad, let alone describe concentric arcs and rings and parabolas in concert with 199 others. It was like watching the tiny interlocking cogs spinning inside a wristwatch, except that each cog was moving freely and had to be controlled by the boy inside. When they finished their display the crowd erupted, and at the same moment a squadron of fighter planes flew over the Zeppelin Field in the formation of a swastika. In those days we were constantly being astounded, and I don’t think it was just because we were young.

  ‘The Rhönrads and their HJ pilots occupied a tiny area at the very front of the Zeppelin Field, closest to the Führer’s rostrum which was still empty. Then came the contingents from the Reich Labour Service. Before the war, you left the HJ at 18 and then spent six months with the Reich Labour Service, working the land. Boys were sent to the farms and rural areas of Germany to work for free. You were given your uniform and a spade – ‘guns of peace’, as the spades used to be called. Company after company of the Reich Labour Service now came marching into the Zeppelin Field. They carried their spades like rifles on their shoulders; the metal was polished mirror-bright. When thirty thousand young men had marched in and a third of the field had been occupied by the neat rectangles of their companies – each with its own flags and banners – they performed the military salute with the spade before standing at ease with both hands resting on the handle. All these movements were once again carried out with the utmost precision. As one hand came down on the other on the spade handle it rang out as one clap. The spectators enthusiastically applauded the neatness of each movement.

  ‘For the next half hour the rectangular units of black clad SS soldiers streamed into the Zeppelin Field… row upon row of them, marching with perfect uniformity. Their columns stretched from just in front of the tribunes where we were sitting right up to the Führer’s rostrum on the other side of the field. There were 70,000 of them, one quarter of the entire number of SS at that time. It was dark by the time the last company had entered the field. Then we heard a low murmur and one after another the enormous searchlights around the outer edge of the grandstand
came on, beaming bright columns of light into the night sky. The Zeppelin Field had been designed with this in mind; it was also know as the ‘Cathedral of Light’. Such a thing you cannot imagine.

  ‘I heard the blast of trumpets and then other searchlights picked out the enormous red, white and black swastika flags that were draped all around the tribunes of the Zeppelin Field. The music grew louder and a number of searchlights were trained on the figure of one man in the far distance; the Führer was ascending the steps to the rostrum followed by a small group of other men, one of them carrying the Blutfahne. The loudspeakers all around played the Horst Wessel song while the flag bearers of newly formed SS regiments carried their flags up to the Führer. The Führer held the material of the Blutfahne in one hand and touched it to the material of the new flags that were presented to him, consecrating the new flags with the blood of the martyrs.

  ‘Then the music stopped and the Führer began to speak. I don’t remember all of his speech and I certainly didn’t understand it all, but I do remember the beginning. ‘Die Zukunft Deutschlands ist ihre Jugend,’ he said. Germany’s youth is her future. Of course we all applauded at that. Then he explained what he expected of us: total, unquestioning loyalty. Only on that basis could the Thousand-Year Reich be built. Unsere Ehre ist unsere Treue – Our Honour is our Loyalty. The sea of SS soldiers cheered at that; it was their motto. The more he spoke, the more impassioned he became. He said that there would be dark times ahead and that we would have to do difficult things, but that the value of an action is directly proportionate to its difficulty. ‘The harder a task is, the greater its value as a dedication and an offering’; those were his words. Then he said that the generation of our parents would not understand this, that they did not love Germany the way we did and that they did not truly understand the meaning of devotion. The future lay in our hands. Even the youngest of us – that was me – had a vital role to play. And that role was simple: we had to place our trust in the Führer completely. We had to follow every order we received. And together with Germany’s beautiful girls, the most beautiful in the world, we had to people the Thousand-Year Reich. When he said that, a great high-pitched cheer went up from the rows of BDM girls, many of whom were now crying with emotion.

  ‘As the Führer spoke those words and the loudspeaker projected them over the Zeppelin Field, Christiane turned round and looked me straight in the eye. She had never looked so beautiful to me as she did right then, her eyes shining with devotion, her pupils wide, her features soft in the reflected glow of the searchlights. Later I came to understand that that look was a kind of promise. Of course, at the time I was only eight years old; I did not know what it meant, and probably neither did she. When your heart is close to bursting it is hard to comprehend your emotions, all the more so when they are emotions you are feeling for the first time.’

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘Nossa, Seu Otto, you remember it all so well,’ said Pietro.

  To tell the truth, I too was surprised by how vividly I was able to recall these events. It was almost as if they had retained their original colour by having been kept in the dark for so long, or as if they had been preserved in amber, untouched by the passing of the years.

  Pietro’s voice dragged me back into the present. ‘You still haven’t told me about your family,’ he said. ‘Can you tell me about your parents?’

  At that moment the door to the ward opened and Fernanda appeared in the doorway. ‘Still here?’ she asked. ‘How our hero must talk, to keep a handsome boy by his bedside on a Friday evening.’

  Pietro smiled. ‘I’m very grateful to Seu Otto,’ he said.

  ‘And I will be very grateful to you if you leave now,’ replied Fernanda, swatting at Pietro like a fly. I could see that Pietro was reluctant to leave.

  ‘I’ll tell you about my family another time,’ I said. ‘Boa noite.’

  Pietro waved back from the doorway. As he did so, I again had the fleeting sense that there might be a real connection between him and Siggi.

  Chapter 12

  ONCE PIETRO had left, Fernanda turned her attention to the man at the end of the ward. He was surrounded by a tight circle of family members including children and grandchildren, or so I assumed. They were all leaning in to listen to him. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but it was obvious that his listeners were hanging from his lips. Even Fernanda seemed unwilling to inform the happy gathering that visiting hours were over. She busied herself for a while fiddling with the window lock, then she spoke briefly to the other two patients. By now the speaker had come to the end of his story and the family around him – even the young children – were laughing. I wondered what he had told them.

  Families. What a difficult business. And yet how greatly they influence us, whether by their presence or by their absence. Seeing that smiling family filter out of the ward made me think how very different my own family had been back in Germany. I had not deliberately avoided Pietro’s question, but I do not like to dwell on my own family relationships. I was rather ashamed of my own father. And now I suppose I am ashamed of having been ashamed. How devilishly these things feed themselves.

  My father was an engineer; because of this he was excused military service. He did not believe in the Führer, that much was obvious to me from a young age. The fathers of many of my friends had signed up enthusiastically for the Wehrmacht. Other friends had parents who were older and who had served in the first war. Many were decorated, several had been wounded. Many were opposed to another war, but at least we knew that they were not cowards. I suspected that my father was a coward. Once I asked him why he had never been promoted in his Gusstahlfabrik – the metalworks where he was employed. He said that if he were promoted he would be responsible for other people and he did not want that.

  Because my father avoided promotion we never had much money. I did not go hungry but there were few luxuries. As I grew older things improved. I learnt at school that this was due to the Führer. It was because of him that the factories in the Ruhr were functioning once again, that roads and railways were being built and that workers no longer had to worry about whether they would be able to feed their families.

  I had an older brother who died from tuberculosis before I was born. I think it is true to say that my parents never recovered from his death. There was no joy or laughter in our home. The three of us usually ate in silence while my father read a book using a device he had built that turned the pages without the need for him to touch them directly. When I joined the Jungvolk I was delighted to be able to stay out later and later, to spend as little time as possible with my parents. I preferred going to the Jungvolk Heim to staying at home, even on nights when all we did was sing songs and practise the salute.

  My parents thought I spent too much time away and that they were being denied the opportunity of bringing me up the way they wished. Maybe they were desperate to protect me from the outside world because they had already lost one son. At the time I did not understand that. There were occasions when they tried to coerce me to stay in after dinner; at first they offered me incentives – sweets, even money. Following an argument they once even locked me in my room. The next day my form teacher asked me why I hadn’t been at Dienst that evening. I told him that I had wanted to go but that my parents had locked me in my room. He must have reported this to the leader of the HJ because that same afternoon, as I was walking home after school, I saw a senior HJ leader close our front door and drive off on a motorbike. When I got home, both my parents were sitting silently at the dinner table. My father was staring at the pepper pot. My mother stared at me. I announced to them that I had drill practice with the Jungvolk. Neither of them responded; they just kept staring. I remember going upstairs and changing into my Jungvolk uniform with a sense of triumph.

  I wasn’t one of those treacherous children who delighted in shopping their parents to the authorities. It was just that, from a young age, I believed that my parents were misguided. They seemed to m
e to be old-fashioned in the extreme. I believed that it was the attitudes of their generation that were responsible for the loss of the First War and for the hated treaty of Versailles, beneath the shame of which we still laboured. Also responsible, of course, were the secret activities of European Jewry, intent on Germany’s destruction. Well, that is what we had been taught, and what we all believed at the time. On the other hand there was the Führer, the Nazi party and the Hitler Youth; together they represented everything that was modern and optimistic and forward-looking. They promised a new world, a new order. My parents simply did not understand that. I did not hate them for it, but I pitied them. And I decided that I would spend as little time as possible in their company.

  Because he had been educated at a university and had a profession, my father considered himself superior to many of the other families who lived in the same area. He was a snob. I am sure that was one of the reasons why he was unhappy that I was a member of the Jungvolk. He did not like me mixing with the sons of labourers.

  For us, the fact that adult social criteria did not apply was another of the attractions of the HJ. As eight and nine year olds playing war games, we chose our friends and made enemies as we saw fit, basing our judgements entirely on the qualities of the individual. The qualities in our peers that attracted us were predictable – success, confidence, humour – but where someone lived, or who their parents were, well, that was quite unimportant. Probably those things are unimportant for young children anywhere; perhaps the remarkable thing about the Hitler Youth was that they continued to be unimportant all the way up.

  Had it not been for the HJ, I would certainly never have met either Siggi or Christiane. Or, even if I had met them, we could not have been friends. Siggi’s father had moved to Bochum because his reputation as a drunkard had made it impossible for him to find work in his own hometown. Siggi told me that one winter’s night his father had been found lying in a blizzard after an evening in the Bierhalle. He hadn’t even put on his gloves and his two little fingers had to be amputated because of frostbite. Whenever I saw him, I was fascinated by these two amputated stumps, like tiny uncooked sausages. As well as being a drunkard, he had been a famous bar brawler. In the early days those were exactly the qualities which were sought by the brownshirted Sturmabteilung – the SA. But after the Night of Long Knives, when the leaders of the SA were executed, the brownshirts were either marginalised or absorbed into the more disciplined SS. The SS had no use for undisciplined brawlers like Siggi’s father, so he started to drink more than ever. Nevertheless, it was a source of great pride to him that his son Siggi was such a widely admired member of the Hitler Youth. When he heard what happened to Siggi, he drank himself to death in three weeks.